Free and bound morphemes.

The morphemic structure of the word

1. The definition of the morpheme.

2. The classification of morphemes.

3. Free and bound morphemes.

4. Immediate constituents.

5. The model of the English word.

6. Distributional analysis. Allomorphs.

7. Replacive allomorphs.

The definition of the morpheme.

Morphology studies the structure of words. It deals with two units: the morpheme and the word. The morpheme isthe elementary meaningful lingual unit built up from phonemes and used to make words.

A morpheme meets three criteria:

a) it’s a word or a part of a word that has meaning;

b) it can’t be divided into smaller meaningful parts without violation or loss of its meaning;

c) it can be found in various verbal environment with a relatively stable meaning.

Example: bright – it’s a word; it can’t be divided without violation of meaning (right!); it can be met in different phrases – bright colors, bright example, bright side (to look on the bright side).

Example: Element EN in the word BRIGHTEN has the sense of “make” (to make light). It’s a part of the word, it has its meaning and it can be found in other words (darken, deepen, straiten). So EN must be considered a morpheme too.

The classification of morphemes.

According to the traditional classification morphemes are divided into roots (expressing the concrete part of the word meaning) and affixes (expressing the specificational part of the word meaning). The roots of notional words are classical lexical morphemes obligatory for any word. The affixes include prefixes and suffixes and they are not obligatory.

Prefixes are lexical morphemes that occur before a root. They constitute a small class of morphemes and often express the meaning of English prepositions and adverbs (dis=without disarm, disinherit; pre=before prehistoric, pre-recorded, preschool; ad=to, towards adverb).

Suffixes are placed after a root and can be both lexical and grammatical. They play a greater role in the structure of English than prefixes. They express different morphological categories: noun possessive (‘s) and plural ((e)s-en), verb past tense (ed), comparative (er) and so on.

Prefixes and lexical suffixes have a word-building function and are usually studied in lexicology.

Prefixes are usually single (except for the negative UN before another prefix UNABRIDGED). Suffixes may pile up to the number of 3 or 4 (NORM/AL/IZ/ER/S, INTER/NATION/AL/IZ/ATION). In this case their order is fixed.

Free and bound morphemes.

Morphemes are of two kinds: free and bound. A free morpheme is one that can be uttered alone with meaning (Example: bright). A bound morpheme unlike free one can’t be uttered alone with meaning, it’s always added to one or more morphemes to form a word (Example: brightEN). All affixal morphemes are bound. Roots are numerous and most of them in English are free morphemes, but there are also bound (Example: pOSSible – both morphemes are bound).

Bound morphemes can be further classified as derivational or inflectional.

Derivational morphemes, when combined with a root, change either the semantic meaning or part of speech of the affected word. For example, in the word happiness, the addition of the bound morpheme -ness to the root happy changes the word from an adjective (happy) to a noun (happiness). In the word unkind, un- functions as a derivational morpheme, for it inverts the meaning of the word formed by the root kind.

Inflectional morphemes modify a verb's tense or a noun's number without affecting the word's meaning or class. Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding -s to the root dog to form dogs and adding -ed to wait to form waited.

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