Lecture the place of english in morphological and genetic typology of languages problems to be discussed

The morphemic structure of the English language

Problems to be discussed

- What operation is called "Morphemic analysis"?

- Morpheme-morph-allomorph

- Types of morphemes from the point of view of their:

a) function

b) number correlation between form and meaning

There are many approaches to the questions mentioned above. According to Zellig Harris "The morphemic analysis is the operation by which the analyst isolates minimum meaningful elements in the utterances of a language, and decides which occur­rences of such elements shall be regarded as occurrences of "the same" element".

The general procedure of isolating the minimum meaningful elements is as follows:

Step 1. The utterances of a language are examined (obviously) not all of them, but a sampling which we hope will be statistically valid. Recurrent par­tials with constant meaning (ran away in John ran away and Bill ran away) are discovered; recurrent partials not composed of smaller ones (way) are alternants or morphs. So are any partials not recurrent but left over when all recurrent ones are counted for. Every utterance is composed entirely of morphs. The division of a stretch of speech between one morph and another, we shall call a cut.

Step 2. Two or more morphs are grouped into a single morpheme if they:

have the same meaning;

never occur in identical environments and

have combined environments no greater than the environments of some single alternant in the language.

Step 3. The difference in the phonemic shape of alternants of morphemes are organized and stated; this constitutes morphophonemics

Compare the above said with the conception of Ch. Hockett.