Classification of morphemes

Morphemes may be classified a) from the semantic point of view; b) from the structural point of view.

a) Semantically morphemes fall into root morphemes and non-root morphemes or affixational morphemes.

In the words helpless, handy, refill the root-morphemes help-, hand-, -fill are understood as the lexical centres of the words. The root-morpheme is the lexical nucleus of a word, it has an individual lexical meaning shared by no other morpheme of the language. Besides it may also possess all other types of meaning proper to morphemes except the part of speech meaning which is not found in roots. The root-morpheme is isolated as the morpheme common to a set of words making up a word-cluster, e.g. the morpheme teach — in to teach, teacher, teaching. Non-root morphemes include inflectional morphemes or inflections and affixational morphemes or affixes. Inflections carry only a grammatical meaning and are thus relevant only for the formation of word-forms, whereas affixes are relevant for building various types of stems — the part of a word that remains unchanged throughout its paradigm. Lexicology is concerned only with affixational morphemes..

Affixes are classified into prefixes and suffixes: a prefix precedes the root-morpheme, a suffix follows it. Affixes besides the meaning proper to root-morphemes possess the part-of-speech meaning and a generalized lexical meaning (e.g. — er denotes a noun and "doer of an action"). Structurally morphemes fall into three types: free morphemes, bound morphemes, semi-free (semi-bound) morphemes.

A free morpheme is defined as one that coincides with the stem or a word-form. E.g., the root-morpheme "friend" — of the noun "friendship" is naturally qualified as a free morpheme because it coincides with, one of the forms of the noun friend; a bound morpheme occurs only as a constituent part of a word. Affixes are bound morphemes for they always make part of a word, e.g. the suffixes -ness, -ship, -ize, etc., the prefixes im-, dis-, de-, etc. (readiness, to activize, to disregard).

Many root-morphemes also belong to the class of bound morphemes, which always occur in morphemic sequences, i.e. in combination with roots or affixes. All unique roots and pseudo -roots are bound morphemes. Such are the root-morphemes theor — in theory, barbar — in barbarism, -ceivc in conceive. Semi-bound (semi-free) morphemes (относительно свободнsе морфемы) are morphemes that can function in a morphemic sequence both as an affix and as a free morpheme. E.g., the morpheme well, on the one hand, occurs as a free morpheme that coincides, with the stem in the utterance (sleep well); on the other hand, well occurs as a bound morpheme in the word well-known. E.g. the morpheme man in "man" and "sportsman" is a semi-free morpheme. There exist bound root .morphemes of Greek and Latin origin often called combining forms. E.g. the morphemes tele-, graph-, phone- are characterized by a definite lexical meaning and peculiar stylistic reference: "tele" means "far", "graph" — means "writing" "phone-" "sound". The fact that these morphemes do not possess the part-of-speech meaning typical of affixational morphemes evidences their status as roots. Combining forms are mostly international. Combining forms are always borrowed from Greek and Latin. They differ from all other borrowings in that they occur in compounds and derivatives that did not exist in their original language but were formed only in modern times in English, Russian, French etc.