The Morphemic Structure of the English Language

1.What operation is called "morphemic analysis?"

According to Zellig Harris "The morphemic analysis is the operation by which the
analyst isolates minimum meaningful elements in the utterances of a language, and
decides which occurrences of such elements shall be regarded as occurrences of
"the same" element".

2. What are the procedures for revealing morphemes suggested by Z. Harris

and Ch. Hockett?
Zellig Harris Ch. Hockett
Step 1. The utterances of a language Step 1. All the utterances of the
are examined (obviously) not all of language before (us) the analyst
them, but a sampling which we hope recorded in some phonemic notation.
will be statistically valid. Recurrent Step 2. The notations are now
partials with constant meaning (ran examined, recurrent partials with
away in John ran away and Bill ran constant meaning are discovered; those
away) are discovered; recurrent partials not composed of smaller ones are
not composed of smaller ones (way) morphs. So are any partials not
are alternants or morphs. So are any recurrent but left over when all
partials not recurrent but left over when recurrent ones are accounted for:
all recurrent ones are counted for. therefore every bit of phonemic
Every utterance is composed entirely of material belongs to one morphs or
morphs. The division of a stretch of another. By definition, a morph has the
speech between one morph and same phonemic shape in all its
another, we shall call a cut. occurrences; and (at this stage) every
Step 2. Two or more morphs are morph has an overt phonemic shape,
grouped into a single morpheme if but a morph is not necessarily
they: a) have the same meaning; b) composed of a continuous
never occur in identical environments uninterrupted stretch of phonemes. The
and c) have combined environments no line between two continuous morphs is
greater than the environments of some a cut.
single alternant in the language. Step 3. Omitting doubtful cases,
Step 3. The difference in the phonemic morphs are classed on the basis of
shape of alternants of morphemes are shape and canonical forms are
organized and stated; this constitutes tentatively determined.
morphophonemics Step 4. Two or more morphs are
grouped into a single morpheme if they
fit the following grouping -
 requirements: a) they have the same
meaning; b) they are in non-contrastive
distribution; c) the range of resultant
morpheme is not unique.
Step 5. It is very important to
remember that if in this procedure one
comes across to alternative
possibilities, choice must be based
upon the following order of priority: a)
tactical simplicity b) morphophonemic
simplicity c) conformity to canonical
forms. Thus the first cut of utterance
into the smallest meaningful units is
called morph.

3. What is a morpheme?
The morphs that have identical meanings are grouped into one morpheme. It
means the morphs and morphemes are speech and language units that have both
form (or shape) and meanings. The smallest meaningful unit of language is called a
morpheme.

4. What is a morph?
The smallest meaningful unit of speech is called a morph. The morphs that have
identical meanings are grouped into one morpheme.

5. What is an allomorph?
There’s a notion of allomorph in linguistics. By allomorphs, the linguists
understand the morphs that have identical meanings and that are grouped into one
morpheme. There may be another definition of the allomorphs: the variants (or
options, or alternates ) of a morpheme are called allomorphs.

6. What are the criteria to classify morphemes?

Morphemes can be classified from different viewpoints: 1. functional 2. number
correlation between form and content. The first one can be shown in the following
scheme: Morphemes Lexical grammatical free bound free bound The second one
can also be shown in the same way: Morphemes overt Zero empty discontinuous
form meaning.
7. What morphemes do you know according to the functional classification?
From the point of view of function they may be lexical and grammatical.
The lexical morphemes are those that express full lexical meaning of their own
and are associated with some object, quality, action, number of reality, like: lip,
red, go, one and so on. The lexical morphemes can be subdivided into lexical - free
and lexical - bound morphemes.
The grammatical morphemes are those that are used either to connect words in
sentences or to form new grammatical forms of words. The content of such
morphemes are connected with the world of reality only indirectly therefore they
are also called structural morphemes, e.g., shall, will, be, have, is, - (e)s, -(e)d and
so on. As it is seen from the examples the grammatical morphemes have also two
subtypes: grammatical - free and grammatical - bound.

8. What types of morphemes are distinguished according to the criterion of

number correlation between form and content?
From the point of view of number correlation between form and content there may
be overt, zero, empty and discontinuous morphemes. By overt morpheme, the
linguists understand morphemes that are represented by both form and content
like: eye, bell, big and so on. Zero morphemes are those that have (meaning)
content but do not have explicitly expressed forms. These morphemes are revealed
by means of comparison: ask – asks high –higher. Empty morphemes are those
that have form but no content. In contemporary English there are cases when two
forms express one meaning like: He is writing a letter Two morphemes in this
sentence "is" and " - ing" express one meaning: a continuous action. Such
morphemes are called discontinuous morphemes .