The morphemic structure of the English language

The morphemic structure of the English language

Morphology

• The study of words and how they are composed is called morphology
• Morphemes are the smallest grammatically independent unit of meaning

• What operation is called "Morphemic analysis"?
• Morpheme-morph-allomorph

"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 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".

Zellig Harris

DISTRIBUTION

• we understand the occurrence of a lexical unit relative to other lexical units of the same level (words relative to words /morphemes relative to morphemes, etc.).

DISTRIBUTIONAL ANALYSIS

Used to fix and study the units of language in relation to their contextual environments, adjoining elements in the text.

• the analyzed text is divided into recurrent segments consisting of phonemes. These segments are called “morphs”.

1st stage

• the environmental features of the morphs are established and the corresponding identifications are effected.

2nd stage

MAIN TYPES OF DISTRIBUTION

Contrastive

noncontrastive

complementary

Contrastive distribution- if the morphs meanings are different. eg. played, playing.

• Contrastive distribution- if the morphs meanings are different. eg. played, playing.
• Noncontrastive distribution -if morphs meaning is the same. eg. burned, burnt.
• Complementary distribution -if two or more morphs have the same meaning and the difference in their form is explained by different environments.eg. desks, girls, glasses.

The morphemic analysis -a process of singling out morphs in a word and stating their meaning.

• The morphemic analysis -a process of singling out morphs in a word and stating their meaning.

e.g. mother+’s , flower+s

The procedure of the morphemic analysis states the morphemic structure of the word. The procedure consists of two operations:

• 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 word forms 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.

Morph- the first cut of utterance into the smallest meaningful units.

• Morph- the first cut of utterance into the smallest meaningful units.
• Morpheme- the smallest meaningful unit of language
• Morph- the smallest meaningful unit of speech. The morphs that have identical meanings are grouped into one morpheme
• Allomorphs - the variants of a morpheme are called allomorphs.

The Types of Morphemes

functional

lexical

lexical - free

lexical - bound

grammatical

grammatical - free

grammatical- bound

lexical

lip, red, go, one

friend-ship, free-dom, teach-er

grammatical

shall, will, be, have, is

girl's bag, bigger room, asked

number correlation between form and content

Overt (eye, bell, big)

Zero

(ask – asks

high –higher)

Empty

(state - s - man.)

Discontinuous ("is" and

" - ing" )