Lecture 2: What’s in a word? Morphological structure of the word
1.The Problems of the Definition of the Word
2.Lexemes and Words
3.Lexical and Grammatical Words
4.Morphological Structure of the Word
1. The Problems of the Definition of the Word
The definition of the word is one of the most formidable tasks in linguistics because the simplest word has many different aspects. It has a sound form because it is a certain arrangement of phonemes; it has its morphological structure, being also a certain arrangements of morphemes; when used in actual speech, it may occur in different word forms and signal different meanings. Being the central element of any language system, the word is a sort of focus for the problems of phonology, syntax, morphology, philosophy, psychology. Many scholars attempted to define the word. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), one of the greatest English philosophers, revealed a materialistic approach to the problem of nomination when he wrote that words are not mere sounds but names of matter. The Russian physiologist LP. Pavlov (1849-1936) examined the word in connection with his studies of the second signal system and defined it as a universal signal that can substitute any other signal from the environment in evoking a response in a human organism. Within the scope of linguistics the word has been defined syntactically, semantically, phonologically, and by combining different approaches. H. Sweet put forward a syntactical approach defining the word as the minimum sentence. L. Bloomfield defined the word structurally as a minimum free form. E. Sapir takes into consideration the syntactic and semantic aspects when he calls the word one of the smallest completely satisfying bits of isolated meaning, into which the sentence resolves itself. E. Sapir also points out one more, very important characteristic of the word, its indivisibility. For example, a lion will be a word-group, alive is a word which is indivisible. A purely semantic treatment is found in Stephen Ullmann 's explanation which runs that words are meaningful units.
The eminent French linguist A. Meillet (1866-1936) combines the three approaches and gives the following definition: A word is defined by the association of a given meaning with a given group of sounds susceptible of a given grammatical employment. The word is a fundamental unit of language. It is a dialectical unity of form and content. Summing our review of different definitions, we come to the conclusion that they are bound to be strongly dependent upon the line of approach, the aim the scholar has in view. For a comprehensive word theory a description seems more appropriate than a definition. The problems to define a word still exist:
•Orthographic, free-form or stress-based definitions of a word make sense, but there are many words that do not fit these categories, e.g., will not- two words; cannot - one word; postbox, post box, post-box - different variants of spelling;
•Words are units of meaning, but the definition of a word having a clear-cut meaning creates numerous exceptions and emerges as vague and asymmetrical. Stability of a word is stressed. A word is a word if it can stand on its own as a reply to a question or as a statement or exclamation, e.g.,Shoot! Goal! Yes. There. Up. Taxi! If we reduce the word Shoot to Sh, it would depend on the other word for its sense.
•We have different forms but different forms do not necessarily count as different words, e.g., bring, brings, brought, bringing - are not separate words, otherwise we would expect to find each word separately in a dictionary.
•Words can have the same forms but also different and, in some cases, completely unrelated meanings, e.g., mug.
•The existence of idioms seems to upset attempts to define words in
any neat formal way, e.g., to rain cats and dogs; to kick the bucket. - Is it raining hard? - Cats and dogs. They involve several orthographic letters but cannot be further reduced without the loss of meaning.
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.
2. Lexemes and Words
A lexeme is the abstract unit which underlies some of the variants we have observed in connection with 'words'. Thus, bring is the lexeme which underlies some of the variants bring, brings, brought, bringing which are the word-forms. Lexemes are the basic, contrasting units of vocabulary in a language. When we flick through words in a dictionary we are looking up lexemes rather than words. The lexeme bring is an abstraction. It doesn't occur in texts in this particular form, but realizes different forms. 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.
Lexemes help to represent polysemantic words through individual words, e.g., fair (n), fair (adj. in good, acceptable), fair (adj. light in colour, especially of hair).
Lexical items or vocabulary items are terms which help to avoid ambiguity in the term word, especially when it becomes limited to by orthography.
3. Lexical and Grammatical Words
There is a distinction between lexical words and grammatical words.
Lexical words known as full words or content words include nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs. They carry a higher information content and are syntactically structured by the grammatical words. Lexical words form an open class of words because they are subject to diachronic change, changes in form and meaning over a period of time.
Nouns
A noun is a naming word (the name of a person, place, or thing). Most nouns inflect for the morphosyntactic category of number and, as such, have a plural form like -s or -es, e.g., bee – bees, bush – bushes, video – videos, tomato – tomatoes, match – matches. Some words make their plural forms the other way, e.g., foot – feet, goose –geese, mouse – mice, child – children. Other nouns never change their singular forms to make their plurals, e.g., deer – deer, sheep – sheep. Some nouns never occur without the plural marker, e.g., scissors, trousers, jeans, shorts.
