Учебное пособие в систематизированном виде содержит необходимые для изучения курса лексикологии английского языка вспомогательные материалы: планы семинаров, определения основных понятий и терминов на английском и русском языках, темы курсовых

Doug Larson
...words are coinedbecause an acute need is feht...
Randolph Quirk
Discussion

1. 
   Morphological structure of the English word:
   

1. 
   the notion of morpheme;
   
2. 
   semantic classification of morphemes (roots, prefixes, suffixes, inflec­tions);
   
3. 
   structural classification of morphemes (free morphemes, bound mor­phemes, semi-affixes).
   

2. 
   Morphemic analysis, its difficulties (pseudo-morphemes, unique roots, combining forms, semi-affixes).
   
3. 
   Word-formation analysis.
   
4. 
   IC-analysis.
   

Terminology
Morpheme ['ma:fi:m] is one of the fundamental units of a language, a minimum sign that is an association of a given meaning with a given form (sound and graphic). For example, in the word cloudy the lexico-grammatical meaning of the suffix -y consists in the ability to express the qualitative idea pe­culiar to adjectives and create an adjective from a noun stem; its lexical meaning here is “full of”. The difference between a phoneme and a morpheme is that a phoneme has no meaning of its own. Unlike a word, a morpheme is not autono­mous. Morphemes occur in speech only as constituent parts of words, although a word may consist of a single morpheme (if it is a root). Nor are they divisible into smaller meaningful units.
Allomorph [¹ ichm.?fj (or morpheme variant) is a representation of the given morpheme that manifests alteration. It means that morphemes may have different phonetic shapes. In the set please, pleasure, pleasant, the root is rep­resented by different phonetic shapes, cf.: please [pli:z], pleasure [ple3-], pleasant [plez-]. Another example is the prefix in- which has several positional variants: il- before -1- (illogical), ir- before r (irresponsible), im- before b, m, p (imbalance, immaterial, impossible). The inflection -s forming the plural of nouns has the following variants: -s [s] as in eats, slips; -s [z] as in beds, minerals; -es [iz] as in boxes, wishes.