Morphology of Modern English PDF

Section II Morphology 4. Morphology as a Part of Grammar The course of Modern English morphology consists of three main parts: 1) essentials of morphology, 2) the system of parts of speech, 3) the study of each part of speech in terms of its grammatical categories and syntactic functions. The chief...

Section II Morphology 4. Morphology as a Part of Grammar The course of Modern English morphology consists of three main parts: 1) essentials of morphology, 2) the system of parts of speech, 3) the study of each part of speech in terms of its grammatical categories and syntactic functions. The chief notions of morphology include the grammatical category, the word and the morpheme. Grammatical category is a system of expressing a generalized grammatical meaning by means of paradigmatic correlation of grammatical forms (e. g. the category of number in nouns with the singular and plural forms). Categorial grammatical meanings are the most general meanings rendered by language and expressed by systematical correlations of word-forms (e. g. tense, aspect, voice, mood in the verb system). The paradigmatic correlations of grammatical forms in a category are exposed by the grammatical oppositions of various types (e. g. a binary privative opposition found in the category of number; a gradual opposition — in the degrees of comparison of adjectives, an equipotential opposition — in the three tense system). Word is the principal and basic unit of the language system, the largest on the morphological and the smallest on the syntactic level of linguistic analysis. It is very difficult to give a complete definition to the word because the word is an extremely complex and many-sided phenomenon. Within different linguistic theories and trends the word is defined as the minimal potential sentence, the minimal free linguistic form, the elementary component of the sentence, the grammatically 17 arranged combination of sound with meaning, the uninterrupted string of morphemes, etc. Being a linguistic sign, the word is a two-facet unit possessing both form and content, i. e. sound-form and meaning. The term “word“, or “lexeme”, is an abstraction. It refers to the word taken as an invariant unity of form and meaning. When used in actual speech, words occur in different forms. The system showing a word in all its word-forms is called its paradigm (e. g. boy, boys, boy’s, boys’). Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units into which a wordform may be divided (e. g. workers = [work + er] + s). The morpheme is the smallest meaningful part of a word expressing a generalized, significative meaning. There are root-morphemes and affixational morphemes; the latter include derivational affixes (prefixes, suffixes) and inflections. Stem, or base, is the part of a word which remains unchanged throughout its paradigm. The most characteristic feature of word structure in Modern English is the phonetic identity of the stem with the root morpheme. The root-morpheme is the common part within a word-cluster and the lexical centre of the word. Root-morphemes make the subject of lexicology. Derivational morphemes are lexically dependent on the root-morphemes, which they modify. But most of them have the part-of-speech meaning, which makes them grammatically significant. Inflectional morphemes have no lexical meaning. Inflections (endings) carry only grammatical meaning (of such categories as person, number, case, tense, aspect, etc). Allomorphs, or morphs, are all the representations of the given morpheme, in other words, the morpheme phonetic variants (e. g. please, pleasant, pleasure; or else, poor, poverty). “Zero-morpheme” is the term used to show that the absence of a morpheme indicates a certain grammatical meaning (e. g. book — singular number vs. books — plural number). The problem with zeromorpheme is that this designation contradicts the general definition of the morpheme as a two-facet linguistic unit having both form and meaning. Zero-morpheme does not have any sound form. To avoid 18 this contradiction, some scholars suggest that the term should be changed and the meaningful absence of a morpheme should be termed “zero-exponent”. Modern English has several ways of expressing grammatical meaning, or several types of word-form derivation. Synthetic types of word-form derivation imply changes in the body of the word without any auxiliary words (e. g. work — works — worked ). Analytical types consist in using an auxiliary word, devoid of any lexical meaning, to express some grammatical category of another word (e. g. work — have worked). Modern English as a predominantly analytical language demonstrates comparatively few grammatical inflections, a sparing use of sound alternations to denote grammatical forms, a wide use of auxiliaries, prepositions, and word order to denote grammatical relations. Sound alternations mean a way of expressing grammatical categories which consists in changing a sound inside the root (e. g. man — men). Suppletive formation is a way of building a form of a word from an altogether different stem (e. g. go — went). Working bibliography Бархударов Л. С. Очерки по морфологии современного английского языка / Л. С. Бархударов. М., 1975. С. 22– 47. Иванова И. П. Теоретическая грамматика современного английского языка / И. П. Иванова, В. В. Бурлакова, Г. Г. Почепцов. М., 1981. С. 4–14. Blokh M. Y. A Course in Theoretical English Grammar / M. Y. Blokh. Moscow, 2004. P. 18–37. 5. Parts of Speech The words of language are divided into grammatically relevant sets, or classes. Parts of speech are grammatical (or lexico-grammatical) classes of words identified on the basis of the three criteria: the meaning common to all the words of the given class, the form with the morphological characteristics of a type of word, and the function 19