Download WHAT`S IN A WORD? MORPHOLOGICAL STRUCTURE OF THE

Identifying a Word.
Morphological
Structure of the Word
Lecture 5
 5.1.Problems of the Definition of the
Word
 5.2. Lexical and Grammatical Words
 5.3. Morphological Structure of the
Word
 5.4. Types of Morphemic
Segmentability
The Problems of the Definition
A word has many different aspects:
 1) phonological, as it has a sound form;
 2) morphological, as it is a certain
arrangement of morphemes;
 3) syntactic, as it may occur in different word
forms and signal different meanings.
The Problems of the Definition
A word is defined as:
 minimum free form (L. Bloomfield)
 association of a given meaning with
a given group of sounds susceptible
of a given grammatical employment
(A. Meillet)
The Problems of the Definition
A word is an autonomous unit of the
language in which
 a particular meaning is associated with
 a particular sound complex
 capable of a particular grammatical
employment and
 able to form a sentence by itself.
The Problems of the Definition
 Orthographically words may be spelt
differently: teapot, tea-pot, tea pot. Words are
written separately, but not all words fit this
category, e.g. will not – two words; cannot –
one word.
 There may be found different forms but
different forms are not necessarily regarded
as different words, e.g. teach, teaches,
taught, teaching; nice, nicer, nicest – are not
separate words.
The Problems of the Definition
 Some words can have the same forms but
completely different and unrelated meanings,
e.g. fair.
 The existence of idioms and phrasal verbs
seems to upset attempts to define words in
any formal way, e.g. to kick the bucket – “to
die”, to put off – “to postpone”.
The Problems of the Definition
 A lexeme is the abstract unit which
underlies some of the variants we have
observed in connection with 'words'.
 Thus, teach is the lexeme which
underlies some of the variants teach,
teaches, taught, teaching which are the
word-forms.
The Problems of the Definition
 The term lexeme is also connected with
more than one word-form expressed by
such lexical items as:
 Multi-word verbs, e.g., to catch up
with;
 Phrasal verbs, e.g., to clear up, to
switch off;
 Idioms, e.g., kick the bucket.
Lexical and Grammatical Words
 Lexical words are full words or content
words. They include nouns, adjectives, verbs,
adverbs and belong to the open classes of
words. They carry a higher information
content and are syntactically structured by the
grammatical words.
 LW form an open class of words because
they are subject to diachronic change,
changes in form and meaning over a
period of time.
Lexical and Grammatical Words
Nouns
 A noun is a naming word. It gives the name to a
person, place, thing, etc.
 Most nouns possess the category of number and
have a plural form (-s/ -es).
 Some words make their plural forms in a different
way.
 Others never change their singular forms to make
their plurals.
 Some nouns never occur without the plural marker.
Lexical and Grammatical Words
Adjectives
 Adjectives denote a property or quality of an
object. All adjectives fall into two groups:
gradable and non-gradable.
 Gradable adjectives take grammatical forms
and represent degrees of comparison:
positive, comparative, superlative.
 Adjectives in English may appear either
before a noun or after a verb, e.g. juicy apple,
get wet, be happy. Not all adjectives appear
in both positions.
Lexical and Grammatical Words
Verbs
 There are two classes of verbs – lexical and
auxiliary verbs. Lexical verbs denote actions
or states. Each verb has five associated
grammatical words, e.g., ask – asks – asked
– asking – asked; go – goes – went – going –
gone.
 Verbs like ask are regular, they form the
majority of verbs in English. Irregular verbs
like go have different forms.
Lexical and Grammatical Words
Adverbs
 Two classes of adverbs – degree and general.
 Degree adverbs are a small group of words like quite,
far, very, more, and most. They always appear with
either an adjective or a general adverb, e.g. She
drives very well. His story is quite interesting.
 General adverbs form a large class and may appear
without a degree adverb, e.g. He cooks well.
Adverbs denote degree, manner, place, time.
Adverbs have no inflected forms, they take
comparisons like adjectives.
Lexical and Grammatical Words
 Grammatical words comprise a small
class of words that includes pronouns,
auxiliary verbs, determiners,
prepositions, conjunctions. They are
also known as functional words, or
empty words.
 Grammatical words constitute a closed
class, i.e. they do not accept new
members.
Lexical and Grammatical Words
 Pronouns are words that take the place of
nouns, noun phrases. Different types:
personal (I, we, she), demonstrative (this,
those), possessive (mine, yours),
interrogative (whom, whose, which), etc.
 Auxiliary verbs such as have, do, did, will
determine the mood, tense, or aspect of
another verb in a verb phrase.
 Conjunctions serve to connect words,
phrases, clauses, or sentences, e.g. and, but,
for, or, nor, yet, so.
Lexical and Grammatical Words
 Determiners introduce nouns; they are
articles (a, an, the), quantifiers (some, much).
 Prepositions are words that show the
relationship between a noun or pronoun and
other words in a sentence. They indicate
locations in time or space (at, in), agency
(by), comparison (like, as . . . as), direction
(to, toward, through), place (at, by, on),
possession (of), purpose (for), source (from,
out of), and time (at, before, on), etc.
Morphological Structure
Words consist of morphemes.
 A morpheme is the smallest meaningful
unit of speech, which cannot be split up
into smaller segments.
 A morpheme is not autonomous.
Morphemes
occur in speech as
constituent parts of words, not
independently.
Morphological Structure
 A word may consist of a single morpheme or
contain several, e.g. shelf (one morpheme),
indisputable (3 morphemes) – in-disput-able.
