张维友英语词汇学教程第三章

1、Chapter three,Morphological Structure of English Words,3.1 Morphemes,Traditionally, words are usually treated as the basic and minimal units of a language to make sentences, which are combinations of words according to syntactic rules. Structurally, however, a word is not the smallest unit because m

2、any words can be separated into even smaller meaningful units. These minimal meaningful units are known as morphemes (morphe is the Greek word for “form”; -eme as in “phoneme” means class of).,3.2 Morphs and Allomorphs,Morphemes are abstract units, which are realized in speech by discrete units know

3、n as morphs. They are actual spoken, minimal carriers of meaning. In other words the phonetic or orthographic strings or segments which realize morphemes are termed morphs. Most morphemes are realized by single morphs like bird, tree, green, sad, want, desire, etc. These morphemes coincide with word

4、s as they can stand by themselves and function freely in a sentence. Words of this kind are called mono-morphemic words. Some morphemes, however, are realized by more than one morph according to their position in a word.,An allomorph refers to a number of a set of morphs, which represent one morphem

5、e. Just as we class phones together as allophones of a single phoneme, so we class morphs together as allomorphs of a single morpheme.,3.3 Classifying Morphemes,Morphemes vary in function. Accordingly, we can classify morphemes into several general categories: free versus bound, derivational versus

6、inflectional, and lexical versus grammatical.,1. Free versus Bound Morphemes,These morphemes have complete meanings in themselves and can be used free grammatical units in sentences. They are identical with words, for example, man, earth, wind, car and anger. Morphemes which cannot occur separate wo

7、rds are bound. They are so named because they are bound to other morphemes to form words or to perform a particular grammatical function. Bound morphemes are chiefly found in derived words.,Free morphemes are all roots, which are capable of being used as words or as word-building elements to form ne

8、w words like collect, ideal, prison, whereas bound morphemes consist of either roots or affixes, most of which can be used to create new words like re-, -ion, -ist and ex-. Bound morphemes include two types: bound root and affix.,2. Derivational versus Inflectional Morphemes,Morphemes which are used

9、 to derive new words are known as derivational morphemes because when these morphemes are conjoined, new words are derived. In English, derivatives and compound are all formed by such morphemes. Inflectional morphemes, in contrast, indicate the syntactic relationships between words and function as g

10、rammatical markers. Inflectional morphemes are confined to suffixes.,The differences between inflectional and derivational morphemes can be summarized as follows: Inflectional Does not change meaning or part of speech of the stem. Indicates syntactic or semantic relations between different words in

11、a sentence. Occurs with all members of some large class of morphemes. Occurs at margins of words.,Derivational Changes meaning or part of speech of the stem. Indicates semantic relations within the word. Occurs with only some members of a class of morphemes. Occurs before any inflectional suffixes a

12、dded.,3. Content versus Grammatical Morphemes,Content morphemes are lexical morphemes which are used as we see above to derive new words, so also known as derivational morphemes. Grammatical morphemes, on the other hand, function primarily as grammatical markers, which are traditionally called funct

13、ional words.,3.4 Identifying Morphemes,Since morphemes are the minimal distinct units, they should be identifiable by their forms, meaning and distribution. Generally speaking, lexical morphemes are easy to define: Mono-morphemic: land, sky Double-morphemic: chill + y, mis + take Triple-morphemic: a

14、nti + govern + ment Four-morphemic: un + friend + li + ness Over-four-morphemic: inter + nation + al + iz(e) + ation,If the morphemes are always consistent in form and meaning, there should be no difficulty in identification. However, there is often mismatch between form and meaning. Some morphemes

15、are identical in form but different in meaning. Some morphemes are not meaningful in isolation but acquire meaning by virtue of their connection in words. There are other morphemes which occur in many words, but their meaning is difficult to define. Some forms are meaningful, but not morphemes.,The

16、identification of inflection morphemes is more problematic. In most cases, an inflectional morpheme can be segmented from the stem of a word and naturally can be added to the stem.,3.5 Morpheme and Word-formation,We know that words can be analyzed into morphemes, which are the minimal meaningful uni

17、ts in the composition of words. In word-formation, however, morphemes are conventionally labeled root, stem, base and affix.,1. Affix Affixes are forms that are attached to words or word elements to modify meaning or function. All affixes are bound morphemes because none of them can stand as words i

18、n their own right. According to the functions of affixes, we can divide them into inflectional affixes like s, -ed and ing, and derivational affixed like pre-, ex-, de- and less. Derivational and inflectional affixes are identical with derivational and inflectional morphemes.,In view of their distri

19、bution in the formation of words, affixes can fall into prefix and suffix. Prefixes are all derivational, i.e. they are used to form new words whereas suffixes embrace both derivational suffixes and inflectional suffixes. Accordingly, the above-mentioned affixes can be further grouped into prefixes: pre-, ex- and de-, and suffixes: -less, -s, -ed and ing.,2. Root, Stem, Base A root is the basic form of a word which cannot be further analyzed with