Procedure of morphemic analysis: methods and principles. The immediate constituents (IC) analysis

Lecture 3. Structure of English word

Outline

Morphemes. Classification of morphemes

Procedure of morphemic analysis: methods and principles. The immediate constituents (IC) analysis

1. Morphemes. Classification of morphemes. In English, as in many other languages, the word is the smallest autonomous unit (i.e. the smallest unit able to form a sentence by itself). Most words are composite in their structure, i.e. they consist of meaningful parts, called morphemes. The term morpheme comes from the Greek word morphē meaning any kind of shape or form, the suffix “-eme” denotes the smallest significant or distinctive unit or form (e.g. phoneme).

A morpheme is often defined as the minimum (= smallest) meaningful part of the word, or the smallest meaningful unit of the language; therefore it also combines a definite sound pattern with a definite meaning. However, unlike a word, a morpheme cannot stand in isolation, i.e. it is not autonomous (= independent), although it may coincide with a word. For example, one of the morphemes making up the adjective " heartily" coincides with the noun " heart". A morpheme can no further be divided into meaningful parts; its component parts are phonemes, which have no meaning of their own.

Morphemes may be classified from the semantic point of view and from the structural point of view.

Semantically morphemes fall into two types: 1) root-morphemes and 2) non-root-morphemes.

Root-morphemes are the lexical nucleus of words. For example, in the words remake, glassful, disorder the root-morphemes are –make, glass – and –order are understood as the lexical centers of the words. The root-morpheme is isolated as the morpheme common to a set of words making up a word-cluster, e.g. the morpheme teach - in to teach, teacher, teaching. The root remains unchanged after all the affixes have been removed and can’t be broken into smaller meaningful parts. Root-morphemes are the main morphemes in any given language. A words is impossible without a root morpheme and some English words contain two root morphemes, even rarely three.

Non-root morphemes include inflectional morphemes (or inflections) and affixational morphemes or affixes (or affixes). Inflections carry only grammatical meaning and are thus relevant only for the formation of word-forms, whereas affixes are relevant for building various types of stems. Lexicology is concerned only with affixational morphemes.

Both root and affix morphemes may have a number of positional variants, called allomorphs (from the Ancient Greek " allos" – " other" and " morph" – " form"). The most obvious example is the negative prefix in-, which has three allomorphs – ir-, im- and il-. In- is the main variant, found in words like independent, ir- is only found before " r", as in irregular, im- precedes " p" or " m", as in impossible or immobile, while il- is only found before " l", as in illegal.

Root morphemes may have allomorphs as well, which can be seen from please, pleasure and pleasant, where the root, although graphically identical, is pronounced differently, depending on its phonemic environment. Allomorphs are defined as semantically identical but phonetically different (= dissimilar) variants of the same morpheme used in mutually exclusive environments, which means they are not interchangeable although their meanings are the same. Allomorphs result from the process of phonemic alternation, and linguists say they are characterized by complementary distribution, i.e. they may not replace one another in an identical environment. Actually there exist three types of distribution – contrastive and free variation may added to the mentioned above.

Affixes are divided according to their function into derivational and functional. According to their position in a word affixes are also classified into prefixes, suffixes and infixes. A prefix is a derivational morpheme proceeding the root morpheme and modifying its meaning (pronounce – mis - pronounce, safe – un- safe). A suffix is a derivational morpheme following the root and forming a new derivative in a different part of speech or a different word-class (- en, - y, - less in heart- en, heart- y, heart- less). Infixes come inside the root, but they hardly ever met in English: the best known example is –n- in sta n d (as different from stood).

The function of an affix is to form a new word from an existing one, often with a different part-of-speech meaning, as teacher is formed from teach (v) and student from study (v). This process is known as derivation. Sometimes a derived word acquires not one but several affixes; of these, one may be so firmly connected with the root that its separation changes the part-of-speech meaning. The part of a word containing the root and the affix with the part-of-speech meaning is called the stem. If a stem coincides with the root, it is called a simple stem. It is also a free stem if it can stand in isolation, otherwise it is a bound stem. Bound stems are typical of borrowed foreign words. A bound morpheme occurs only as a constituent part of a word and never occurs alone in speech. Affixes are bound morphemes for they always make part of a word. For example, the suffixes – ness, -ship in the words darkness, friendship; prefixes im-, dis-, de- in the words impolite, to disregard, to demobilize.

