The structure of English words:
A morpheme (Gr. morphé ‘form, shape’) is one of the fundamental units of a language, a minimum sign that is an association of a given meaning with a given form (sound and graphic), e.g. old, un+happy, grow+th, blue+colour+ed.
Depending on the number of morphemes, words are divided into:
monomorphic are root-words consisting of only one root-morpheme, i.e. simple words, e.g. to grow, a book, white, fast etc.
polymorphic are words consisting of at least one root-morpheme and a number of derivational affixes, i.e. derivatives, compounds, e.g. good-looking, employee, blue-eyed etc.
Baudouin de Courtenay
Ivan Alexandrovich
the Kazan school of linguistics;
was the first in world linguistics to investigate the morphological structure of the word;
introduced a number of linguistic terms, including a morpheme (in 1881), a phoneme, a lexeme, a syntagm etc. The Greek suffix –eme has been adopted to denote the smallest significant or distinctive unit.
Types of morphemes:
An allomorph (a morphemic variant) (Gr. állos ‘different’ and morphé ‘form, shape’) is a phonetically conditioned positional variant of the same derivational or functional morpheme identical in meaning and function and differing in sound only insomuch, as their complementary distribution produces various phonetic assimilation effects, e.g. please /pli:z/ pleasure /pleʒ/ pleasant /plez/.
Complementary distribution takes place when two linguistic variants cannot appear in the same environment, e.g. in-competent, il-logical, ir-responsible, im-possible; cat-s, box-es; organis-ation, corrup-tion.
Contastive distribution characterises different morphemes occurring in the same linguistic environment, but signaling different meanings, e.g. –able in measurable and –ed in measured.
A pseudo-morpheme (a quasi-morpheme) is a morpheme which has a differential meaning and a distributional meaning but does not possess any lexical or functional (part-of-speech) meaning, e.g. re- and -tain in retain, con- and –ceive in conceive etc.
A unique morpheme is an isolated pseudo-morpheme which does not occur in other words but is understood as meaningful because the constituent morphemes display a more or less clear denotational meaning, e.g. ham- in hamlet (cf. booklet, ringlet), cran- in cranberry (журавлина), mul- in mulberry (шовковиця), -et in pocket etc.
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