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Министерство науки и высшего образования Российской федерации

Московский Авиационный Институ

Институт иностранных языков

Реферат

на тему: Morphological structure of English word

Выполнил: Ерохин М.Д.

Москва

2011

This great topic considered the structure of English words includes many items. There are such as affixes, prefixes allomorphs etc.

In this work I want to try to learn these important lexical meanings.

And I hope the material I gathered with help of Arnold's book and other internet material will be interested for readers and help them to understand English better.

So, fistful I want to begin from the defining the Morphology.

Morphology studies the internal structure of words

There are many words in English that are fairly obviously analyzable into smaller grammatical units. For example, the word "unacceptability" can be divided into un-, accept, abil-, and -ity (abil- being a variant of -able). Of these, at least three are minimal grammatical units, in the sense that they cannot be analyzed into yet smaller grammatical units--un-, abil-, and ity. The status of accept, from this point of view, is somewhat uncertain. Given the existence of such forms as accede and accuse, on the one hand, and of except, exceed, and excuse, on the other, one might be inclined to analyze accept into ac- (which might subsequently be recognized as a variant of ad-) and -cept. The question is left open. Minimal grammatical units like un-, abil-, and -ity are what Bloomfield called morphemes; he defined them in terms of the "partial phonetic-semantic resemblance" holding within sets of words. For example, "unacceptable," "untrue," and "ungracious" are phonetically (or, phonologically) similar as far as the first syllable is concerned and are similar in meaning in that each of them is negative by contrast with a corresponding positive adjective ("acceptable," "true," "gracious"). This "partial phonetic-semantic resemblance" is accounted for by noting that the words in question contain the same morpheme (namely, un-) and that this morpheme has a certain phonological form and a certain meaning.

Morphs that are in complementary distribution and represent the same morpheme are said to be allomorphs of that morpheme. For example, the regular plurals of English nouns are formed by adding one of three morphs on to the form of the singular: /s/, /z/, or /iz/ (in the corresponding written forms both /s/ and /z/ are written -s and /iz/ is written -es). Their distribution is determined by the following principle:

if the morph to which they are to be added ends in a "sibilant" sound (e.g., s, z, sh, ch), then the syllabic allomorph /iz/ is selected (e.g., fish-es /fis-iz/, match-es /mac-iz/);

Otherwise the nonsyllabic allomorphs are selected, the voiceless allomorph /s/ with morphs ending in a voiceless consonant (e.g., cat-s /kat-s/) and the voiced allomorph /z/ with morphs ending in a vowel or voiced consonant (e.g., flea-s /fli-z/, dog-s /dog-z/). These three allomorphs, it will be evident, are in complementary distribution, and the alternation between them is determined by the phonological structure of the preceding morph. Thus the choice is phonologically conditioned.

Morpheme morphology words english

In linguistics, the smallest grammatical unit of speech; it may be a word, like "place" or "an," or an element of a word, like re- and -ed in "reappeared." So-called isolating languages, such as Vietnamese, have a one-to-one correspondence of morphemes to words; i.e., no words contain more than one morpheme. Variants of a morpheme are called allomorphs; the ending -s, indicating plural in "cats," "dogs," the -es in "dishes," and the -en of "oxen" are all allomorphs of the plural morpheme. The word "talked" is represented by two morphemes, "talk" and the past-tense morpheme, here indicated by -ed. The study of words and morphemes is included in morphology.

Affixation

Affixes, word elements attached to words, may either precede, as prefixes (do, undo; way, subway), or follow, as suffixes (do, doer; way, wayward). They may be native (overdo, waywardness), Greek (hyperbole, thesis), or Latin (supersede, pediment). Modern technologists greatly favour the neo-Hellenic prefixes macro-"long, large," micro- "small," para- "alongside," poly- "many," and the Latin mini-, with its antonym maxi-. Greek and Latin affixes have become so fully acclimatized that they can occur together in one and the same word, as, indeed, in "ac-climat-ize-d," just used, consisting of a Latin prefix plus a Greek stem plus a Greek suffix plus an English inflection. Suffixes are bound more closely than prefixes to the stems or root elements of words. Consider, for instance, the wide variety of agent suffixes in the nouns actor, artisan, dotard, engineer, financier, hireling, magistrate, merchant, scientist, secretary, songster, student, and worker. Suffixes may come to be attached to stems quite fortuitously, but, once attached, they are likely to be permanent. At the same time, one suffix can perform many functions. The suffix -er denotes the doer of the action in the words worker, driver, and hunter; the instrument in chopper, harvester, and roller; and the dweller in Icelander, Londoner. It refers to things or actions associated with the basic concept in the words breather, "pause to take breath"; diner, "dining car on a train"; and fiver, "five-pound note." In the terms disclaimer, misnomer, and rejoinder (all from French) the suffix denotes one single instance of the action expressed by the verb. Usage may prove capricious. Whereas a writer is a person, a typewriter is a machine. For some time a computer was both, but now, with the invention and extensive use of electronic apparatus, the word is no longer used of persons.

Allomorphs

The combining from allo-from Greek allos `other' is used to denote elements of a group whose members together constitute a structural unit of the language (allophones, allomorphs). Thus, -ion/-tion/-sion/-ation/ are the positional variants of the same suffix. to show this they are taken together and separated by slight deference in sound form depending on the final phoneme of preceding stem.

An allomorphs is defined as a positional variant of a morpheme occurring in a specific environment and characterized by complementary distribution. Complementary distribution is said to take place when two linguistic variants cannot appear in the same environment. Thus, stems ending in consonants take as a rule -ation (liberation); stems ending in pt, however, take -tion (corruption) amd the final t becomes fused with the suffix.

Allomorph will also occur among prefixes. Their form then depends on the initials of the stem with which they will assimilate. A prefix such as im- occurs before bilabials (impossible), its allomorph ir- before r (irregular), il- before l (illegal). It is in- before all other consonants and vowels (indirect, inability)

In American linguistic allomorphs are treated on a purely semantic basis, so that not only [iz] in dishes, [z] in dreams and [s] in books, which are allomorphs in the sense given above, but also formally unrelated [эn] in oxen, the vowel modification in tooth:: teeth and zero suffix in many sheep are considered to be allomorphs of the same morpheme on the strength of the sameness of their grammatical meaning and become pure abstractions.

Suffixes

Classification of suffixes