Page 16 - 6807
P. 16

lexical  or  functional  meaning  of  their  own.  Therefore,  the
                            morphemes making up words of conditional segmentability differ
                            from morphemes making up words of complete segmentability in
                            that the former do not reach the full status of morphemes for the
                            semantic reason and that is why a special term is applied to them –
                            pseudomorphemes or quasi-morphemes.
                                  Defective  morphemic  segmentability  is  the  property  of
                            words  whose  unique  morphemic  components  seldom  or  never
                            recur  in  other  words  (e.g.  in  the  words  cranberry,  gooseberry,
                            strawberry defective morphemic segmentability is obvious due to
                            the  fact  that  the  morphemes  cran-,  goose-,  straw-  are  unique
                            morphemes).
                                  Morphemes can be classified into.
                                  1.  From  semantic  point  of  view:  roots  and  affixes/non-
                            roots. A root  is the lexical nucleus of a word bearing the major
                            individual meaning common to a set of semantically related words,
                            constituting  one  word  cluster/word-family  (e.g.  learn-learner-
                            learned learnable; heart-hearten, dishearten, hear-broken, hearty,
                            kind-hearted  etc.)  with  which  no  grammatical  properties  of  the
                            word are connected. In this respect, the peculiarity of English as a
                            unique language is explained by its analytical language structure –
                            morphemes  are  often  homonymous  with  independent  units
                            (words). A morpheme that is homonymous with a word is called a
                            root morpheme.
                                  Here we have to mention the difference between a root and a
                            stem.  A  root  is  the  ultimate  constituent  which  remains  after  the
                            removal  of  all  functional  and  derivational  affixes  and  does  not
                            admit any further analysis. Unlike a root, a stem is that part of the
                            word  that  remains  unchanged  throughout  its  paradigm  (formal
                            aspect).  For  instance,  heart-hearts-to  one’s  heart’s  content  vs.
                            hearty-heartier-the heartiest. It is the basic unit at the derivational
                            level, taking the inflections which shape the word grammatically
                            as a part of speech. There are three types of stems: simple, derived
                            and compound.













                                                           16
   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21