Morphological structure of the word

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 620.

Morphemes, free and bound forms. We describe a. word As an autonomous unit of language in which a particular meaning is associated with a particular sound complex and which is capable of a particular grammatical employment and able to form a sentence by itself, we have the possibility to distinguish it from the other fundamental unit, namely the morpheme.

A morphemeis also an association of a given meaning with a given sound pattern. But unlike a word it is not autonomous. Morphemes occur in speech only as constituent parts of words, not independently, although a word may consist of a single morpheme. Morphemes are not divisible into smaller meaningful units. That is why morphemes: may be defined as the smallest meaningful units of form.

The term morpheme is derived from Gr. Morphe - "form" + erne. The Greek suffix - eme has been adopted by linguists to denote the smallest unit or the minimum distinctive feature (phoneme, sememe). The morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of form, (a form in these cases is recurring discrete unit of speech) (повторяющаяся отдельная самостоятельная единица речи).

A form is said to be free if it may stand alone without changing its meaning; if not, it is a bound form, because it always bound to something else: for example, if we compare the words sportive and elegant and their parts, we see that sport, sportive, elegant may occur alone as utterances, whereas eleg- -ive, -ant are bound forms because they never occur alone. A wordis, by Bloomfield's definition, a minimum free form amorpheme is said to be either bound or free. This statement should be taken with caution. It means that some morphemes are capable of forming words without adding other morphemes: that is, thy are homonymous to free forms.

According to the role they play in constructing words morphemes are subdivided into: ROOTS and AFFIXES. The latter are further subdivided, according to their position, into prefixes, suffixes and infixes, according to their function and meaning, into derivationaland functional affixes,the latter are also called ending or outer formatives (словообразующий).

When a derivational or functional affix is stripped from the word, what remains is a stem base. The stem expresses the lexical and the part-of-speech meaning. For the word hearty and for the paradigm heart-hearts (pl.) the stem may be represented heart. This stem is a single morpheme, it contains nothing but the root, so it a simple stem. It is also a free stem because it is homonymous to the word heart.

A stem may also be defined as the part of the word that remains unchanged throughout its paradigm. The stem of the paradigm hearty - heartier - (the) heartiest is hearty. It is a free stem, but as it consists of a root morpheme and an affix, it is not simple but derived. Thus, a stem containing one or more affixes is a derived stem.If after deriving the affix the remaining stem is not homonymous to a separate word of the same root, we call it a bound stem. Thus, in the word cordial (proceeding as if from the heart); the adjective-forming suffix can be separated on the analogy with such words as bronchial [bronkial] radial, social. The remaining stem, however cannot form a separate word by itself: it is bound. In cordial-ly and cordial-ity, on the one hand, the stems are free.

Bound stems are especially characteristic of loan words. The point may be illustrated by the following French borrowings: arrogance, charity, courage , coward, distort, involve; notion; legible and tolerable, to give but a few. After the suffixes of these words are taken away the remaining elements are: arrog-; char-; cour-, cow-, tort-, volve-, nat-, leg-, toler-, which don't ??????? with any semantically related independent words (p. 31 Arnold).

Roots are main morphemic vehicles of a given idea in a given language at a given stage of its development. A root may be also regarded as the ultimate constituent element which remains after removal of all functional and derivational affixes and don't admit any further analysis. It i the common element of words within a word - family. Thus heart- is the common root of the following series of words; heart, hearten, dishearten, heartily, heartless, hearty, heartiness, sweetheart, heart-broken, kind-hearted, whole­heartedly, etc. In some of this, as, for example, in hearten, there is only one root; in others the word the root -heart- is combined with some other root, thus forming a compound like sweetheart.

The root in English is very often homonymous with the word, which is one of the most specific features of the English language arising from its general grammatical system on the one hand, and from its phonetic system on the other. The influence of the analytical structure of the language is obvious. The second point, however, calls for some explanation. Actually the usual phonetic shape is one single stressed syllable: bear, find, jump, land, man, sing, etc. This doesn't give much space for a second morpheme to add classifying lexico-grammatical meaning to the lexical meaning already present in root stem, so the lexico-grammatical meaning must be signalled bу distribution.

In the phrases a morning 's drive, a morning 's ride, a morning 's walk the words drive, ride, walk receive the lexico-grammatical meaning of a noun not due to the structure of their stem, but because they are preceded by a noun in the Possessive case.

An English word does not necessarily contain formulates indicating to what part of speech it belongs. This holds true even with respect to inflectable parts of speech, i.e. nouns, verbs, adjective.

Not all roots are free forms, but productive roots(roots capable of the producing new words) usually are.

The semantic realization of an English, word is therefore very specific. Its dependence on distribution is further enhanced by the widespread occurrence of homonymy both among root morphemes ad affixes. Note how many words in this sentence might be ambiguous if taken in isolation: "A change of work is as good as a rest".

Unlike roots, affixes are always bound forms. The difference between affixes and prefixes is not confined to their respective position, suffixes being "fixed after" and

prefixes "fixed before" the stem. It also concerns their function and meaning. A suffix is a derivational morpheme following the stem and forming a new derivative [ ]

(производное слово) in a different part of speech or different word-class, if-en, -y, -less in hearten, hearty, heartless. When both the initial underlying and the resultant forms belong to the same part of speech, the suffix serve to differentiate between lexico-grammatical classes by rendering some very general lexico-grammatical meaning. For instance, both -ify and -er are verb suffixes, but the first characterizes causative verbs, such as horrify, purify, whereas the second is mostly typical of frequentative verbs: flicker, shimmer, turttle and the like.

A prefix is a derivational morpheme standing before the root and modifying meaning: if to hearten - to dishearten. It is only the verbs and statives that a prefix may serve to distinguish one part of speech from another, like in earth n - unearth v, sleep n -asleep (Stative). Preceding a verb stem, some prefixes express the difference between a transitive and an intransitive verbs: stay v. and outstay (smb.) v. with a few exceptions prefixes modify the stem for time (pre-, post-) for example, pre-war, post-war, or express negation (un-, dis-) i.e. undress, disarm, etc. and remain rather independent of the stem.

An infix is an affix placed within the world, like -n- stand. The type isn't productive. An affix should not be confused with a combining form which can be distinguish from the affix historically; it is always borrowed from Latin or Greek in which it existed as a free form i.e. a separate word, or also as a combining form. Thus, cyclo- or its variant cyd- are derived from Greek word kuklos "circle" giving the English word cyclic.