Филология ф акультеті «Ағылшын филологиясы» кафедрасы

Lecture 3. Word-Structure

Due to the morphemic structure of the word all English words fall into two large classes. They are so-called segmentable words, i.e. those ones allowing of segmentation into morphemes, e.g. agreement, information, fearless, quickly, door-handle, etc., and non-segmentable words, i.e. those ones not allowing of such segmentation, e.g. house, girl, woman, husband, etc.

The operation of a segmentable word breaking into the constituent morphemes is referred to in present-day linguistic literature as the analysis of word-structure on the morphemic level. The morphemic analysis aims at splitting a segmentable word into its constituent morphemes — the basic units at this level of word-structure analysis — and at determining their number and types. The degree of morphemic segmentability is not the same for different words.
Three types of morphemic segmentability of words are distinguished: complete, conditional and defective.
Complete segmentability is characteristic of a great many words the morphemic structure of which is transparent enough, as their individual morphemes clearly stand out within the word lending themselves easily to isolation. There are, however, numerous words in the English vocabulary the morphemic structure of which is not so transparent and easy to establish.
Conditional morphemic segmentability characterises words whose segmentation into the constituent morphemes is doubtful for semantic reasons. In words like retain, contain, detain or receive, deceive, conceive, perceive the sound-clusters [ri-], [di-], [кэn-] seem, on the one hand, to be singled out quite easily due to their recurrence in a number of words, on the other hand, they undoubtedly have nothing in common with the phonetically identical morphemes re-, de- as found in words like rewrite, re-organise, de-organise, decode. The type of meaning that can be ascribed to them is only a differential and a certain distributional meaning: the [ri-] distinguishes retain from detain and the [-tein] distinguishes retain from receive, whereas their order and arrangement point to the status of the re-, de-, con-, per- as different from that of the -tain and -ceive within the structure of the words.