Classification of Morphemes.

Lecture 1

Theme: 1. The Object of Lexicology. Links with Other Branches of Linguistics.

Morphological Structure of English words.

Lexicology (from Gr. lexis –“word” and logos – “learning”) is the part of linguistics dealing with the vocabulary of a language and the properties of words as the main units of language. The term word denotes the basic unit of a given language. Thus, the literal meaning of the term Lexicology is ‘the science of the word’.

Lexicology as a branch of linguistics has its own aims and methods of scientific research, it’s basic task being a study and systematic description of vocabulary in respect to its origin, development and current use.

General Lexicology is part of General Linguistics; it is concerned with the study of vocabulary irrespective of the specific features of any particular language.

Special Lexicology is the Lexicology of a particular language, i.e. the study and description of its vocabulary and vocabulary units, primarily words as the main units of language.

The evolution of any vocabulary, as well as of its single elements, forms the object of historical lexicology. This branch of linguistics discusses the origin of various words, their change and development and investigates the linguistic and extra-linguistic forces modifying their structure, meaning and usage.

Descriptive lexicology deals with the vocabulary of a given language at a given stage of its development. The Descriptive lexicology of the English language deals with the English word in its morphological and semantic structures investigating the independence between these two aspects.

There is also close relationship between Lexicology. and Stylistics, or, to be more exact, Linguo-Stylistics(Linguistic Stylistics). Linguo-Stylistics is concerned with the study of the nature, functions and structure of stylistic devices, on the one hand, and with the investigation of each style of language, on the other, i.e. with its aim, its structure, its characteristic features and the effect it produces as well as its interrelation with the other styles of language.

Lecture 2

Theme: Aims and principles of

Morphemic and Word-formation Analysis.

Classification of Morphemes.

As far as “the complexity of the morphemic structure of the word is concerned all English words fall into 2 large classes. To Class 1 belong segmentable words, i.e. those allowing of segmentation into morphemes, e.g. agreement, information, fearless, quickly, door-handle, etc. To Class 2 belong non-segmentable words, i.e. those not allowing of such segmentation, e.g. house, girl, woman, husband, etc.

The operation of breaking non-segmentable words into the constituent morphemes is referred to in present-day linguistic literature as the analysis of word-structure on the morphemic level.

Three types of morphemic segmentabiliy of words are distinguished: complete, conditional and defective.

Complete segmentability is characteristic of a great many words the morphemic structure of which is transparent enough, as their individual morphemes clearly stand out within the word lending themselves easily to isolation.

Conditional morphemic segmentability characterizes words whose segmentation into the constituent morphemes is doubtful for semantic reasons. In words like retain, contain, detain, receive, deceive, conceive, perceive the sound-clusters [ri-], [di-], [k n], seem on the one hand, to be singled out quite easily due to their recurrence in a number of words; on the other hand, they undoubtedly have nothing in common with the phonetically identical morphemes re-, de- as found in words like rewrite, re-organize, deorganize, decode; neither the sound-clusters [ri-] or [di-] nor the [-tein] or [-si:v] possess any lexical or functional meaning of their own.

Defective morphemic segmentability is the property of words whose component morphemes seldom or never recur in other words.

The morphemic analysis of words like cranberry, gooseberry, strawberry shows that they also possess defective morphemic segmentability: the morphemes cran-, goose-, straw- are unique morphemes.

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