Ta’lim sohasi: 110000 Pedagogika Ta’lim yo`nalishi

Lecture № 6. The structure of the word. Types of morphemes
Outline:
1. Segmentation of words into morphemes.
2. Classification of morphemes.
3. Historical changeability of word structure
Key words: Morphemes, affixational morphemes, root morphemes, inflexions, derivational affixes, free morphemes, allomorphs
Close observation and comparison of wordsclearly shows that a great many words have acomposite nature and are made up of smallerunits, each possessing sound-form and meaning. These are generally referredto as m o r p h e m e s defined as the smallest indivisible two-facetlanguage units. For instance, words like boiler, driller fall into the morphemesboil-, drill- and -er by virtue of the recurrence of the morpheme - er in these and other similar words and of the morphemes boil- and drillin to boil, a boil, boiling and to drill, a drill, drilling, a drill-press, etc.Likewise, words like flower-pot and shoe-lace are segmented into themorphemes flower-, pot-, shoe- and lace- (cf. flower-show, flowerful, etc., shoe-brush, shoeless, etc., on the one hand; and pot-lid, pottery, etc., lace-boots, lacing, etc., on the other).
Like a word a morpheme is a two-facet language unit, an association ofa certain meaning with a certain sound-pattern. Unlike a word a morphemeis not an autonomous unit and can occur in speech only as a constituentpart of the word.
Morphemes cannot be segmented into smaller units without losing theirconstitutive essence, i.e. two-facetedness, association of a certain meaningwith a given sound-pattern, cf. the morpheme lace- denoting 'a string or cord put through small holes in shoes', etc.; 'to draw edges together' andthe constituent phonemes [l], [ei], [s] entirely without meaning.
Identification of morphemes in various texts shows that morphemesmay have different phonemic shapes.
In the word-cluster please, pleasing, pleasure, pleasant the rootmorphemeis represented by phonemic shapes: [pli:z] in please, pleasing, [plez] in pleasure and [plez] in pleasant. In such cases we say that thephonemic shapes of the word stand in complementary distribution or inalternation with each other. All the representations of the given morphemethat manifest alteration are called allomorphs of that morpheme ormorphemevariants . Thus [pli:z, plez] and [рlез] are allomorphs of оnе and the same morpheme. The root-morphemes in the wordclusterduke, ducal, duchess, duchy or poor, poverty may also serve asexamples of the allomorphs of one morpheme.