Principles of morphemic analysis and its basic units.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 1990.

The basic unit of the morphemic level is the morpheme. It is defined as the smallest indivisible two-facet language unit. Two-facet here means an association of a certain meaning with a certain sound-form (a morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of the language). Morphemes may be classified from a) the semantic point of view, b) the structural point of view.

Semantically morphemes fall into two classes: root-morphemes and affixational morphemes. Roots and affixational morphemes make two distinct classes of morphemes due to the different roles they play in the word-structure. The root-morpheme is a morpheme in which the lexical meaning is concentrated, i.e. it's the lexical nucleus of the word. E.g., teach – in teach, teacher, teaching. Affixational morphemes are subdivided according to their position, into prefixes, suffixes and infixes, and according to their function and meaning, into derivational and functional affixes. A prefix preceeds the root-morpheme, a suffix follows it. An infix is an affix placed within the word, like -n- in stand. The type is not productive. Functional affixes serve to convey grammatical meaning; they build different forms of one and the same word, e.g., near, nearer, nearest; son, son's, sons, sons'. Derivational affixes form different words with different lexical and lexico-grammatical meaning, e.g., foolish, foolishly, foolishness. Derivational and functional morphemes may happen to be identical in sound form, but they are substantially different in meaning and function. E.g., unwanted, “-ed” is not a functional affix as in played, studied, but derivational. Lexicology is primarily concerned with derivational affixes, the other group of functional affixes is the domain of grammarians.

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 (the stem is the part of the word which remains unchangeable throughout the paradigm). A great many root-morphemes are free, that is those root morphemes that coincide with the stem of the word, e.g., friendship.

A bound-morpheme exists only as a part of a word. Affixes are usually considered to be bound-morphemes (-ness, -ize, -ship, dis-, de-), but many root-morphemes, especially those of Greek or Romanic origin, are bound morphemes, e.g., conceive, theoretical, barbarism.

Semi-bound (semi-free) morphemes are those that can function both as an affix and as a free morpheme, e.g., well, half in well-known, to feel well, half-done, half an hour.

The relationship between the two classes of morphemes discussed above can be graphically presented in the following diagram:

The analysis of word-structure on the morphemic level consists in breaking a word into the constituent morphemes. It is the method of Immediate and Ultimate Constituents. This method is based on a binary principle which means that we divide the word into two parts at a time. At each stage these two components are referred to as the Immediate Constituents (ICs). Each IC at the next stage of analysis is in its turn broken into two smaller meaningful elements. The analysis is completed when we arrive at constituents incapable of further division, i.e. morphemes. They are referred to as Ultimate Constituents (UCs). The procedure of segmenting a word into its UC morphemes may be presented with the help of a box-like diagram:

The lower layer contains the ICs resulting from the first cut, the upper one those from the second, the shaded boxes representing the ICs which are at the same time the UCs of the word.

According to the number of morphemes words are classified into monomorphic and polymorphic. Monomorphicor root-words consist of only one root morpheme, e.g., small, dog, make, give. Polymorphicwords according to the number of root-morphemes are classified into two subgroups: monoradical (or one-root words) and polyradical words, i.e. words which consist of two or more roots. Monoradical words fall into two subtypes: 1) radical-suffixal words, i.e. words that consist of one root-morpheme and one or more suffixal morphemes, e.g., acceptable, acceptability, blackish, etc.; 2) radical-prefixal words, i.e. words that consist of one root-morpheme and a prefixal morpheme, e.g., outdo, rewrite; 3) prefixo-radical-suffixal, i.e. words which consist of one root, a prefixal and a suffixal morphemes, e.g. disagreeable, misinterpretation, etc.

Polyradical words fall into two types; 1) polyradical words which consist of two or more roots with no affixations morphemes, e.g., bookshelf, lamp-shade, etc.; 2) words which contain at least two roots and one or more affixational morphemes, e.g., safety-pin, light-mindedness, wedding-pie, class-consciousness, etc.

The morphemic analysis defines the Ultimate Constituents (UCs), their typical sequence and arrangement, but it doesn't reveal the hierarchy of morphemes making up the word. The morphemic analysis doesn't aim at finding out the nature and arrangement of ICs of the word, e.g., unmanly and discouragement are referred to the same type as both are segmented into three UCs representing one root, one prefixational and one suffixational morpheme.