Derived words, or derivatives, consist of at least two morphemes, of which at least one is a root They may be further classified into affixational derivatives, made up of a root and one or more affixes; compound words, made up of two (very seldom more) simple or derived stems (e.g. sweetheart, looking-glass); and derivational compounds, derived from a phrase by a combined process of composition and affixation (as a kind heart became kind-hearted. A special case is words formed by the process of conversion, which will be discussed separately.

Affixes may be classified into productive and non-productive. Suffixes are especially productive in forming new words, often changing the part-of-speech meaning, as quickly (adv.) is formed from quick (adj.). Prefixes do not usually change the part-of-speech meaning, as in lucky – unlucky, like – dislike, but there are a few exceptions: witch (n) – bewitch (v), war (n) – anti-war (adj.). Perhaps the most productive in English is the noun-forming -er suffix, as it is observed in many words like teacher, painter, miner, etc., and is regularly used to form new words. Other productive noun-forming suffixes are -ness and -ing (thinness, loveliness; singing, reading, teaching, etc.), while -dom, -hood and -ship are less productive (wisdom, kingdom; knighthood; friendship, professorship, scholarship, etc.). Some suffixes are useful in forming rare but expressive neologisms and nonce-words like brinkmanship (= the political skill of holding the world at the brink of a war), egghood (= the state of being an eggpresumably in the life of a hen) or lobsterdom; used in Charles Kingsley's " Water Babies" to describe the social life of lobsters (if there is one). The most productive verb-forming suffix now is -ise/-ize, and the most productive adverb-forming suffix is -ly.

2. Procedure of morphemic analysis: methods and principles. The immediate constituents (IC) analysis. Studying the principles of word-formation in English, calls for isolating various morphemes and determining word-formation patterns. This is achieved by different analytical procedures. The simplest of these is the morphemic analyses, which splits a word into its component morphemes and states their types and number. The word “girlishness” could be thus analyzed into three morphemes: of which the first is the root “girl-“ and the other two are suffixes “-lish-“ and “-ness”. The morphemic analysis helps to classify words into root-words, consisting of but one morpheme (root or stem), such as “girl”; derived words combining a root with one or more affixes, as “girlish” and “girlishness”; compound words, made up of two or more stems as “girl-friend”; and compound-derivatives, originating from a phrase as “old-maidish”, derived not from “old” and “maidish” –which does not exist in English – but from “old maid” and “-ish”. Therefore the affix is common in both stems in a compound derivative word. The morphemes into which a word is split by the morphemic analysis are defined in it as ultimate constituents (UC).

All English words fall under two classes: segmentable and non-segmentable words. The procedure generally employed for the purposes of segmenting words into the constituent morphemes is known as the method of Immediate and Ultimate constituents. Immediate constituents are any of the two meaningful parts forming a larger linguistic unit. The analysis into immediate constituents (ICs) was first suggested by L. Bloomfield and later developed by many linguists. IC analysis is a purely synchronic procedure showing the morphological motivation or the derivation pattern of the word according to which it is formed. In other words, the IC analysis shows in which sequence new morphemes were added on in the process of word-formation.

The idea behind the IC analysis is that a larger linguistic unity is always formed of two meaningful parts. Each of the parts may, or may not, be further analyzable. The result of the IC analysis could be represented by a tree diagram, the resulting morphemes forming its terminal branches.

girlishly

girlish ly

girl ish

The IC analysis is based on the dichotomic (binary division) principle, that means that a word to be analyzed is cut, at each successive step, into but two parts. Just where the cut is made depends on how strong the connections between the morphemes are. If possible each part is then cut into two again, and the process is repeated until the results are the individual morphemes, or the ultimate constituents (UC).

Taking the word ungentlemanly as a sample, we first observe that there are many similar words in English (unwomanly, untimely, unusually), and many more contain un- as their first element (uncertain, uneasy, unnatural). Therefore, the first step is to separate the prefix un- from the rest of the word resulting in gentlemanly. There are two possibilities for the next move: gentleman + -ly or gentle + -manly. Both produce two meaningful parts: however, gentle + manly does not seem to reflect the derivational history of the word and the mutual attraction of gentle and man seems to be much stronger than in gentleman and -ly. Gentle is next separated from man and the final step is gent + le, as English has both brittle, little, subtle and gently, genteel, gentry – although this is not a productive derivational pattern.