The Basic Units of Morphology. The Theory of Oppositions. Part 2 Outline

1. The word and its basic features.

2. The notion of the analytical word.

3. The morpheme and the morphemic structure of the word.

4. The theory of oppositions.

5. The reduction of oppositions,

The Basic Notions of the Lecture

Naming power is the ability of the word to name objects of reality.

Isolability the ability of the word to be separated within a phrase or a sentence.

Uninterruptibility is the inability of the word to be interrupted by some other word or a parenthetical enclosure.

Looseness means relatively different positions which the word can take in the sentence.

The morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit and an elementary part of the word.

The opposition is a generalized correlation of language units, forms, by means of which a certain category or function is expressed.

Neutralization is that type of the reduction of the oppositions when the unmarked member of the opposition is used as the marked one.

Transposition is that type of reduction of oppositions when the marked member is used instead of the unmarked one. Transposition usually brings about a certain stylistic effect.

1. The Word and its Basic Features.

The word as a unit of morphology has many aspects and presents difficulties in defining it. The word may be defined as the largest unit of morphology and the smallest meaningful naming unit of the language as the smallest free language unit, as a potential sentence.

Minding the difficulty in defining the word, many linguists especially in descriptive and structural linguistics consider the morpheme and not the word to be the basic unit of morphology.

However, the majority of linguists recognize the word as a segmental language unit and sharing this opinion we should be able to prove that the unit we deal with is really a word. It means that we should know the distinctive features of the word. These features are:

1) Naming power. Words name sth and have their referents which may be of different nature (objects, properties). The correlation between the word as a segmental language unit and its referent determines the concrete lexical meaning of a word. However, words may lose their referential nature and serve only as formal units performing different syntactic roles and rendering vague (abstract) grammatical meanings (link-verbs, auxiliaries, word-substitutes).

1. Isolability. A word is easily singled out inside a phrase or a sentence.

2. Uninterruptibility (indivisibility). A word can’t be interrupted by some other word or a parenthetical enclosure: a blackboard = a black board = a black long board.

3. A certain looseness concerning the position of the word inside the sentence.

e.g. He ran away. Away he ran.

Thus, we can say that a word is characterized by positional independence which brings about its looseness and isolability.

When speaking about the word it is necessary to touch upon the so-called ANALYTICAL WORD.

By analytical words some scholars mean such word-combinations as: take up, look up, take after. Such units are discreet (расщеплённые) in their form, because they consist of 2 or more words, but their meaning makes them a single unit.

So when we treat them as analytical words we take into consideration only their meaning. However, the plain of expression resists this idea, because formally we have 2 or more isolated words, the first of which may change in form without affecting the other or others.

The last phenomenon violates the principle of indivisibility of the word. It is even possible to put another word between the components of the “analytical word” which also violates the notion of the word: put it on, take firm hold.

So it seems that we can’t agree to the notion of the analytical word because if we agree to it than the boundaries of the word will become indefinite.

In such cases we should speak not of analytical words but of bound phrases.