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NewArchive / 02 - The morphological structure of the word. Alomorphes. Morphological meaning of the word

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  1. A) The morphological structure of the word.

B) Morphemes and allomorphs.

C) The morphological meaning of the word.

Morphology is a branch of linguistics that studies morphemes – the smallest meaningful non-segmentable parts of words.

Lexicology is closely connected with morphology. It includes part of morphology as its integral part because one of its objectives is investigating all meaningful units in a language.

The aim of morphology is to show the number and type of UC (ultimate constituencies).

Segmentable words are derived from other words. Non-segmentable words are not interesting for morphology.

There are three main types of word-segmentability:

1. complete takes place when segmentation into morphemes (free or bound) doesn’t cause any doubt for structural or semantic reasons as in teach-er)

2. conditional - when segmentation is doubtful for semantic reasons as the segments (pseudo-morphemes) regularly occurring in other words can hardly be ascribed any definite lexical meaning (ac cept, ex cept, con cept, per cept, pre cept).

3. defective - in cases when segmentation is doubtful for structural reasons because one of the components has a specific lexical meaning but seldom or never occurs in other words (ham-let, pock-et).

Lexicology studies only part of the morphemes that morphology is interested in. it studies only derivational morphemes that are the smallest meaningful stem building or word building lexical units as in reason-able, un-reason-able. It doesn’t study form building or inflectional morphemes as in smiled, smiles, is smiling.

Morpheme is the smallest two-facet language unit possessing both sound-form and meaning

Morphemic structure of words

All words can be classified as monomorphic or polymorphic according to the number of their morphemes.

Polymorphic words can be subdivided into monoradical and polyradical.

Monoradical words can be:

-monoradical suffixal (teacher, student);

-monoradical prefixal (overteach, overstudy)

-prefixal-radical suffixal (superteacher, superstudent)

Polyradical words can also be subdivided into

-polyradical proper (blackboard);

-polyradical suffixal (head-teacher);

-polyradical prefixal (super-headmaster)

-polyradical prefixal-suffixal (super-headteacher, super-light-mindedness).

In different contexts morphemes may have different phonemic shapes (please-pleasure-pleasant). These differently sounding parts can be recognized as morphemic variants of the same morphemes due to semantic and distributional criteria. These representations, alternates of morphemes are called allomorphs. Allomorphs may involve vowel and\or consonantal morphophonemic alternations. (number-numerous, fuse-fusion).

The conditions under which the same morpheme derives two or more differently sounding forms are still not quite clear. Many morphophonemic alternations and allophones as their results may be accounted for etymological reasons ( peace [OFr] - pacifist [L]); phonological (sound change and the Great Vowel Shift as in divine-divinity); analogical ( metricity will be pronounced as electricity) and exceptional factors (as in equate - equation where we observe t- alternation instead of the more productive alternation t- as in relate-relation).

This fact is worth mentioning and it is necessary to recognize a morpheme in its different phonemic shapes in different words while making morphological and derivational analyses of words.

C)

There are cases when me can observe a direct connection between the structural pattern of the word and its meaning. This relationship between morphemic structure of the word and meaning is termed morphological motivation; its main criterion is the relationship between morphemes. When we observe a direct connection between the structural pattern of the word and its meaning, we say that this word is motivated. (singer, rewrite – are motivated words).

If the connection between the structure of the lexical unit and its meaning is completely arbitrary and conventional, we speak of non-motivated or idiomatic words (matter, repeat).

It should be noted that morphological motivation is “relative”. Thus, the degree of motivation can be different. Between complete motivation and lack of motivation there exist various grades of partial motivation.

Some linguists argue that words can be motivated in more than one way and suggest another type of motivation - a direct connection between the phonetic structure of the word and its meaning. This can be observed in the phonemic structure of some newly coined words. For example, the small transmitter specialized in high frequencies is called “a tweeter”; the transmitter for low frequencies - “a woofer”.

Another type of phonetic motivation is represented by such words as swish, sizzle, boom, splash. They are phonetically motivated because the sound-clusters [sizl, bum] are a direct imitation of the sounds these words denote.

The sounds themselves may be emotionally expressive which accounts for the phonetical motivation in certain words. The sound-cluster [in] is imitative of sound or swift movement (ring, sing, swing).

There is also a type of motivation called semantic motivation – implies a direct connection between the central and marginal meanings of the word. This connection may be regarded as metaphoric extention of the central meaning based on the similarity of different classes of referents denoted by the word.