Lecture 4-《英语词汇学》第四章教案

Lecture 4

讲授题目：Morphological Structure of English Words

所属章节：《现代英语词汇学概论》之第2章

计划学时：2 periods

教学方法：传统讲授法

参考资料：《英语词汇学教程》、《英语词汇学》

教学目的和要求：通过本单元的学习，学生对词的

形态结构、词的构成要素—词素、词干、词根有基本的了解和认识。

▪教学重点：

1) Morpheme;

2) Types of morphemes.

教学难点：

1) Concept of morpheme;

2) Morpheme、stem 、root.

Lecture 4

Before we actually deal with the means of word-formation, we need to analyze the morphological structure of words and gain a working knowledge of the different word-forming elements which are to be used to create new words.

Morphological Structure of English Words

1. Morpheme (词素/语素/形位)

It seems to be generally agreed that a word is the smallest unit of a language that stands a lone to communicate meaning. Structurally, however, a word is not the smallest unit because many words can be separated into even smaller meaningful units. Look at the following items:

Morphological Structure of English Words

▪ yes yes

▪ unhappiness un-happi-ness

▪ horses horse-s

▪ talking talk-ing

Yes has no internal grammatical structure. We could

analyze its constituent sounds, [ j ]、[ e ]、[ s ], but none of these has a meaning in isolation. So the three sounds are called phonemes rather than morphemes. By contrast, horse, talk and happy plainly have a meaning, as do the elements attached to them: un-carries a negative meaning; -ness expresses a state or quality; -s expresses plural; and –ing helps to convey a sense of duration. These minimal meaningful units are known as morphemes. In other words, ①the morpheme is ‗the smallest functioning unit in the composition of words‘ (crysta l 1985)

▪②The morpheme is the smallest meaningful linguistic unit of language, not divisible or analyzable into smaller forms.

▪What is usually considered a single word in English may be composed of one or more morphemes:

▪One morpheme---nation

▪Two morphemes---nation-al

▪Three morphemes---nation-al-ize

▪Four morphemes---de-nation-al-ize（使…非国有化）

▪More than four morphemes---de-nation-al-iz-ation

2. Allomorphs(词素词素变体/语素变体/形位变体)

―An allomorph is any of the variant forms of a morpheme as conditioned（受制约）by pos ition or adjoining sounds‖ (Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language).

Allomorphs do not occur at random, but are phonetically conditioned and thus predictable:

▪①The plural morpheme ｛-s｝is realized by [s] after the sounds [ t, p，k ] as in packs, cheats, maps; by [z] after [ b, d, g] as in beds, bottles, fads and by [ -iz ]after / s, z, ∫, З, t∫, dЗ/ as in classes, dishes, damages, etc.

▪②There are cases where the allomorphs of the plural morpheme are unusual. It can be realized by the change of an internal vowel as in foot-feet, man-men, woman-women, goose-geese or by zero morph as in deer – deer, fish-fish. ▪③The same is true of the past tense marker ｛-ed｝, which