The Basic Units of Morphology. The Theory of Oppositions The Word and its Basic Features

The word as a unit of morphology has many aspects and presents difficulties in defining it. The word may be defined as the largest unit of morphology and the smallest meaningful naming unit of the language as the smallest free language unit, as a potential sentence.

Minding the difficulty in defining the word, many linguists especially in descriptive and structural linguistics consider the morpheme and not the word to be the basic unit of morphology.

However, the majority of linguists recognize the word as a segmental language unit and sharing this opinion we should be able to prove that the unit we deal with is really a word. It means that we should know the distinctive features of the word. These features are:

1) Naming power. Words name sth and have their referents which may be of different nature (objects, properties). The correlation between the word as a segmental language unit and its referent determines the concrete lexical meaning of a word. However, words may lose their referential nature and serve only as formal units performing different syntactic roles and rendering vague (abstract) grammatical meanings (link-verbs, auxiliaries, word-substitutes).

1. Isolability. A word is easily singled out inside a phrase or a sentence.

2. Uninterruptibility (indivisibility). A word can’t be interrupted by some other word or a parenthetical enclosure: a blackboard = a black board = a black long board.

3. A certain looseness concerning the position of the word inside the sentence.

e.g. He ran away. Away he ran.

Thus, we can say that a word is characterized by positional independence which brings about its looseness and isolability.

When speaking about the word it is necessary to touch upon the so-called ANALYTICAL WORD.

By analytical words some scholars mean such word-combinations as: take up, look up, take after. Such units are discreet (расщеплённые) in their form, because they consist of 2 or more words, but their meaning makes them a single unit.

So when we treat them as analytical words we take into consideration only their meaning. However, the plane of expression resists this idea, because formally we have 2 or more isolated words, the first of which may change in form without affecting the other or others.

The last phenomenon violates the principle of indivisibility of the word. It is even possible to put another word between the components of the “analytical word” which also violates the notion of the word: put it on, take firm hold.

So it seems that we can’t agree to the notion of the analytical word because if we agree to it than the boundaries of the word will become indefinite.

In such cases we should speak not of analytical words but of bound phrases.

The Morpheme and the Morphemic Structure of the Word

The morpheme is one of the basic units of morphology. The notion of the morpheme was put forward by the Russian linguist Bodwen de Courtenay.

The morpheme is defined as the smallest meaningful unit and an elementary part of the word. The meaning of the morpheme is purely significative. We mustn’t mix up morphemes and syllables. The difference between them lies in the fact that morphemes are always meaningful, while syllables, as units of phonology, lack this feature though they may coincide with morphemes and then seem meaningful.

For ex., in the word “tables” we distinguish two morphemes: the lexical root morpheme /table/ which denotes a class of things and the grammatical morpheme /s/ expressing plurality.

On the other hand, this word includes two syllables which are meaningless and do not coincide with the morphemes: ta-bles.

The morpheme is analyzable into phonemes. The smallest morpheme may include only one phoneme: table-s, work-s.

Morphemes, in their turn, make up words. The shortest word may coincide with the morpheme when it gets a naming power.

The ideal complete morphemic structure of the word may be presented in the following way:

prefix + root + lexical suffix + grammatical suffix (ending, inflexion).

Roots and affixes (prefixes and lexical suffixes) make up the stem of the word. They are word-building morphemes. Grammatical suffixes stand outside the stem of the word and function as form-building morphemes expressing such abstract grammatical categorical meanings as number, tense, degrees of comparison etc.

We should also say that in English we can find three types of inflexions:

• outer inflexions which are added to the stem of the word (e.g. shorter, going);

• inner inflexions are revealed in the alteration of the root vowel (get – got, food – feed);

• mono inflexion which is a grammatical element modifying word combinations (my son and daughter’s toys).

As for the STEM of the word, it can be:

1. Simple when it includes only one root morpheme (dog, cats, decided).

2. Derived when it includes one root morpheme and one or more affixes (unreasonable).

3. Compound when it includes 2 or more root morphemes with or without affixes (merry-goes-round, sky-scraper).

Speaking about morphemes, we should remember that that they have two planes and both of them should be analyzed when classifying morphemes. The matter is that morphemes may be homonymous: identical on the plane of expression and different on the plane of content.

e.g. /er/ may be a lexical morpheme when it denotes the doer of the action named by the root morpheme.

/er/ may also be a grammatical morpheme when it denotes a degree of comparison.

The grammatical morpheme /s/ denoting plurality is homonymous with the grammatical morpheme /s/ expressing person, number, tense, mood, voice and it may be homonymous with the lexical morpheme /s/ like in the words “waters”, “snows” denoting a great amount of the named material but not plurality.

In present-day linguistics there exists the notion of the zero morpheme. Some scholars identify it in word forms which have no inflexion in one context and get it in another context.

Thus professor Smirnitsky speaks of three morphemes in the noun “teacher”: root + a lexical suffix + a zero inflection expressing singularity. He says that in the word-form “teachers” there really exist three morphemes, and the inflexion /s/ is opposed to its zero counterpart.

So the zero morpheme can be understood as meaningful absence of some morpheme. But here appears a contradiction: the notion of the zero morpheme doesn’t satisfy the definition of the morpheme. If the morpheme is a segmental part of the word, it should have the plane of content and the plane of expression. The zero morpheme lacks the plane of expression.

Should we agree that the zero morpheme is a morpheme, than likewise we’ll have to agree that supra-segmental language units, which also render a certain meaning should be also treated as morphemes, but it is hardly acceptable.

So it seems more reasonable to speak not of the zero morpheme, but of the meaningful absence of the morpheme.

In conclusion we should say that that the morpheme is the smallest, formed by phonemes, meaningful, segmental part of the word. It can’t be divided into other smaller meaningful units.