Lecture No 1 Word as a basic language unit. Different approaches to the definition of the word. Word meaning as a linguistic phenomenon

A bound morpheme occurs only as a constituent part of a word. Affixes are, naturally, bound morphemes, for they always make a part of a word, e.g. the suffixes -ness, -ship, -ise (-ize), etc., the prefixes un-, dis-, de-, etc. (e.g. readiness, comradeship, to activise; unnatural, to displease) and can not be used separately.

Semi-bound (semi-free) morphemes are morphemes that can function in a morphemic sequence both as an affix and as a free morpheme (a word). For example, the morpheme well and half, on the one hand, occur as free morphemes that coincide with the stem and the word-form in utterances like sleep well, half an hour, on the other hand, they occur as bound morphemes in words like well-known, half-eaten, half-done.

The procedure generally employed for the purposes of segmenting words into the constituent morphemes is the method of Immediate and Ultimate Constituents. During breaking a word into its constituents at each stage of the procedure we segment the word into immediately broken morphemes, and they are termed as the Immediate Constituents (ICs). We finish the process of segmentation when we arrive at constituents which cannot be further broken, and these indivisible morphemes are referred to as the Ultimate Constituents (UCs).