语言学教程胡壮麟(第四版) 第3章

Chapter 3 From Morpheme to Phrase

第一部分The formation of word——Morpheme词的构成

1. Morpheme 词素的定义

Morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of language in regard to the relationship between sounding and meaning, a unit that cannot be divided into further smaller units without destroying or drastically altering the meaning, such as boy and –s in boys, check and –ing in checking. And the systematic study of morpheme is a branch of linguistics called morphology

2. Types of morphemes 词素的种类

①Free morpheme and bound morpheme 自由词素和黏着词素

Free morphemes: Those that may occur alone, that is, those which may make up words by themselves, are free morphemes, such as Dog, nation.

Bound morphemes: Those that cannot occur alone. They must appear with at least one different morpheme, are called bound morphemes, for example, the word distempered has three morphemes, namely, dis-, temper, and –ed, of which temper is a free morpheme, dis- and –ed are two bound morphemes.

②Root, affix and stem 词根、词缀和词干

A root is the base form of a word that cannot be further analyzed without destroying its meaning. That is to say, it is that part of the word that remains when all the affixes are removed. For example, in the word internationalism, after the removal of inter-, -al and -ism, what is left is the root nation. Therefore, all words contain a root morpheme.

A root may be free or bound. First, free root morphemes are those that can stand by themselves and are the base forms of words, such as black in black, blackbird, blackboard, blacksmith. A language may contain many morphemes of this type. Second, there are relatively a few bound root morphemes in English, such as -ceive in receive, perceive and conceive: -mit in remit, permit, commit and submit: -tain in retain, contain and maintain, among many others

A few English roots may have both free and bound variants. E.g. the word sleep is a free root morpheme, whereas slep- in the past tense form slept cannot exist by itself, and therefore bound.

An affix is the collective term for the type of morpheme that can be used only when added to another morpheme. They are classified into three subtypes, namely, prefix, infix, and suffix. Prefix such as para-, mini- in paragraph and miniskirt; Infix such as –ize, -tion in colonize and revolution; Suffix such as –ee- in feet (vs. foot).

A stem is any morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an inflectional affix can be added, so both friend- in friends and friendship- in friendships are stems. The former shows that a stem may be the same as a root, whereas the latter shows that a stem may contain a root and one, or more than one, derivational affix.

③Inflectional affix and derivational affix 屈折词缀和派生词缀

Inflection is the manifestation of grammatical relationships through the addition of inflectional affixes, such as number, person, finiteness, aspect, and case, which don’t change the grammatical class of the stems to which they are attached.

The distinction between inflectional affixes and derivational affixes is sometimes known as a distinction between inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes. We can tell the difference between them with the following ways:

1)First, inflectional affixes are generally less productive than derivational affixes. They often add a minute or delicate grammatical function to the stem, such as toys, walks, John’s. Therefore, they serve to produce different forms of a single lexical item. However, derivational affixes are very productive in making new words. For example, cite, citation, cital. So derivational affixes often change the lexical meaning.

2)Second, inflectional affixes don’t change the word class of the word they attach to, such as flower, flowers, whereas derivational affixes might or might not, such as the relation between small and smallness for the former, and that between brother and brotherhood for the latter.

3)Third, that whether one should add inflectional affixes or not depends very often on other factors within the phrase or sentence at stake. For example, the choice of likes in “The boy likes to navigate on the Internet.” is determined by the subject the boy in the sentence. However, derivational affixes are more often based on