#3

The morphological structure of the word. Morphemes and allomorphs. The morphological meaning of the word.

Morphology is a branch of linguistics that studies morphemes – the smallest meaningful non-segmentable parts of words.

Lexicology is closely connected with morphology. It includes part of morphology as its integral part because one of its objectives is investigating all meaningful units in a language.

The aim of morphology is to show the number and type of UC (ultimate constituencies).

Segmentable words are derived from other words. Non-segmentable words are not interesting for morphology. There are three main types of word-segmentability:

1. complete takes place when segmentation into morphemes (free or bound) doesn’t cause any doubt for structural or semantic reasons as in teach-er)

2. conditional - when segmentation is doubtful for semantic reasons as the segments (pseudo-morphemes) regularly occurring in other words can hardly be ascribed any definite lexical meaning (ac cept, ex cept, con cept, per cept, pre cept).

3. defective - in cases when segmentation is doubtful for structural reasons because one of the components has a specific lexical meaning but seldom or never occurs in other words (ham-let, pock-et).

Lexicology studies only part of the morphemes that morphology is interested in. it studies only derivational morphemes that are the smallest meaningful stem building or word building lexical units as in reason-able, un-reason-able. It doesn’t study form building or inflectional morphemes as in smiled, smiles, is smiling.

Morpheme is the smallest two-facet language unit possessing both sound-form and meaning

In different contexts morphemes may have different phonemic shapes (please-pleasure-pleasant). These differently sounding parts can be recognized as morphemic variants of the same morphemes due to semantic and distributional criteria. These representations, alternates of morphemes are called allomorphs. Allomorphs may involve vowel and\or consonantal morphophonemic alternations. (number-numerous, fuse-fusion).

The conditions under which the same morpheme derives two or more differently sounding forms are still not qite clear. Many morphophonemic alternations and allophones as their results may be accounted for etymological reasons ( peace [OFr] - pacifist [L]); phonological (sound change and the Great Vowel Shift as in divine-divinity); analogical ( metricity will be pronounced as electricity) and exceptional factors (as in equate - equation where we observe t- alternation instead of the more productive alternation t- as in relate-relation).

This fact is worth mentioning and it is necessary to recognize a morpheme in its different phonemic shapes in different words while making morphological and derivational analyses of words.