D. V. Demidov

participle of verbs; 
3) the segments -ing: the gerund and present participle; 
4) the segments -er, -est: the comparative and superlative 
degrees of adjectives and adverbs.
The auxiliary word- morphemes of various standings 
should be interpreted in this connection as ―semi-bound‖ 
morphemes, since, being used as separate elements of speech 
strings, they form categorial unities with their notional stem-
words. 
On the basis of formal presentation, ―overt‖ morphemes 
and ―covert‖ morphemes are distinguished. Overt morphemes are 
genuine, explicit morphemes building up words; the covert 
morpheme is identified as a contrastive absence of morpheme 
expressing a certain function. The notion of covert morpheme 

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coincides with the notion of zero morpheme in the oppositional 
description of grammatical categories. 
For instance, the word- form clocks consists of two overt 
morphemes: one lexical (root) and one grammatical expressing 
the plural. The outwardly one-morpheme word- form clock, since 
it expresses the singular, is also considered as consisting of two 
morphemes, i.e. of the overt root and the co\ert (implicit) 
grammatical suffix of the singular. The usual symbol for the 
covert morpheme employed by linguists is the sign of the empty 
set: 0. 
On the basis of segmental relation, ―segmental‖ 
morphemes and ―supra-segmental‖ morphemes are distinguished. 
Interpreted as supra-segmental morphemes in distributional terms 
are intonation contours, accents, pauses.
The said elements of language should be considered 
signemic units of language, since they are functionally bound. 
They form the secondary line of speech, accompanying its 
primary phonemic line. On the other hand, from what has been 
stated about the morpheme proper, it is not difficult to see that the 
morphemic interpretation of suprasegmental units can hardly 
stand to reason. Indeed, these units are functionally connected not 
with morphemes, but with larger elements of language: words, 
word-groups, sentences, supra-sentential constructions. 
On the basis of grammatical alternation, ―additive‖ 
morphemes and ―replacive‖ morphemes are distinguished. 
Interpreted as additive morphemes are outer grammatical 
suffixes, since, as a rule, they are opposed to the absence of 
morphemes in grammatical alternation. E.g:. look+ed; small+er, 
etc. In distinction to these, the root phonemes of grammatical 
interchange are considered as replacive morphemes, since they 
replace one another in the paradigmatic forms. E.g.: dr- i-ve – dr-
o-ve – dr- i-ven; m-a- n – m-e-n; etc. 

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It should be remembered that the phonemic interchange is 
unproductive in English as in all the Indo-European languages. If 
it were productive, it might rationally be interpreted as a sort of 
replacive ―infixation‖ (correlated with ―exfixation‖ of the additive 
type). As it stands, however, this type of grammatical means can 
be understood as a kind of suppletivity (i.e. partial suppletivity).
On the basis of linear characte ristic, ―continuous‖ (or 
―linear‖) morphemes and ―discontinuous‖ morphemes are 
distinguished. 
By the discontinuous morpheme, opposed to the, continuous 
morpheme, a two-element grammatical unit is meant which is 
identified in the analytical grammatical form comprising an 
auxiliary word and a grammatical suffix. These two elements, as it 
were, embed the notional stem; hence, they are symbolically 
represented as follows: 
be ... ing – for the continuous verb forms (e.g.: is going);
have ... en – for the perfect verb forms (e.g.: has gone);
be ... en – for the passive verb forms (e.g.: is taken) 
Many of the distributional morpheme types contradict the 
traditional definition of the morpheme: traditionally the morpheme 
is the smallest meaningful lingual unit (this is contradicted by the 
―empty‖ morphemes type), built up by phonemes (this is 
contradicted by the ―supra-segmental‖ morphemes type), used to 
build up words (this is contradicted by the ―discontinuous‖ 
morphemes type). This is due to the fact that in Descriptive 
Linguistics only three lingual units are distinguished: the phoneme, 
the morpheme, and syntactic constructions; the notion of the word 
is rejected because of the difficulties of defining it. Still, the 
classification of distributional morpheme types can be used to 
summarize and differentiate various types of word-building and 
word-changing, though not all of them are morphemic in the 
current mainstream understanding of the term ―morpheme‖. 

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