D. V. Demidov

5. The concept of the morpheme and its structural 
types. 
The morpheme is the elementary meaningful lingual unit 
built up from phonemes and used to make words. It has meaning, 
but its meaning is abstract, significative, not concrete, or 
nominative, as is that of the word [2, р. 12]. Morphemes constitute 
the words; they do not exist outside the words. Studying the 
morpheme we actually study the word: its inner structure, its 
functions, and the ways it enters speech.
Stating the differences between the word and the 
morpheme, we have to admit that the correlation between the 
word and the morpheme is problematic. The borderlines between 
the morpheme and the word are by no means rigid and there is a 
set of intermediary units (half-words – half- morphemes), which 
form an area of transitions between the word and the morpheme as 

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the polar phenomena. This includes the so-called ―morpheme-
like‖ functional, or auxiliary words, for example, auxiliary verbs 
and adverbs, articles, particles, prepositions and conj unctions: 
they are realized as isolated, separate units (their separateness 
being fixed in written practice) but perform various grammatical 
functions; in other words, they function like morphemes and are 
dependent semantically to a greater or lesser extent. E.g..: Jack‟s, 
a boy, have done. 
This approach to treating various lingual units is known in 
linguistics as ―a field approach‖: polar phenomena possessing the 
unambiguous characteristic features of the opposed units 
constitute ―the core‖, or ―the center‖ of the field, while the 
intermediary phenomena combining some of the characteristics of 
the poles make up ―the periphery‖ of the field; e.g.: functional 
words make up the periphery of the class of words since their 
functioning is close to the functioning of morphemes. 
When studying morphemes, we should distinguish 
morphemes as generalized lingual units from their concrete 
manifestations, or variants in specific textual environments; 
variants of morphemes are called ―allo-morphs‖.
Initially, the so-called allo-emic theory was developed in 
phonetics: in phonetics, phonemes, as the generalized, invariant 
phonological units, are distinguished from their concrete 
realizations, the allophones. For example, one phoneme is 
pronounced in a different way in differe nt environments, e.g.: you 
[ju:] – you know [ju]; in Russian, vowels are also pronounced in a 
different way in stressed and unstressed syllables, e.g.: дом – 
домой. The same applies to the morpheme, which is a generalized 
unit, an invariant, and may be represented by different variants, 
allo- morphs, in different textual environments. For example, the 
morpheme of the plural, -(e)s, sounds differently after voiceless 
consonants (bats), voiced consonants and vowels (rooms), and 

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after fricative and sibilant consonants (clashes). So, [s], [z], [iz], 
which are united by the same meaning (the grammatical meaning 
of the plural), are allo- morphs of the same morpheme, which is 
represented as -(e)s in written speech. 
The ―allo-emic theory‖ in the study of morphemes was 
also developed within the framework of Descriptive Linguistics 
by means of the so-called distributional analysis: in the first stage 
of distributional analysis a syntagmatic chain of lingual units is 
divided into meaningful segments, morphs, e.g.: he/ start/ed/ 
laugh/ing/; then the recurrent segments are analyzed in various 
textual environments, and the following three types of distribution 
are established: contrastive distribution, non-contrastive