Lecture
Morphemics — the morphemic structure of a language (the totality and types of morphemes distinguishable in words), as well as the branch of linguistics that studies the morphological models of a language : the types and structure of morphemes, their formal varieties (morphs), and the regularities governing the arrangement of morphemes in more extended linguistic units (stems, word forms). Since affixes — grammatical morphemes — belong to the sphere of grammar, morphemics may be regarded as a part of grammar, encompassing aspects of morphology and word formation that describe affixes and the grammatical and word-formational meanings expressed by them .
The term «morphemics» is not generally accepted and came into wide use no earlier than the 1970s, when the academic «Grammar of the Contemporary Russian Literary Language» («Grammar-70») appeared, although by that time the theory of morphemes and certain principles of describing the morphemic level of language were already known.
In most conceptions, the morpheme is regarded as an abstract linguistic unit. The concrete realization of a morpheme in a text is called a morph, or (more often) a morph. Morphs representing one and the same morpheme may have a different phonetic shape depending on their environment within the word form. The set of morphs of one morpheme having the same phonemic composition is called an allomorph.
A word form (also form of a word ) — a word in the narrow sense, that is, a chain of phonemes possessing the features of a word, formally distinct from another such chain. For example, in the lines of A. S. Pushkin :
The following subdivisions of morphemics may be distinguished :
Since combinatorial sound alternations and structural models pertain to a greater or lesser degree to the sphere of morphonological phenomena, morphonology may be regarded as part of morphemics .
At present, methods for describing the morphemic level have been developed with respect to languages of various structural types. The principal methods are the descriptive-analytical method, which involves the construction of rules for isolating morphs and identifying the varieties of a single morpheme, and which is adopted, for example, in the academic «Russian Grammar» of 1980, and the generative-synthetic method — the construction of rules for deriving, from a morph taken as the underlying one, the other morphs of the same morpheme, found, in particular, in the works of D. S. Worth and V. G. Churganova .
Within the framework of research in morphemics, an inventory is carried out of the types and meanings of morphemes, as well as of morphonological phenomena, in grammars and morphemic dictionaries .
In contemporary morphemics there is a range of debated questions, among them :
Raven to raven flies,
Raven to raven calls —
five word forms are represented: voron (raven), k (to), voronu (to-raven), letit (flies), krichit (calls). However, there are only four lexemes here (or woírds in the most widespread sense), since the word forms voron and voronu belong to one and the same lexeme RAVEN: they have the same lexical meaning, but different grammatical meanings (nominative and dative case).
The word forms of one lexeme form an inflectional paradigm (voron, vorona, voronu…).
Plan of morphemic analysis
1. Write out the word in the form in which it is presented in the sentence. Determine the word as a part of speech (an inflected or an uninflected part of speech).
2. For an inflected word, isolate the ending and indicate its meaning. To determine the ending, the word must be declined or conjugated.
3. Indicate the stem of the word.
4. Isolate the root of the word; select cognate words.
5. Isolate the prefixes, suffixes, postfixes, connecting vowels (if there are any); select other words with the same prefixes, suffixes, etc., but with a different root.
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