Branches of linguistics. Synchronic vs diachronic approaches to the language study. Lexicology – ‘the science of the word’ Lexicon

Semantic classification of morphemes:

According to the role they play in the structure of words, morphemes fall into:

root (radical) morphemes – the lexical nuclei of words which are characterised by individual lexical meaning shared by no other morpheme of the language; the root remains after the removal of all functional and derivational affixes and does not admit any further analysis, e.g teach- in to teach, teacher, teaching;

non-root morphemes represented by inflectional morphemes (inflections) and affixational morphemes (affixes).

According to the position in a word, affixational morphemes fall into:

prefixes – derivational affixes standing before the stem and modifying its meaning, e.g. ex-minister, in-sensitive, re-read etc.; about 51 in the system of Modern English;

suffixes – derivational affixes following the stem and forming a new derivative within the same part of speech (e.g. king-dom, book-let, child-hood etc.) or in a different word class (e.g. do-er, wash-able, sharp-en etc.);