Most nouns appear with either an indefinite article a, or a definite article the. Consider the following list of nouns and divide them into the following groups: nouns that can take a (an), nouns that can take the, nouns that have a plural form, and nouns that can refer to things that can be counted. Some nouns will appear in more than one category.
a (an) / the / plural / countablebutter
video
fame
anger
worker
Peter
mouse
London
All nouns fall into three groups: those which appear in all four groups, those which appear in only one group, those which appear in some groups. The nouns which appear in all four groups are called countable, those which appear in only one are called uncountable.
Adjectives
Adjectives denote a property or quality of an object. They may take grammatical forms and represent degrees of comparison: positive, comparative, superlative, e.g., big - bigger - the biggest; difficult - more difficult -the most difficult.
Consider the following list of adjectives and divide them into three groups: those which take the -er and -est endings, those which take more or most, and those which take neither of the above.
-er, -est / more, most / neithernarrow
ugly
absolute
high
painful
The adjectives that have comparative and superlative degrees are called gradable. Those that do not have comparative and superlative degrees are called non-gradable.
Adjectives in English may appear either before a noun or after a form of the verb to be, e.g., the ripe peach, the peach is ripe. Not all adjectives appear in both positions. Some may only appear before nouns, while others appear only after the verb to be.
Consider the following list of adjectives. Which may appear only before a noun, which may appear only after the verb to be, and which may appear in both positions?
before nouns / after the verb to be / botholder
elder
red
incredible
ill
hungry
afraid
Verbs
There are two classes of verbs - lexical and auxiliary verbs. 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. There are about 200 irregular verbs in English.
Adverbs
There are two classes of adverbs: degree and general. Degree adverbs are a small group of words like very, more, and most. They always appear with either an adjective or a general adverb, e.g., She cooks very well. She cooks very. This picture is more beautiful. This picture is more.
General adverbs constitute a large class and may appear without a degree adverb, e.g., She cooks well. Adverbs denote degree, manner, place, time. Adverbs have no inflected forms, they take comparisons like adjectives.
Grammatical words known as functional words, functors, empty words comprise a small class of words that includes pronouns, articles, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, conjunctions. Grammatical words constitute a closed class, because these words remain generally immutable.
Prepositions
Prepositions are words such as in, out, on, by, which often indicate locations in time or space, or direction. While nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs are members of open classes because the classes they belong to are very large, and while it is possible to add new items to any one of these open classes, prepositions are members of a closed class. Other closed classes of words are conjunctions, for example, and, but, because, or; determiners, for example, a, an, the, these, those; and the class of auxiliary verbs. It is not possible to add new members to the closed classes.
4. Morphological Structure of the Word
The term morphology, which literally means "the study of forms", was originally used in biology, but, since the middle of the nineteenth century, has also been used to describe the type of investigation that analyzes all those basic elements used in the language known as morphemes.
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of speech, an association of a given meaning with a given sound pattern. But unlike a word it is not autonomous. Morphemes occur in speech as constituent parts of words, not independently. A word may consist of a single morpheme or contain several, e.g., cat — cats; inexpensive; in-distinguish-able; antidisestablishmentarianism.
Morphemes may have different phonetic shapes. In the word-cluster please, pleasing, pleasure, pleasant the root morpheme is represented by the phonetic shapes. All the representations of the given morpheme are called allomorphs or morphemic variants.
Thus,an allomorph is defined as a positional variant of a morpheme occurring in a specific environment and characterized by complementary distribution. Allomorphs also occur among prefixes. Their form may depend on the initial letters with which they will assimilate, e.g. in: im occurs before bilabials - impossible; ir occurs before г - irregular; il occurs before 1 - illegal; in occurs before other consonants and vowels - inability, indirect.
Morphemes can 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 and non-root morphemes are generally easily distinguished and the difference between them is clearly felt as in the words helpless, handy, blackness, Londoner, refill. The root-morphemes help, hand, black, London, fill are understood as the lexical centers of the words, as the basic constituent part of a word without which the word is inconceivable. The root-morpheme is the lexical nucleus of a word, has an individual lexical meaning shared by no other morpheme of the language. The root-morpheme is isolated as the morpheme common to a set of words making up a word-cluster, e.g., teach in to teach, teacher, teaching. It is the ultimate constituent element which remains after the removal of all functional and derivational affixes and doesn't admit any further analysis. It is the common element of words in a word-family, e.g., heart - hearten, heartify, heartless, sweet- heart, heart-broken, kind-hearted, whole-heartedly.
Non-root morphemes include inflectional morphemes (inflections) andaffixational morphemes (affixes). Inflections carry only grammatical meaning, they build different forms of one and the same word, e.g., near, nearer, nearest.Affixes supply the stem with components of lexical and lexico-grammatical meaning.They are classified into prefixes and suffixes.
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.
Structurally morphemes fall into free morphemes, bound morphemes, semi-free (semi-bound morphemes).
