morphology

A morpheme can be defined as the smallest meaningful unit which has a sound form and meaning, occurring in speech only as a part of a word. It can be subdivided into phonemes, that are the smallest single-facet distinctive units of language with no meaning.

A word is a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used with others (or sometimes alone) to form a sentence and typically shown with a space. It consists of morphemes.

​Identification

The analysis of the morphemic structure of words reveals the ultimate meaningful constituents (UCs), their typical sequence and arrangement, but it does not show the way a word is constructed. The nature, type and arrangement of the ICs of the word are known as its derivative structure.

​Segmentation

​Classification

Characteristic of words whose the morphemic stucture is transparent enough as their individual morphemes clearly stand out within the workd lending themsleves easily to isolation. Its constituent morphemes recur with the same meaning in mamy other words.

​Complete segmentability

​Conditional morphemic segmentability

Characterizes words whose segmentation into constituent morphemes is doubtful for semantic reasons.

​Defective morphemic segmentability

The property of words whose unique

morphemic components seldom or never recur in other words.

The second stage of morphemic analysis is identification of morphs. The main criteria here are semantic and phonetic similarity. Morphs should have the same denotational meaning, but their phonemic shape can vary. Such phonetically conditioned positional morpheme variants are called allomorphs. They occur in a specific environment, being identical in meaning or function and characterized by complementary distribution.

A root is the lexical nucleus of a word bearing the major individual meaning common to a set of semantically related words, constituting one word cluster/word-family with which no grammatical properties of the word are connected.
A root is the ultimate constituent which remains after the removal of all functional and derivational affixes and does not admit any further analysis.

Root

In this respect, the peculiarity of English as a unique language is explained by its

analytical language structure-morphemes are often homonymous with independent units (words). A morpheme that is homonymous with a word is called a root morpheme.

​1. Semantic POV

Unlike a root, a stem is that part of the word that remains unchanged throughout its paradigm. There are three types of stems:

• Simple stems are semantically non-motivated and do not constitute a pattern on analogy with which new stems may be modeled. Simple stems are generally monomorphic and phonetically identical with the root morphemes.

• Derived stems are built on stems of various structures, they are motivated, i.e. derived stems are understood on the basis of the derivative relations between their immediate constituents and the correlated stems. Derived stems are mostly polymorphic.

• Compound stems are made up of two immediate constituents, both of which are themselves stems. It is built by joining two stems, one of which is simple, the other is derived.

Compound words have at least two root-morphemes, the number of derivational morphemes being insignificant.

​Compound words

Derived words are those composed of one root-morpheme and one or more derivational morphemes.

The derivational types of words are classified according to the structure oftheir stems into simple, derived and compound words.

​Derived words

​2. Position POV

According to their position affixational morphemes fall into suffixes - derivational morphemes following the root and forming a new derivative in a different part of speech or a different word class, infexes – affixes placed within the word, and prefixes – derivational morphemes that precede the root and modify the meaning.

The process of affixation itself consists in coining a new word by adding an affix or several affixes to a root morpheme. Suffixation is more productive than prefixation in Modern English.

3. Functional POV

From this perspective affixational morphemes include derivational morphemes that serve to make a new part of speech or create another word in the same one, modifying the lexical meaning of the root, and functional morphemes, that serve to build grammatical forms, the paradigm of the word, carrying only grammatical meaning and thus relevant only for the formation of words. Some functional morphemes have a dual character. They are called functional word-morphemes (FWM) – auxiliaries. The main function of FWM is to build analytical structures.

It is presupposed that morphemes fall into three types:

• Free morphemes which can stand alone as words in isolation (e.g. friendly, friendship).

• Bound morphemes that occur only as word constituents (e.g. resist, deceive, misinterpret, etc.).

• Semi-bound morphemes which can function both as affixes and as free morphemes (compare, e.g. well-known, herself, after-thought and well, self, after).

Affixes can also be classified into productive and non-productive types. Productivity is the ability to form new words after existing patterns which are readily understood by the speakers of a language. By productive affixes we mean those which take part in deriving new words in this particular period of language development.

​6. Productivity POV

Affixes are also classified from the etymological POV into two large groups: native and borrowed.

​5. Etimolgical POV