Б. С. Хаймович, Б. И. Роговская теоретическая грамматика английского языка

THE STRUCTURE OF WORDS

§ 7. One of the main properties of a word is its double nature. It is material because it can he heard or seen, and it is immaterial or ideal as far as its meaning is concerned. We shall regard the material aspects of the word (written and oral) as its forms ², and its meanings as its content³. When defining the word as "the smallest naming unit" (§ 1), we refer prima­rily to its content, whereas in point ing out the most character­istic features of words (§ 6) we deal chiefly with the form.

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² Many authors attribute also other meanings to the term form.
³ С. L. Ebeling writes: "The meaning of a word is its possibility to point to certain things in reality (in the same way as the form of a word is its possibility to be recognized)".
See also the following statement:
"In spite of rather excentric pronouncements on the part of some, no linguist has really ever doubted that he has to take note of both the physical shapes ('forms') and the purposes they serve ('meanings')." (W. Haas)

§ 8. The word books can be broken up in two parts: book-and -s. The content of the first part can be rendered by the Russian книг- and the meaning of the second part is 'plural­ity'. So each of the two parts of the word books has both form and content. Such meaningful parts of a word are called morphemes. If we break up the word books in some other way, e. g. boo-ks, the resulting parts will not be morphemes, since they have no meanings.

§9. There is an important difference between the morpheme book- and the word book besides that of a part and the whole. The word book contains the meaning of "singular number", which the morpheme does not. The meaning of "singularity" is acquired by the word book because there exists the word books with the morpheme of "plurality" -s. So the absence of -s in book is interpreted as "singular number". Thus, we may say that the word book contains the morpheme book-plus a zero morpheme with the meaning of "singular number".

Note. Zero refers only to the form of the morpheme. The morpheme -s having a positive form may be called a positive morpheme.

§ 10. The morphemes book- and -s differ essentially:

a) In their relations to reality and thought. Book- is directly associated with some object of reality, even if it does not name it as the word book does (cf. bookish). The morpheme -s is connected with the world of reality only indirectly, through the morpheme it is linked with. In com­bination with the morpheme book- it means "more than one book". Together with the morpheme pot- it refers to "more than one pot". But alone it does not remind us of the notion "more than one" in the same way as, for instance, the morpheme plural- does.
b) In their relations to the word of which they are part. Book- is more independent than -s. As we have seen, book-makes a word with a zero morpheme,added, -s cannot make a word with a zero morpheme. It always depends on some pos­itive morpheme.
c) In their relations to similar morphemes in other words. The meaning of -s is always relative. In the word books it denotes "plurality", because books is opposed to book with the zero morpheme of "singularity". In the word news -s has no plural meaning because there is no "singular" opposite to news. Or, to take another example, the morpheme -s in wants shows the meaning of "present tense" in relation to the mor­pheme -ed of wanted, but it shows the meaning of "third person, singular" in relation to the zero morpheme of want. Now we cannot say that book- has one meaning when contrasted with table- and another meaning when contrasted with chair-.
The meanings of the morphemes -s, -ed, relative, dependent and only indirectly reflecting reality, are grammatical mean­ings of grammatical morphemes.
Morphemes of the book- type and their meanings are called lexical.

§ 11. The lexical and grammatical morphemes of a word are linked together so closely that sometimes it seems impos­sible to separate them. The relation between foot and feet is similar to the relation between book and books. But how are we to separate the "plural" morpheme in feet from the lexical morpheme? In a general way we can say that everything distinguishing the form of feet from that of foot expresses "plurality". But the answer can be more elaborate. We may regard /f..t/ as a discontinuous form of the lexical morpheme, /-u-/ as the form of the grammatical morpheme of "singular­ity", and /-i:-/ as that of the morpheme of "plurality". Then /-u-/ and /-i:-/ are grammatical morphemes inserted into a lexical one, and we deal with internal inflection. We may also assume that the 'singular' meaning in foot is, as usual, not marked, i. e. we have there a zero morpheme. The word feet contains the lexical morpheme foot- and the grammatical morpheme of "plurality" whose form is /u > i:/, i. e. the change of the vowel /u/ to the vowel /i:/. Thus "plurality" is expressed by vowel change.

§ 12. It is not uncommon in English that the function of a grammatical morpheme is discharged by an apparent word. The lexical meanings of the words invite, invited and the combination shall invite (I invite you. I invited you. I shall invite you.) are the same. The main- difference in content is the "present" meaning in invite, the "past" meaning in invited and the "future" meaning in shall invite. These meanings are grammatical. By comparing the relations of invite — invited and invite — shall invite we can see that the function of shall is similar to that of the grammatical morpheme -ed.

Thus, shall is a kind of contradiction. Formally, it is a word, since it has the looseness (§ 6) of a word (I shall come. I shall certainly come. Shall I come? I shall.). As to its content, it is not a word, but a grammatical morpheme:
a) Unlike a word, it has no lexical meaning in We shall arrive to-morrow.
b) The meaning of -(e)d in arrived and that of shall in shall arrive are homogeneous.
c) The meaning of shall is relative like that of grammatical morphemes. Shall invite shows the "future" meaning when it is opposed to invite with the "present" meaning. But when it is contrasted with will invite, it shows the meaning of "first person".
d) The meaning of shall is only indirectly connected with reality, through the word it is linked with. It does not denote "futurity" in general, but the futurity of the action denoted by invite, arrive, etc.
Since shall has the properties of both a word and a gram­matical morpheme, we shall call it a grammatical word-morpheme.
Let us now compare the two units: works and will work. They contain the same lexical morpheme work- and different grammatical morphemes -s and will. The grammatical mor­pheme -s is a bound morpheme: it is rigidly connected with the lexical morpheme. The grammatical morpheme will is a free morpheme or a word-morpheme: it is loosely connected with the lexical morpheme. Owing to the difference in the forms of the grammatical morphemes, there is a difference in the forms of the units works and will work. Works has the form of one word, will work that of a combination of words.
Units like works, with bound grammatical morphemes, are called synthetic words. They are words both in form and in content.
Units like will work, with free grammatical morphemes, or grammatical word-morphemes, are called analytical words. They are words in content only. In form they are combinations of words.
Since the difference between synthetic and analytical words is a matter of form, not content, we may speak of synthetic and analytical forms.
Analytical forms are much more characteristic of English than of Russian. Especially rich in analytical forms is the English verb where they greatly exceed the synthetic forms in number (see § 19).
Owing to the prevalence of analytical forms, English is usually spoken of as an analytical language, and Russian, Latin, Greek, in which synthetic forms prevail, as synthetic languages.
Nоte. This is but one of the distinctive features of the analytical structure of Modern English. As to the functions of grammatical word-morphemes in the structure of the English sen­tence, see Syntax.

§ 13. Besides lexical and grammatical morphemes there exist some intermediate types.

The first morphemes in the words de-part, for-give, and the second morphemes in the words fly-er, home-less resemble grammatical morphemes in their dependence on lexical morphemes. But they differ from grammatical morphemes in not being relative. True, one can say that in the pair merci­ful — merciless the morpheme -less is correlated with -ful, but in homeless, jobless, etc. -less retains its meaning though it is not contrasted with -ful.
Like grammatical morphemes, de-, for-, -er, -less are at­tached only to certain classes of lexical morphemes. The mor­pheme -er, for instance, is usually attached to morphemes like sing-, read-, speak- which are associated with the grammat­ical morphemes -s, -ing and the grammatical word-morphemes shall, will. But like lexical morphemes they determine the lexical meanings of words. Cf.