Morphemic and Categorical Structure of the Word

The definition of the morpheme. The word and the morpheme, their correlation in the level structure of the language. Intermediary phenomena between the word and the morpheme. Traditional classification of morphemes: positional and functional (semantic) criteria. Roots and affixes. Lexical (derivational, word-building) and grammatical (functional, word-changing) affixes. The IC-analysis of the morphemic structure. Grammatical relevance of derivational affixes; lexical (word-building) paradigms. The peculiarities of grammatical suffixes (inflexions) in English. Outer and inner inflexion. The "allo-emic" theory in morphology: morphs, allomorphs and morphemes.Distributional analysis in morphology; contrastive, non-contrastive, and complementary types of distribution. Distributional classification of morphemes: full and empty (zero morphemes), free and bound, overt and covert, segmental and supra-segmental, additive and replacive, continuous and discontinuous morphemes. The assessment of distributional morpheme types. As shown in the previous unit, the morpheme is the elementary meaningful lingual unit built up from phonemes and used to make words. It has meaning, but its meaning is abstract, significative, not concrete, or nominative, as is that of the word. Morphemes constitute the words; they do not exist outside the words. Studying the morpheme we actually study the word: its inner structure, its functions, and the ways it enters speech.

Grammatical meaning and the means of its expression. Paradigmatic correlation of individual grammatical forms. Grammatical category as a system of expressing a generalized grammatical meaning. Oppositional analysis of grammatical category. The theory of oppositions. The types of oppositions: binary and supra-binary (ternary, quaternary, etc.) oppositions; privative, gradual, and equipollent oppositions. Oppositions in grammar. Privative binary opposition as the most important type of categorial opposition in grammar. The strong (marked, positive) and the weak (unmarked, negative) members of the opposition, their formal and functional features. Grammatical category in communication: contextual oppositional reduction (oppositional substitution). The two types of oppositional reduction: neutralization and transposition. Synthetical and analytical grammatical forms. The types of synthetical grammatical forms: outer inflection, inner inflection, and suppletivity. The principle of identifying an analytical form; grammatical idiomatism of analytical forms. The types of grammatical categories: immanent and reflective categories, closed and transgressive categories, constant feature categories and variable feature categories. Grammatical meanings of notional words are rendered by their grammatical forms. For example, the meaning of the plural in English is regularly rendered by the grammatical suffix –(e)s: cats, books, clashes. Grammatical meanings of individual grammatical forms are established as such in paradigmatic correlations: the plural correlates with the singular (cat – cats), the genitive case of the noun correlates with the common case (cat – cat’s), the definite article determination correlates with the indefinite article determination (a cat – the cat), etc.