The Structure of English Words and Word-building in English
Plan 1. The structure of English words and its specific features. 2. Different types of words. 3. Various ways of word-building in English. 4. Conversion as a non-affixed word-building device. If we define a word as an autonomous unit of language in which a given meaning is associated with a given sound complex which is susceptible of a given grammatical employment and able to form a sentence by itself we'll have the possibility to distinguish it from the оther fundamental language unit - the morpheme. The morpheme is also an association of a given meaning with a given sound pattern. But unlike a word it is not autonomous. Morphemes occur in speech only as constituent parts of words, not independently. Morphemes are not divisible into smaller meaningful units. That’s why the morpheme may be defined as the minimum meaningful language unit. According to the role, morphemes may play in constructing words, they are subdivided into roots and affixes. The morpheme which bears the main lexical meaning of the word is called a root morpheme. If we take such groups of words as end, ending, endless, unending, endlessness, endlessly or boy, boyhood, boyish, the morphemes which are the lexical nuclei of the words are end and boy. A root may be also regarded as the ultimate constituent element which remains after the removal of all affixes and does not admit any further analysis. It is the common element of words within a word-family. Thus "heart"; is the common root of the following words: heart, heartily, heartless, hearty, heartiness, kind-hearted, etc. Alongside with root morphemes there exist affixational morphemes or affixes which are subdivided into suffixes and prefixes. According to their function and meaning affixes are further subdivided into derivational аnd inflexious which carry only grammatical meaning and are used for the formation of word-forms. We must distinguish a root from a stem. A root together with derivational affixes makes up a stem.
e.g. Pave – ment - s â â â pavements root derivational form-changing suffix suffix
stem
The stem оf the word “smaller” is “small”, “gives” – “give”. Roots and derivational affixes are easily distinguished and the difference between them is clearly felt. It should be noted that in different positions some morphemes may take different phonetic shapes. Thus, for instance, -ion/ tion/ sion / ation / - are the positional variants of the same affix. They don't differ in meaning or function but show a slight difference in sound form depending on the final phoneme of the preceding stem. They are considered as variants of one and the same morpheme and are called its allomorphs. Thus stems ending in consonants take as a rule – ation (dictate – dictation) but in pt – tion (corrupt – corruption, the final i becomes fused with the suffix ). Allomorphs also occur among prefixes. Their form then depends on the initials of the word with which they assimilate. e.g. in - before labials gives im: impossible, immediate before r gives ir: irregular before 1 - il: illegal In all other cases and vowels it is in -: indirect, inability. In American descriptive linguistics 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 explained above, but also formerly unrelated / en / in "oxen"; and zero suffix in "many sheep"; are considered to be allomorphs on the ground of the sameness of their grammatical meaning. This needs a serious re-thinking as within that kind of approach morphemes cease to be linguistic units combining the two fundamental aspects of form and meaning and become pure abstractions. The name "morpheme"-form turns into misnomer because all connection with form is lost. As to their morphemic structure words are subdivided into monomorphic and polymorphic. Monomorphic or root-words consist of only one root-morpheme. e.g. dog, small, make, give, boy. All polymorphic words fall into 2 subgroups: derived words and compound words. Derived words are composed of one root-morpheme and one or more derivational morpheme: disagreeable, driver, notable, etc. Compound words contain at least two root morphemes: school-master, blackboard, weekend, looking-glass, kind-hearted, good-natured etc. Among compound words we distinguish compounds proper and derived compounds. e.g. 1) to tip-toe, to white-wash, a fountain-pen 2) two-seater, week-ender, blue-eyed The suffixes in these words refer to the whole compound, not to its last element. Comparing the role each of these structural types of words plays in the language, we can easily perceive that they are not of equal importance. It was counted that derived words in different parts of speech comprise the largest part of the English vocabulary. But if we consider the frequency value of these words in actual speech, we shall see that root-words occupy a predominant place. In English according to the recent frequency counts, about 60% of the total number of adjectives in current use are root-words that constitute the foundation and the backbone of the vocabulary and are of the paramount importance in speech. It should also be mentioned that root-words are characterized by a high-degree of collacability and they usually are polysemantic. The specific features of the structure of English words depend on the grammar system (structure) of the language. The root in English is very often homonymous with the word. The influence of the analytical structure of the language is obvious. An English word does not necessarily contain formatives indicating to what part of speech it belongs. This holds true even with respect to inflective parts of speech, e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives; change, talk, walk, rest, back - 5 parts of speech. The number of affixes in English is far fewer than in Russian. We often see that lexical meanings expressed in Russian by means of affixation are rendered in English analytically: людці - petty people садочок - a little garden домище – a big house
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