Chapter 3 Morphological Structure of English Words ——0601 黎娟娟

Introduction In previous chapters, we have learned the historical, cultural, and social factors that facilitate the development of the English vocabulary. Although borrowing has been playing an important role in the expansion of vocabulary, however, vocabulary is mainly enlarged on an internal basis nowadays. In brief, this chapter will discuss morphemes, their classification and identification, the relationship between morphemes and word-formation.

3.1 Morphemes 词素 What is Morpheme? Word-formation: the smallest functioning unit in the composition of words. (Crystal 1985) Syntactic: the minimal form of grammatical analysis. Definition: A morpheme is a minimal meaningful unit of a language ( 语言中最小的意义单位 ). Morphemes are used to form words or indicate grammatical concept.

A word is a minimal free form ( 词是最小的自由单位 ). The concept of morpheme differs from the concept of word, as many morphemes cannot stand as words on their own. What’s more, many morphemes are not free. un respect able free re collect ion free un predict able free 语言中最小的不可再分的意义单位是词 morpheme 。 Word Many can be seperated into even smaller meaningful units. Can occur by itself. Morpheme Cannot be further divided. Cannot occur by itself unless it is in a mono- morphemic word.

The word “unladylike” consists of three morphemes: “ un- ” not “ lady ” (well behaved) female adult human “ –like ” having the characteristics of None of these morphemes can be broken up any more without losing all sense of meaning. Lady cannot be broken up into "la" and "dy," even though "la" and "dy" are separate syllables. Because none of these has meaning on its own.

The word "unbreakable" has three morphemes: “un-” a bound morpheme, prefix "break“ a free morpheme "-able", a bound morpheme, suffix. Both "un-“ and "-able" are affixes. The word “technique” consists of only one morpheme with two syllables. Even though the word has two syllables, it is a single morpheme because it cannot be broken down into smaller meaningful parts.

Characteristics: 1. All the morphemes have their own meanings, but they cannot be further divided, otherwise they will not make any sense. 2. Morphemes may have some variants, for example, -ation, may also be –tion, -sion, -ion ， but they belong to the same suffix because they have the same meaning and grammatical function.

3.2 Morphs and Allomorphs ( 形素和词素变体 ) Morph( 形素 ) Morph is the phonetic realization of a morpheme. Morphemes are abstract units, which are realized in speech by discrete units known as morphs. 词素是抽象的，它是通过词素形式 （ morph ）表现出来的。 e.g. tree is a morpheme, but it is realized in speech by /tri:/.

Mono-morphemic words: bird,green,sad,want,desire,etc. The plurality forms are realized by different forms of morphemes in different words. The morpheme of plurality –s have three variants in the example such as in cats /s/, bags /z/and matches /iz/, but they belong to the same suffix as they have the same meaning and grammatical function.

Allomorph( 词素变体 ) Allomorph: the phonetic(sound) variants of a morpheme in a particular language. Some morphemes are realized by more than one morph according to their position in a word. Such alternative morphs are known as Allomorphs. Three features: A. all allomorphs should have common meaning; B. all allomorphs should be in complementary distribution; C. allomorphs which share the common meaning should occur in parallel formation.

Relationship Morpheme {would} morph morph morph morph allomorph /wud/ /w ə d/ / ə d / /d/

SUMMARY A morpheme’s actual phonetic representation is the morph, with the morphs representing the same morpheme being grouped as its allomorphs. A morpheme is manifested as one or more morphs in different environments. These morphs are called allomorphs. 语言中最小的不可再分的意义单位是词素 morpheme( 又 可称为形位、语素等 ) 。词素是抽象的，它是通过词素形 式 morph 表现出来的。词素还具有变体形式，在语言学中 称为词素变体 allomorph 。