A free morpheme is defined as one that coincides with the stem or a word-form. A great many root-morphemes are free morphemes, e.g., friend in the noun friendship is naturally qualified as a free morpheme because it coincides with one of the forms of the noun friend.
A bound morpheme occurs only as a constituent part of a word. Affixes are, naturally, bound morphemes, for they always make part of a word, e.g., -ness, -ship, -ize, un-, dis-, de- in the words like readiness, comradeship, to activize, to displease, to decipher. Many root morphemes belong to the class of bound morphemes which always occur in morphemic sequences, i.e., in combinations with roots or affixes.
Semi-free or semi-bound morphemes can function in a morphemic sequence both as an affix and as a free morpheme, e.g., half-done, seaman, womanlike.
According to the number of morphemes words are classified into monomorphic and polymorphic.
Monomorphic or root-words consist of only one root-morpheme, e.g., small, dog, make, give, etc. 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. Monoradical words fall into two subtypes: 1) radical-suffixal words, i.e., words that consist of one root-morpheme and one or more suffixal morphemes, e.g., acceptable, acceptability, blackish; 2) radical-prefixal words, i.e., words that consist of one root-morpheme and a prefixal morpheme, e.g. outdo, rearrange, unbutton; and 3) prefixo-radical-suffixal, i.e., words which consist of one root, a prefixal and suffixal morphemes, e.g., disagreeable, misinterpretation.
Polyradical words fall into two subtypes: 1) polyradical words which consist of two or more roots with no affixational morphemes, e.g., book-stand, eye-ball, lamp-shade; and 2) words which contain at least two roots and one or more affixational morphemes, e.g., safety-pin, wedding-pie, class-consciousness, light-mindedness, pen-holder.
There are three types of morphemic segmentability:
Complete segmentability is the characteristic feature of many words. The morphemic structure of the words with complete segmentability is transparent. The individual morphemes clearly stand out within the word and can easily be isolated. The transparent morphemic structure of the segmentable words is conditioned by the fact that their constituent morphemes recur with the same meaning in other words, e.g., endless – nameless, useless.
Conditional segmentability characterizes words whose segmentation intothe constituent morphemes is doubtful for some semantic reasons, e.g., retain, contain, detain; deceive, receive. The morphemes making up words of conditional segmentability do not rise to the status of full morphemes for semantic reasons and that is why a special term is applied to them in linguistic literature: such morphemes are called pseudo-morphemes or quasi-morphemes. It should be mentioned that there is no unanimity on the question, and there are two different approaches to the problem. Those linguists who recognize pseudo-morphemes, i.e., consider it sufficient for a morpheme to have only a differential and distributional meaning to be isolated from a word regard words like retain, deceive as segmentable; those who think it necessary for a morpheme to have some denotational meaning qualify them as non-segmentable.
Defective segmentability is the property of words whose componentmorphemes seldom or never recur in other words. One of the component morphemes of these words is a unique morpheme.
A unique morpheme is isolated and understood as meaningful because the constituent morphemes display a more or less clear denotational meaning. In the word hamlet (деревушка)the morpheme –let has the diminutive meaning. This morpheme occurs in booklet, leaflet. Ham that is left after the isolation of the morpheme –let does not recur in any other English word, thus, this morpheme is unique.
In conclusion, on the level of morphemic analysis the linguist has to operate with two types of elementary units, namely full morphemes and pseudo-morphemes. It is only full morphemes that are genuine structural elements of the language system, so that the linguist must primarily focus his attention on words of complete morphemic segmentability. On the other hand, a considerable percentage of words of conditional and defective segmentability signals a relatively complex character of the morphological system of the language in question, reveals the existence of various heterogeneous layers in its vocabulary.
From the point of view of the complexity of the morphemic structure all English words fall into two large classes:1)segmentable words, allowing of further morphemic segmentation, e.g., quickly, fearless, agreement,2) non-segmentable words, e.g., house, girl, cat, woman. Morphemic analysis deals with segmentable words. 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. This method is based on a binary principle, i.e., each stage of the procedure involves two components the word immediately breaks into. At each stage these two components are referred to as the immediate constituents. Each immediate constituent at the next stage of analysis is in turn broken into two smaller meaningful elements. The analysis is completed when we arrive at constituents incapable of further division, i.e., morphemes. In terms of the method employed these are referred to as the ultimate constituents. The noun friendliness, for example, is first segmented in to the immediate constituents friendly recurring in the adjectives friendly-looking and friendly and the -ness found in a countless number of nouns, such as happiness, darkness, unselfishness. The immediate constituent -ness is at the the same time an ultimate constituent of the noun, as it cannot be broken into any smaller elements possessing both sound-form and meaning. The immediate constituent friendly is next broken into the immediate constituents friend-and -ly recurring in friendship, unfriendly, etc., on the one hand, and wifely, brotherly, etc., on the other.