Státnice z anglická filologie – morfologie a syntax (basic units of linguistic analysis in morphology and syntax)

Basic units of linguistic analysis in morphology and syntax (morpheme, free, bound; lexical, functional/grammatical, inflectional, derivational), morph, allomorph, morphophonology, syntactic phrase, root, stem)

Morphology

– Deals with application of an abstract rule
– If we know morphology, we consequently know what parts re words made of + what these individual parts mean

Morpheme

– The smallest linguistic unit which carries a semantic meaning
– Meaning can be either a) lexical or b) grammatical – e.g. ‚s has a plural meaning

– with respect to their independence
a) bound – e.g. -er (heavier)
b) free – e.g. more (more beautiful)

– with respect to position
a) prefix – preceeding the lexical morpheme, e.g. discomfort
b) suffix – following the lexical morpheme, e.g. truly
c) interfix – inserting in the middle, e.g. pipecoline (pe ? used in chemistry to say that the process hydrogenation is complete)
d) circumfix – around the lexical morpheme, e.g. superlative gradation or verbal tenses

– with respect to meaning
a) stem (free)/base (bound)
b) function word (free)/affix (bound)

1. non-stem morphemes wit respect to meaning
a. derivational affix – creates a new word, e.g. walk -> walker
b. inflectional affix – creates a new form within a paradigm, e.g. walk -> walked

Free morphemes

• can stay alone

a) lexical words – have full meaning, are from open class – are received automatically to the language – nouns, verbs, adjective, adverbs; can create a sentence just by themselves – e.g. Stop!
b) functional words/grammatical words – don’t have lexical meaning -> meaning can be interpreted only in the context; cannot create the sentence alone; are from closed class – mainly pronouns, conjunctions, auxiliaries, prepositions; are rarely stressed

bound morpheme

– cannot stay alone -> must be connected to another morpheme
– base = base of a word to which other morphemes are added
– derivational – create new words, e.g. writer
– grammatical – change the word within its paradigm, e.g. writers

morph

• the smallest unit of parole/of concrete utterance
  – is the actual realisation of morpheme
  – cannot be segmented any further
  – one morph can have several allomorphs

allomorph

• variants of a morpheme
  – a unit of meaning which can very in sound without changing meaning
  – e.g. plural markers in English

room

•  primary lexical unit of a word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced to smaller constituents
  – can be a synonym o base morpheme
  – an element from which words are derived

stem

• the part of a word that is common to all its inflected variants (or = a base of a word to which inflectional suffixes are added)

e.g. destabilized
– root = -stabil-
– stem = destabilize

morphonology

•  is a branch of linguistics which studies the phonological structure of morphemes
  – the study of the relations between morphemes and their phonological realizations
  – e.g. different pronunciations for the past tense marker „-ed“.

Syntax phrase  viz. question 13 + 16