Classification of Morphemes.

Morphemes may be classified:

a) from the semantic point of view;

b) from the structural point of view.

a) Semantically morphemes fall into 2 classes: root-morphemes and non-root or affixational morphemes. Roots and affixes make 2 distinct classes of morphemes due to the different roles they play in word-structure.

Roots and affixational morphemes are generally easily distinguished and the difference between them is clearly felt as, e.g., in the words helpless, handy, blackness, Londoner, refill, etc.: the root morphemes help-, hand-, black-, London-, fill- are understood as the lexical centres 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, it 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, for example, the morpheme teach – in to teach, teacher, teaching, theor – in theory, theorist, theoretical, etc.

Non-root morphemes include inflectional morphemes or inflections and affixational morphemes or affixes.

Lexicology is concerned only with affixational morphemes.

Affixes are classified into prefixes and suffixes:

a) prefix precedes the root morpheme, a suffix follows it;

b) Structurally morphemes fall into 3 types.

1. free morphemes;

2. bound morphemes;

3. semi-free 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, for example, the root morpheme friend - of 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. the suffixes –ness, -ship, -ize, etc., the prefixes un-, dis-, de-, etc.

Semi-bound (semi-free) morphemes are morphemes that can function in a morphemic-sequence both as an affix and as a free morpheme. For example, the morpheme well and half on the one hand occur as free morphemes that coincide, with the stem and the word-form in utterances like sleep well, half an hour, on the other hand they occur as bound morphemes in words likewell-known, half-eaten, half-done.

Lecture 3

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