2004. P. 6–17.
P. 12–15.
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Section II
morphology
4. morphology as a part of grammar
The course of Modern English morphology consists of three main
parts: 1) essentials of morphology, 2) the system of parts of speech,
3) the study of each part of speech in terms of its grammatical categories
and syntactic functions.
The chief notions of morphology include the grammatical category,
the word and the morpheme.
Grammatical category is a system of expressing a generalized
grammatical meaning by means of paradigmatic correlation of
grammatical forms (e. g. the category of number in nouns with the
singular and plural forms).
Categorial grammatical meanings are the most general meanings
rendered by language and expressed by systematical correlations of
word-forms (e. g. tense, aspect, voice, mood in the verb system).
The paradigmatic correlations of grammatical forms in a category
are exposed by the grammatical oppositions of various types (e. g.
a binary privative opposition found in the category of number; a
gradual opposition — in the degrees of comparison of adjectives, an
equipotential opposition — in the three tense system).
Word is the principal and basic unit of the language system, the
largest on the morphological and the smallest on the syntactic level of
linguistic analysis. It is very difficult to give a complete definition to
the word because the word is an extremely complex and many-sided
phenomenon. Within different linguistic theories and trends the word
is defined as the minimal potential sentence, the minimal free linguistic
form, the elementary component of the sentence, the grammatically
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arranged combination of sound with meaning, the uninterrupted string
of morphemes, etc.
Being a linguistic sign, the word is a two-facet unit possessing both
form and content, i. e. sound-form and meaning. The term “word“, or
“lexeme”, is an abstraction. It refers to the word taken as an invariant
unity of form and meaning. When used in actual speech, words occur
in different forms. The system showing a word in all its word-forms is
called its paradigm (e. g. boy, boys, boy’s, boys’).
Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units into which a word-
form may be divided (e. g. workers = [work + er] + s). The morpheme
is the smallest meaningful part of a word expressing a generalized,
significative meaning. There are root-morphemes and affixational
morphemes; the latter include derivational affixes (prefixes, suffixes)
and inflections.
Stem, or base, is the part of a word which remains unchanged
throughout its paradigm. The most characteristic feature of word
structure in Modern English is the phonetic identity of the stem with
the root morpheme.
The root-morpheme is the common part within a word-cluster
and the lexical centre of the word. Root-morphemes make the subject
of lexicology. Derivational morphemes are lexically dependent on
the root-morphemes, which they modify. But most of them have the
part-of-speech meaning, which makes them grammatically significant.
Inflectional morphemes have no lexical meaning. Inflections (endings)
carry only grammatical meaning (of such categories as person, number,
case, tense, aspect, etc).
Allomorphs, or morphs, are all the representations of the given
morpheme, in other words, the morpheme phonetic variants (e. g.
please, pleasant, pleasure; or else, poor, poverty).
“Zero-morpheme” is the term used to show that the absence of
a morpheme indicates a certain grammatical meaning (e. g. book —
singular number vs. books — plural number). The problem with zero-
morpheme is that this designation contradicts the general definition
of the morpheme as a two-facet linguistic unit having both form and
meaning. Zero-morpheme does not have any sound form. To avoid
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this contradiction, some scholars suggest that the term should be
changed and the meaningful absence of a morpheme should be termed
“zero-exponent”.
Modern English has several ways of expressing grammatical
meaning, or several types of word-form derivation.
Synthetic types of word-form derivation imply changes in the
body of the word without any auxiliary words (e. g. work — works —
worked ). Analytical types consist in using an auxiliary word, devoid of
any lexical meaning, to express some grammatical category of another
word (e. g. work — have worked). Modern English as a predominantly
analytical language demonstrates comparatively few grammatical
inflections, a sparing use of sound alternations to denote grammatical
forms, a wide use of auxiliaries, prepositions, and word order to denote
grammatical relations.
Sound alternations mean a way of expressing grammatical
categories which consists in changing a sound inside the root (e. g.
man — men).
Suppletive formation is a way of building a form of a word from an
altogether different stem (e. g. go — went).
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