Lecture 3. Word-Structure

Due to the morphemic structure of the word all English words fall into two large classes. They are so-called segmentable words, i.e. those ones allowing of segmentation into morphemes, e.g. agreement, information, fearless, quickly, door-handle, etc., and non-segmentable words, i.e. those ones not allowing of such segmentation, e.g. house, girl, woman, husband, etc.

The operation of a segmentable word breaking into the constituent morphemes is referred to in present-day linguistic literature as the analysis of word-structure on the morphemic level. The morphemic analysis aims at splitting a segmentable word into its constituent morphemes — the basic units at this level of word-structure analysis — and at determining their number and types. The degree of morphemic segmentability is not the same for different words.

Three types of morphemic segmentability of words are distinguished: complete, conditional and defective.

Complete segmentability is characteristic of a great many words the morphemic structure of which is transparent enough, as their individual morphemes clearly stand out within the word lending themselves easily to isolation. There are, however, numerous words in the English vocabulary the morphemic structure of which is not so transparent and easy to establish.

Conditional morphemic segmentability characterises words whose segmentation into the constituent morphemes is doubtful for semantic reasons. In words like retain, contain, detain or receive, deceive, conceive, perceive the sound-clusters [ri-], [di-], [кэn-] seem, on the one hand, to be singled out quite easily due to their recurrence in a number of words, on the other hand, they undoubtedly have nothing in common with the phonetically identical morphemes re-, de- as found in words like rewrite, re-organise, de-organise, decode. The type of meaning that can be ascribed to them is only a differential and a certain distributional meaning: the [ri-] distinguishes retain from detain and the [-tein] distinguishes retain from receive, whereas their order and arrangement point to the status of the re-, de-, con-, per- as different from that of the -tain and - ceive within the structure of the words.

Defective morphemic segmentability is the property of words whose component morphemes seldom or never recur in other words. One of the component morphemes is a unique morpheme. A unique morpheme is isolated and understood as meaningful because the constituent morphemes display a more or less clear denotational meaning. There is no doubt that in the nouns streamlet, ringlet, leaflet,etc. the morpheme -lethas the denotational meaning of diminutiveness and is combined with the morphemes stream-, ring-, leaf-,etc. each having a clear denotational meaning. Things are entirely different with the word hamlet.The morpheme -letretains the same meaning of diminutiveness, but the sound-cluster [hæm] that is left after the isolation of the morpheme -letdoes not recur in any other English word with anything like the meaning it has in the word hamlet.It is likewise evident that the denotational and the differential meaning of [hæm] which distinguishes hamletfrom streamlet, ringlet,etc. is upheld by the denotational meaning of -let.

The oppositions that the different types of morphemic segmentability are involved in hardly require any comments with the exception of complete and conditional segmentability versus defective segmentability.

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

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

Roots and affixational morphemes are generally easily distinguished and the difference between them is clearly felt as, e.g., in the words helpless, handy, blackness, Londoner, refill, etc.: the root-morphemes help-, hand-, black-, London-, -fill are understood as the lexical centres of the words, as the basic constituent part of a word without which the word is inconceivable.

The 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, theor- 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.

Affixes are classified into prefixes and suffixes: 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 generalised lexical meaning.

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