Types of morphemes. Distributional classification of morphemes

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 787.

Morphemes and their types

Morpheme is the smallest meaningful lexical unit.

Phoneme – meaningless unit

Lexical units

· morphemes

· words

· set expressions

Морфемный анализ

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de-nat-ion-al-iz-ation

a) Semantically morphemes fall into two classes: root-morphe­mes and non-root or affixation al morphemes. Roots and affixes make two distinct classes of morphemes due to the dif­ferent roles they play in word-structure.

U-h e root-morpheme is the lexical nucleus of a word, it has an individual lexical meaning shared by no other morpheme of the language. The root-morpheme is isolated as the morpheme common to a set of words making up a word-cluster, for example the morpheme teach-in to teach, teacher, teaching, theory in theory, theorist, theoretical, etc. Non-root morphemes include inflectional morphemes or inflections and affixational morphemes or affixes. Inflections carry only 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. A f f i x e s are classified into prefixes and s u f f i xes: 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.

b) Structurally morphemes fall into three types: free mor­phemes, bound morphemes, semi-free (s e m i -bound) morphemes. A free morpheme is defined as one that coincides with the stem 2 or a word-form. A great many root-morphemes are free morphemes, for example, 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, naturally, bound morphemes, for they always make part of a word, e.g. the suffixes -ness, -ship, -ize, etc., the prefixes un-, dis-, de-, etc. (e.g. readiness, comradeship, to activize; unnatural, to displease, to decipher). Semi-bound (semi-free) morphemes1 are morphemes that can function in a morphemic sequence both as an affix and as a free morpheme. For example, the morpheme well and half on the one hand occur as free morphemes that coincide with the stem and the word-form in utterances like sleep well, half an hour, on the other hand they occur as bound morphemes in words like well-known, half-eaten, half-done.

Speaking of word-structure on the morphemic level two groups of morphemes should be specially mentioned. To the first group belong morphemes of Greek and Latin origin often called combining f o-r m s, e.g. telephone, telegraph, phonoscope, microscope, etc.

The morphemes tele-, graph-, scope-, micro-, phone- are characterized by a definite lexical meaning and peculiar styl­istic reference: tele- means ‘far', graph- means ‘writing', scope-'see­ing', micro- implies smallness, phone- means ‘sound.' Comparing words with tele- as their first constituent, such as telegraph, telephone, tele­gram one may conclude that tele- is a prefix and graph-, phone-, gram-are root-morphemes.

On the other hand, words like phonograph, seismo­graph, autograph may create the impression that the second morpheme graph is a suffix and the first-a root-morpheme_. This undoubtedly would lead to the absurd conclusion that words of this group contain no root-morpheme and are composed of a suffix and a prefix. Therefore, there is only one' solution to this problem; these morphemes are all bound root-mor­phemes of a special kind and such words belong to words made up of bound roots.

The second group embraces morphemes occupying a kind of intermediate position, morphemes that are changing their class member­ship. The root-morpheme man- found in numerous words like postman [postmen], fisherman, gentleman in compari­son with the same root used in the words man-made and man-servant is, as is well-known, pronounced, differently, the [ae] of the root-morpheme becomes [a] and sometimes disappears alto­gether. / we still recognize the identity of [man] in postman, cabman in man-made, man-servant^ we can hardly regard [man] as having completely lost the status of a root-morpheme?) It follows from all this that the mor­pheme -man as the last component may be qualified as semi-free.

a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes (the smallest linguistically distinctive units of sound), and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes (the smallest units of written language).

The concept morpheme differs from the concept word, as many morphemes cannot stand as words on their own. A morpheme is free if it can stand alone, or bound if it is used exclusively alongside a free morpheme. Its actual phonetic representation is the morph, with the morphs representing the same morpheme being grouped as its allomorphs. English example: The word "unbreakable" has three morphemes: "un-", a bound morpheme; "break", a free morpheme; and "-able", a bound morpheme. "un-" is also a prefix, "-able" is a suffix. Both "un-" and "-able" are affixes.

The morpheme plural-s has the morph "-s", s, in cats ([kæts]), but "-es", [ ɪ z], in dishes ([dɪʃ ɪ z]), and even the voiced "-s", [z], in dogs ([dɒgz]). "-s" might even turn into "-ren" ([rɪn]) in children .