The morpheme and types of morphemes

The word as a unit should be distinguished from the other fundamental language unit, the morpheme.

A morpheme as well as a word is an association of a given meaning with a given sound pattern. Morphe­mes occur in speech only as constituent parts of words, but a word may consist of a single morpheme. Morphemes are ultimate units as they can`t be further divi­sible. That is why the morpheme may be defined as the minimum meaningful language unit. It should not be confused with semes and phonemes. Semes are the minimal unit of meaning, while morphemes are the minimal meaningful unit. Phonemes, according to traditional definitions help to distinguish meaning but don`t possess it.

The term morpheme is derived from Greek morphe – “form”+ eme-“ the smallest unit or the minimum distinctive feature”. A morpheme is said to be either bound or free. Morphemes are free if they may stand alone without changing their meaning; otherwise they are bound forms: e.g. 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.

According to the role they play in constructing words, morphemes are divided into roots and affixes. A root is the ultimate constituent element which remains after the removal of all functional and derivational affixes and does not admit any further analysis.

The root in English is very often homonymous with the word. It is one of the most specific features of the English language. The reason for it lies in its general grammatical and phonemic system. Most words in English have one single stressed syllable: bear, find, jump etc. An English word does not necessarily contain formatives indicating to what part of speech it belongs. The lexico-grammatical meaning is shown in distribution. I.V. Arnold [] gives an example: A change of work is as good as a rest. Among the types of morphemes roots are the most numerous.

Affixes are further subdivided, according to their function and meaning, into functional(grammatical) affixes and derivational(lexical) affixes.

Derivational and functional affixes have some similarity but it is necessary to see the difference between them. They are often homonymous, all the other respects they are different be­cause they render different types of meaning.

Functional affixes serve to convey grammatical meaning. They build different forms of one and the same word. Here another important notion is a word-form, which is defined as one of the different aspects a word may take as a result of inflection. Complete sets of all the various forms of a word when considered as inflectional patterns, such as declensions or conjugations, are termed paradigms. A paradigm is defined as the system of grammatical forms characteristic of a word, e.g. near, nearer, nearest.

Functional affixes can be added to any element belonging to the part of speech they serve: regular correlation of singular and plural forms of nouns: book-books. The archaic forms, e.g. child - children, or foreign plurals like criterion - criteria are quite rare.

The part of a word without a functional affix is a stem. In other words it is the part of the word that remains unchanged throughout its paradigm. The stem expresses the lexical and the part of'speech meaning. If a stem is a single morpheme and contains nothing but the root, it is a simp1e stem. A stem containing one or more affixes is a derived stem. E.g. The stem of the paradigm hearty—heatier consists of a root morpheme and an affix, it is derived. If the stem is not homonymous to a separate word of the same root, we call it a bound stem. E.g. in the word cordial the adjective-forming suffix can be separated on the analogy with such words as bronchial, the noun is bronchi. The remaining stem in cordial cannot form a separate word, it is bound. Bound stems are especially characteristic of loan words.

Derivational affixes serve to supply the stem with components of lexical and lexico-grammatical meaning, and thus form different words. One and the same lexico-grammatical meaning of the affix is sometimes accompanied by different combinations of various lexical meanings: lexico-grammatical meaning of the suffix -y the ability is to express the qualitative idea and create adjectives from noun stems; its lexical meanings can differ: “ full of”, as in bushy or cloudy, “com­posed of”, as in stony”, etc. It can convey emotional meaning, e.g. Bossy.

A derivative can always take further derivation and in this way it is homonymous to a stem: foolish i s from the stem fool - and is homonymous to the stem foolish - occurring in the words foolishness and foolishly. But words with functional suffixes cease to be homonymous to stems. E.g. No further derivation is possible from the word-form fools, in which the stem fool- is followed by the functional affix -s.

Derivational affixes do not always combine freely. The suffix -en occurring in golden and leaden cannot be added to the root steel. Derivational and functional affixes are different positionally. A functional affix marks the word boundary, it can only follow a derivational affix. That is why functional affixes are called outer formatives as contrasted to inner formatives (derivational affixes).

Affixation.

Unlike roots, affixes are always bound forms. According to their position,affixes are subdivided into prefixes, suffixes and infixes.

A suffix is a derivational morpheme following the stem and for­ming a new derivative in a different part of speech or a different word class, the suffix also serves 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 horrify, purify, while the second shows frequency: flicker, shimmer, twitter.

A prefix is a derivational morpheme standing before the root and modifying meaning, e.g. to hearten — to dishearten. Usually words stay within the same part of speech. It is only with verbs and statives that a prefix may serve to distinguish one part of speech from another, like in earth – to unearth, sleep — asleep (stative).

Preceding a verb stem, some prefixes express the difference between a transitive and an intransitive verb: stay and outstay smb. Prefixes can modify the stem for time (pre-, post-), place (in; ad-), negation (un; dis-).

An infix is an affix placed within the word, like -n- in stand. The type is not productive in English.

An affix should not be confused with a combining form and a semiaffix. A combining form is also a bound form but it can be distinguished from an affix historically by the fact that it is always borrowed from another language, namely, from Latin or Greek, in which it existed as a free form, i.e. a separate word, or also as a combining form. E.M.Dubenets calls them completives. Thus, the combining form cyclo - and its variant cycl - are derived from the Greek word kuklos 'circle', giving the English word cycli. There are words in which both elements- completives: astronaut; claustrophobia, megalopolis; and words in which the 1^st – completive, the 2^nd- a free stem: macrocontract; multimedia; megadebte r.

Besides, the problem of semi –affixes should be mentioned. There are cases where it is difficult to draw a line between roots and affixes on the one hand, and derivational affixes and inflexional formatives on the other. They are called semi-affixes. They determine the lexico-grammatical class the word belongs to. E.g. sailor - seaman, where -man is a semi-affix.

Speaking about morphemes we also speak about the allomorph, which is defined as a positional variant of a morpheme appearing in a specific environment. They say that it is characterized by complementary distribution. Complementary distribution takes place when two linguistic variants cannot appear in the same environment, e.g. stems ending in consonants take the suffix - ation (liberation); stems ending in pt, take -tion (corruption). Different morphemes are characterized by contrastive distribution. It means that if they occur in the same environment they signal different meanings: -able and –ed are different morphemes, not allomorphs, because adjectives in -able mean 'capable of doing': e.g. measurable, while -ed is a suffix meaning a result: e.g. measured.

In American descriptive linguistics allomorphs are treated from a semantic point of view, so that not only [iz] in dishes, [z] in dreams and [s] in books, but also [en] in oxen, the vowel modification in tooth - teeth and zero suffix in many sheep are allomophs. I.V. Arnold and other Russian scholars criticised the approach, because then morphemes become pure abstractions.

Classification of suffixes

Depending on different principles various classifications of derivational af­fixes are suggested. They are classified according to 5 principles: parts of speech they served to form, their meaning (semantic classification), their frequency, productivity, accor­ding to their origin, and other characteristics. Within the parts of speech suffixes have been classified semantically according to lexico-grammatical groups, and according to the types of stems they are added to.