Morpheme. Morph. Allomorph.

the most elementary unities of sound and meaning words nevertheless fall into smaller meaningful structural units or morphemes. Words are made up of morphemes which are two-facet units, each being an association of a certain meaning and a sound-pattern. A morpheme can occur in speech only as a constitu­ent part of the word.

A morpheme, then, is also an association of a given meaning with a given sound pattern. However, unlike a word it is not autonomous. Morphemes occur in speech only as constituent parts of words, although a word may consist of a single morpheme. Nor are they divisible into smaller meaningful language units.

The term morpheme comes from the Greek word morphē meaning any kind of shape or form, corresponding to the very general sense in which we have been speaking of free and bound forms. The suffix “-eme” denotes the smallest significant or distinctive unit or form (e.g. phoneme).

Morphemes may have different phonetic shapes. In the word-cluster please, pleasing, pleasure, pleasan t the root-morpheme is represented by the phonetic shapes: [pli:z-] in please, pleasing; [pleʒ-] in pleasure, pleasant. All these representations of the given morpheme are called allomorphs or morpheme variants.

Morphemes may be classified from the semantic point of view and from the structural point of view.

Semantically morphemes fall into two types: 1) root-morphemes and 2) non-root-morphemes.

Root-morphemes (or radicals) are the lexical nucleus of words. For example, in the words remake, glassful, disorder the root-morphemes are –make, glass – and –order are understood as the lexical centers of the words. 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. The root remains unchanged after all the affixes have been removed and can’t be broken into smaller meaningful parts. Root-morphemes are the main morphemes in any given language, for it is they that ideas or concepts. A words is impossible without a root morpheme and some English words contain two root morphemes, even rarely three.

Non-root morphemes include inflectional morphemes (or inflections) and affixational morphemes or affixes (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. (A stem is the part of the word containing the root and the affix with the part-of-speech meaning. A stem remains unchanged throughout its paradigm. If a stem coincides with the root it is called a simple stem). Lexicology is concerned only with affixational morphemes.

Affixes are divided according to their function into derivational and functional. According to their position in a word affixes are also classified into prefixes, suffixes and infixes. A prefix is a derivational morpheme proceeding the root morpheme and modifying its meaning (pronounce – mis - pronounce, safe – un- safe). A suffix is a derivational morpheme following the root and forming a new derivative in a different part of speech or a different word-class (- en, - y, - less in heart- en, heart- y, heart- less). Infixes come inside the root, but they hardly ever met in English: the best known example is –n- in sta n d (as different from stood).

Structurally morphemes fall into three types: 1) free morphemes 2) bound morphemes 3) semi-bound (or semi-free) morphemes.

A morpheme is said to be free if it may stand alone without changing its meaning. It is defined as one that coincides with the stem or a word-form. 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 word friend.

A bound morpheme occurs only as a constituent part of a word and never occurs alone in speech. Affixes are bound morphemes for they always make part of a word. For example, the suffixes – ness, -ship in the words darkness, friendship; prefixes im-, dis-, de- in the words impolite, to disregard, to demobilize.

Some root morphemes also belong to the class of bound morphemes. These are as a rule, roots which are found in quite a limited number of words and never independently or pseudo-roots, i.e. root-morphemes which have lost most of the properties of “full” words. Such are root-morphemes goose- in gooseberry, -ceive in conceive. Combining forms, i.e. morphemes borrowed namely from Greek or Latin in which they existed as free forms, are considered to be bound roots. For example, the word tele - phone consists of two bound roots, whereas the word cycl-ic – of a bound root and an affix.

Morph -The smallest set of phonemes. It is meaningful, indivisible, regularly reproduced in utterances.

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