Words and morphemes

Words and morphemes

1. Words (lexemes) - unit of the lexicon (an entry in the dictionary, a vocabulary item), which is an uninflected abstract form that underlies all its inflected variants

• When we are talking about the syntactic word, we mean its inflected form

• Inflection - varying the shape of a lexeme in such a way that its grammatical relation to other lexemes within the phrase, so sentence becomes clear

• Paradigm - a whole set of inflected variants of a lexeme

• Lexemes (are abstract/from vocabulary) and syntactic words belong to different syntactic categories

• Syntactic category - word classes, parts of speech (content VS function parts of speech)

2. Morpheme - the smallest meaningful units of language, which cannot be subdivided without losing their meaning

• lexemes and syntactic words consist of one or more morphemes

• when we realise morphemes, we produce morphs (physical realisations of morphemes)

Free VS bound

Morphemes have two types:

1. Free - they can occur by themselves as whole words - monomorphemic

2. Bound - must be attached to other morphemes within words

3. Bound morphemes are represented through affixes:

• Prefixes (added at the beginning of the word)

• Suffix (added at the end of the word)

Inflection and derivation

1. Inflectional affixes adjust grammar (tense, number, etc.) without changing word class = only suffixes in English

2. Derivational affixes create new words and can change meaning or part of speech

Ordering of affixes in morphology

1. In morphology, affixes (prefixes, suffixes, infixes, circumfixes) are added to root words in a specific order, governed by linguistic rules

2. Stem - the part of the word which remains if we remove the suffix or the prefix that was added to it last

3. Root (absolute stem) - the word when all the affixes are removed, always a single/free morpheme

4. Derivation comes before inflection!

5. Prefixes come before suffixes!

Word formation processes

1. coinages: lexemes artificially invented

2. derivation (=affixation): creating a new lexeme by means of adding a derivational affix to an old lexeme

3. conversion (=zero affixation): a lexeme is assigned to another word class without changing its form

4. compounding: bringing together 2 roots or 2 lexemes to produce a new lexeme (=compound - typically compounds bear the main stress on their initial member)

5. clipping: shortening a lexeme and thus producing a more informal variant

6. blending: putting together lexemes but at least one of these lexemes is present only in a fragmentary form

7. backformation: establishing, on the basis of analogy with derivatives, the apparently existing stem of a lexeme which looks like a derivative, although it is not a real derivative

8. synomymy: two or more lexemes have the same cognitive meaning (even though they may differ stylistically)

9. blocking: an existing word blocks a regular morphological derivation (child - children/ go- went)