Theme: morphology

The course of lecture.

Morphological study of a word presupposes the analysis of a word and its structure. Hence, it's important for grammar to distinguish what a word is and what a morpheme is. The notions of morph and allomorph are also of great significance here.

Let's see what units of language are found in English.

Phoneme is the smallest distinctive unit: tale – take, bank - rank.

So let's see what morph is?

Morpheme is the smallest meaningful language unit. Morph is its concrete realization in speech.

Morph is (as to Barkhudarov L.S.) the smallest combination (succession) of phonemes (at least one phoneme) which has its certain meaning and is not further divided into miner meaningful parts, but it is so frequently repeated in various utterances:

clear

clear/ly

clear/ness

clear/ed

clear/s

un/clear

As we see, "clear" is the smallest meaningful combination of phonemes, hence it is a morph, where as "cl" is not a morph.

If we take the morpheme "clear" off the structure of the above words, well have-,-ly, -ness,-ed,-s, un-," they are also morphemes.

Prof. Barkhudarov gives these two rather interesting conclusions of the word-structure:

1. In any utterance any phoneme or combination of phonemes always enters into a morph.

2. If one part of the word is already a morph, then the second (rest) half is also to be considered a morph.

Straw-berry

goose-berry

cran-berry

bil-berry

Morphemes fall under four types: free, bound, fused and zero morphemes.

F r e e m o r p h e m e s are the ones that can be used alone as one word when taken off the structure of the word:

class-room,

bed-room,

baby-sit

air-craft, etc

whereas bound ones are the morphemes that can't be used alone, if taken off the structure of the word.

B o u n d m o r p h e m e s are such ones, which can not be used alone, when taken off the structure of the word: -by,-ed,-tun,-ness,-s,ek.