14. Morphemes. Classification of morphemes. Types of meaning in morphemes. Types of word-segmentability.

Words consist of morphemes.

“Morpheme” – (Greek) “morphe” (form) + suffix “-eme” (to denote the smallest unit).

The morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of form.

Morphemes can not be segmented into smaller units without losing their constitutive essence.

Morphemes occur in speech only as constituent parts of words but not independently.

Morphemes may have different phonetic shapes. All the representations of the given morpheme are called allomorphs or morpheme variants.

Ex: please, pleasing, pleasure, pleasant.

Classification:

I. Semantically:

1) Root-morphemes (or radicals) are the lexical nucleus of words.

Ex: remake, glassful, disorder

The root-morphemes are isolated as the morpheme common to a set of words making up a word-cluster.

Ex: the morpheme “teach-“ in “to teach, teacher, teaching”.

2) Non-root morphemes:

2.1 inflectional morphemes (inflections) – carry only grammatical meaning and thus relevant only for formation of word-forms;

2.2 affixational morphemes (affixes) are relevant for building various types of steams.

NOTE! A steam is the part of a word that remains unchanged throughout its paradigm.

Lexicology is concerned only with affixational morphemes.

Affixes

prefixes	suffixes
is a derivational morpheme preceding the root-morpheme and modifying its meaning. Ex: pronounce – mispronounce; safe - unsafe	is a derivational morpheme following the root and forming a new derivative in a different part of speech or a different word class. Ex: hearten, hearty, heartless.

II. Structurally:

1) Free morpheme – coincides with the steam or a word-form.

Ex: friendship

2) Bound-morpheme occurs only as a constituent part of a word. They always make part of a word.

Ex: darkness, friendship, to activize; impolite, to disregard, to demobilize.

Some root-morphemes also belong to the class of bound morphemes.

Ex: goose- in gooseberry; -ceive in conceive.

Combining forms (morphemes borrowed namely from Greek and Latin in which they existed as free forms) are considered to be bound roots.

Ex: tele-phone consists of 2 bound roots, whereas the word cycl-ic – of a bound root and an affix.

3) Semi-bound (semi-free) morphemes are morphemes that can function in a morphemic sequence both as an affix and as a free morpheme.

Ex: “well” and “half” on the one hand occur as free morphemes that coincide with the steam and the word-form in the utterances “to sleep well”, :half an hour”, on the other hand “well” and “half” occur as bound morphemes in the words “well-known”, “half-done”.

Types of meaning in morphemes Word-formation

1. Various types and ways of forming words

Word-formation is the system of derivative types of words and the process of creating new words from the material available in the language after certain structural and semantic formulas and patterns.