THE MORPHEMIC STRUCTURE OF THE ENGLISH WORD

1. A word as a fundamental unit of a language.

2. Classification of morphemes.

3. Allomorph as a positional variant of a morpheme.

4. Structural types of words.

A word as a fundamental unit of a language.

The modern approach to word is based on distinguishing between the external and the internal structures of the word.

By the external structure of the word we mean its morphological structure,

e.g. in the word post-impressionalists the following morphemes can be distinguished: the prefixes post-, im-, the root press, the noun-forming suffixes -ion, -ist and the grammatical suffix of plurality —s.

All these morphemes constitute the external structure of this word (The area of Lexicology - Word-building).

The internal structure of the word, or its meaning, is referred to the word's semantic structure (The area of lexicology which is specializing in this problem is called semantics).

Another structural aspect of the word is its unity. The word possesses both external (formal) unity and semantic unity. Formal unity of the word is sometimes interpreted as indivisibility. We can illustrate this aspect by comparing a word and a word-group comprising identical constituents.

e.g. a blackbird (this word possesses a single grammatical framing -blackbirds) and a black bird (each constituent of this word-group can acquire grammatical forms of its own {the blackest bird I've ever seen) Also other words can be inserted between the components {a black night bird)

The same example may be used to illustrate what we mean by semantic unity. In the word-group a black bird each component has a separate concept: bird — a kind of living creature; black — a colour. The word blackbird has only one concept - the type of bird. This is one of the main features of any word: it always conveys one concept, no matter how many component morphemes it may have in its external structure.

A futher structural feature of the word is its susceptibility to grammatical employment. In speech most words can be used in different grammatical forms in which their interrelations are realized. So far we have underlined the word's major peculiarities which are shown in definition of the word.

The word is a speech unit used for the purposes of human communication, materially representing a group of sound, possessing a meaning, susceptible to grammatical employment and characterized by formal and semantic unity.

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