 The morpheme in can be found in words
insignificant, inexpensive; the morpheme
able – in words excusable, reliable; the
morpheme dispute – in such words as
disputing, disputes.
Morphological Structure
 Some
morphemes have only one
phonological form, while others may
have a number of variants which are
known as allomorph.
 Pronounce: please, pleasing, pleasure,
pleasant.
 The representations of the given
morpheme are called allomorphs or
morphemic variants.
Morphological Structure
 An allomorph is a positional variant of
a morpheme occurring in a specific
environment and characterized by
complementary distribution.
 Cows, cats, pigs, horses, sheep, oxen, mice
Allomorphs occur among prefixes.
 The morpheme in may have the following
phonological forms:
 im occurs before bilabials – impossible;
 ir occurs before r – irregular;
 il occurs before 1 – illegal;
 in occurs before other consonants and
vowels – inability, indirect.
Morphological Structure
 Semantically morphemes fall into root-
morphemes and non-root
morphemes.
 The root-morphemes are the lexical
centers of the words, as the basic
constituent part of a word without which
the word is inconceivable.
Morphological Structure
 Words hairless, lofty, darkness, refill – the
root morphemes are hair, loft, dark, fill
 The root-morpheme is the lexical nucleus of
a word; it has an individual lexical meaning
shared by no other morpheme of the
language.
 The root-morpheme is the morpheme
common to a set of words making up a wordcluster, e.g. dance in to dance, dancer,
dancing.
Morphological Structure
 Non-root morphemes include inflectional
morphemes (inflections) and derivational
morphemes (affixes).
Morphological Structure
 Inflections carry only grammatical
meaning, they build different forms of
one and the same word, e.g. cheap,
cheaper, cheapest.
 Affixes supply the stem with
components of lexical and lexicogrammatical meaning. They are
classified into prefixes and suffixes, e.g.
chain – unchain, broad - broaden.
Morphological Structure
 A suffix is a derivational morpheme
following the stem and forming a new
derivative in a different part of speech or
a different word class, e.g., -en, -y, less in hearten, hearty, heartless.
 A prefix is a derivational morpheme
standing before the root and modifying
meaning, e.g., to hearten - to dishearten.
Morphological Structure
Structurally morphemes fall into
 free morphemes,
 bound morphemes,
 semi-free (semi-bound morphemes).
Morphological Structure
 A free morpheme is defined as one that can
occur by itself as a whole word, e.g. cloudy –
cloud, excusable – excuse. A great number
of root morphemes are free morphemes, e.g.
child in the words childhood, children,
childish is naturally qualified as a free
morpheme because it coincides with one of
the forms of the noun child.
Morphological Structure
 A bound morpheme is attached to another
and is a constituent part of a word. Bound
morphemes are of two types: inflectional
morphemes and derivational ones.
 Inflectional morphemes: watch – watches,
look – looked, etc.
 Derivational morphemes are affixes, e.g. ness, -ship, -ize, dis-, de- in the words like
happiness, relationship, to displease, to
demoralize.
Morphological Structure
 Semi-free or semi-bound morphemes can
function in a morphemic sequence both as an
affix and as a free morpheme, e.g. half-ready,
seaman, womanlike.
Morphological Structure
 According to the number of morphemes
words fall into monomorphic and
polymorphic.
 Monomorphic or root-words consist of
only one root-morpheme, e.g. long, car,
make, drive, etc.
Morphological Structure
 All polymorphic words according to the
number of root-morphemes are
classified into two subgroups:
monoradical or root words and
polyradical words, i.e. words which
consist of two or more roots.
Morphemic Segmentability
 As far as the complexity of the
morphemic structure of the word is
concerned all English words fall into two
large classes:
 segmentable words, those allowing of
further morphemic segmentation, e.g.,
quickly, fearless, agreement;
 non-segmentable words, e.g., house,
girl, cat, woman.
Morphemic Segmentability
 The main aim of the morphemic
analysis is to split a word into its
constituent morphemes, determine their
number and type.
 It's called the method of immediate
and ultimate constituents.
Morphemic Segmentability
DISAGREEMENT
DISAGREE
DIS
AGREE
MENT
Morphemic Segmentability
There are three types of morphemic
segmentability:
 complete,
 conditional and
 defective.
Morphemic Segmentability
Complete segmentability:
 the individual morphemes are clearly singled
out within the word and can easily be
isolated. The constituent morphemes are met
in other words with the same meaning,
 e.g. speechless – two morphemes: speech
and less.
 Speech → speech, speeches, less →
nameless, useless.
Morphemic Segmentability
Conditional segmentability:
 the segmentation into the constituent
morphemes is doubtful for some semantic
reasons, e.g. retain, contain, detain.
 The words can be split into the following
re–tain, con–tain, de–tain. The constituent
part -tain unites these three verbs, but we
cannot trace the common meaning in each
verb, consequently we cannot regard -tain as a
morpheme.
Morphemic Segmentability
 Similarly we may find re-, con-, de- in
other verbs (recall, remind, consist,
confuse, delay, defeat), but each group
of words does not share a common
meaning. Such morphemes are called
pseudo-morphemes or quasimorphemes.
Morphemic Segmentability
 Defective segmentability is the property of words
whose constituent morphemes are seldom or never
met in other words.
 A unique morpheme is isolated and understood as
meaningful because the constituent morphemes
display a more or less clear denotational meaning.
cranberry → two morphemes: cran and berry.
 The morpheme -berry occurs in strawberry,
blackberry, etc.
 Cran does not recur in any other English word, thus,
this morpheme is unique.
Thank you for your attention.
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