Lexis meaning ‘word, phrase’ (hence lexicos ‘having to do with words’) and logos

3. The main principles of morphemic analysis. Classification of morphemes.


Morpheme – smallest non-segmentable meaningful unit of L.
As far as the complexity of the morphemic structure of the word is concerned all English words fall into two large classes:

1. 
   segmentable words, i.e. those allowing of segmentation into morphemes
   

Ex. agreement, information, fearless, quickly, door-handle

2. 
   non-segmentable words, i.e. those not allowing of such segmentation.
   

Ex. house, girl, woman, husband
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.
adult-hood re-e-valu-ate
barbar-ian re-in-state
gaunt-let de-press-ed
star-dom test-ify
relat-ion-ship legal-ize

Three types of morphemic segmentability of words are distinguished: complete, conditional and defective.

Types of segmentability:

4. 
   complete segmentability – you can easily split a word, the morphemic structure of which is transparent enough, as their individual morphemes clearly stand out within the word lending themselves easily to isolation.
   

Ex. adult-hood
star-dom
relat-ion-ship
ex-pos-able
mis-apply

5. 
   conditional – semantically is not possible
   

Ex. re-ceive
de-ceive
ceive looks like a root, but it is not a root, segmentation is doubtful
ceive is pseudo morphene
re-tain, con-tain, de-tain (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, deorganise, decode neither the sound-clusters [ri-] or [di-] nor the [-tein] or [-si:v] possess any lexical or functional meaning of their own. 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.)
barbar-ian
re-quire