D. V. Demidov

distribution and complementary distribution. The morphs are 
said to be in contrastive distribution if they express different 
meanings in identical environments the compared morphs, e.g.: 
He started laughing – He starts laughing; such morphs constitute 
different morphemes. The morphs are said to be in non-
contrastive distribution if they express identical meaning in 
identical environments; such morphs constitute ‗free variants‘ of 
the same morpheme, e.g.: learned – learnt, ate [et] – ate [eit] (in 
Russian: трактора – тракторы). The morphs are said to be in 
complementary distribution if they express identical meanings in 
different environments, e.g.: He started laughing – He stopped 
laughing; such morphs constitute variants, or allo- morphs of the 
same morpheme. [17, p. 56] 
The allo- morphs of the plural morpheme -(e)s [s], [z], [iz] 
stand in phonemic complementary distribution; the allo- morph –
en, as in oxen, stands in morphemic complementary distribution 
with the other allo- morphs of the plural morpheme. 
Besides these traditional types of morphemes, in 
Descriptive Linguistics distributional morpheme types are 

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distinguished; they immediately correlate with eac h other in the 
following pairs. 
On the basis of the degree of self-dependence, ―free‖ 
morphemes and ―bound‖ morphemes are distinguished. Bound 
morphemes cannot form words by themselves, they are identified 
only as component segmental parts of words. As different from 
this, free morphemes can build up words b y themselves, i.e. can 
be used ―freely‖. 
For instance, in the word handful the root hand is a free 
morpheme, while the suffix -ful is a bound morpheme. 
There are very few productive bound morphemes in the 
morphological system of English. Being extremely narrow, the list 
of them is complicated by the relations of homonymy. These 
morphemes are the following: 
1) the segments -(e)s [-z, -s, -iz]: the plural of nouns, the 
possessive case of nouns, the third person singular present of 
verbs; 
2) the segments -(e)d [-d, -t, -id]: the past and past