Lecture 1 Fundamentals of grammar

contrastive distribution if their meanings are different. Such morphs constitute
different morphemes (eg. played, playing). The morphs are said to be in noncontrastive distribution if their meaning is the same. Such morphs constitute
“free alternants”, or “free variants” of the same morpheme (eg. burned, burnt).
Complementary distribution concerns different environments of formally
different morphs which are united by the same meaning. If two or more morphs
have the same meaning and the difference in their form is explained by different
environments, these morphs are said to be in complementary distribution and
considered the allomorphs of the same morpheme (eg. desks, girls, glasses).
The morphemic analysis (sometimes also called morphological) is one of
possible methods of analyzing word structure along with the word-building
analysis. The morphemic analysis is a process of singling out morphs in a word
and stating their meaning. To state the borders between morphemes correctly, it is
necessary to study the word in a row of words which are structurally similar
(words with the same root and suffixes).
The procedure of the morphemic analysis states the morphemic structure of
the word. The procedure consists of two operations:
1) the stem is separated from the inflection by means of comparing wordforms
of the word;
2) relations between morphemes in the stem are stated by means of
comparing cognate words.
The morphemic analysis based on the distributional analysis gave rise to
such notions as morph, allomorph, morpheme, etc.
The theory of Immediate Constituents (IC) was originally elaborated as an
attempt to determine the ways in which lexical units are relevantly related to one
another. It was discovered that combinations of such units are usually structured
into hierarchically arranged sets of binary constructions. For example in the wordgroup