On the basis of the degree of self-dependence, "free" mor­phemes and "bound" morphemes are distinguished. Bound mor­phemes cannot form words by themselves, they are identified only as component segmental parts of words. And zero-inflections are referred to as “zero-morphs”.

    On the basis of formal presentation, “overt” morphemes and “covert” morphemes are distinguished. Overt morphemes are genuine, explicit morphemes building up words; the covert morpheme is identified as a contrastive absence of morpheme expressing a certain function.

    On the basis of segmental relation, “segmental” morphemes and “supra-segmental” morphemes are distinguished. For example, supra-segmental morphemes are intonation contours, accents, pauses.

    On the basis of grammatical alternation, “additive” morphemes (outer grammatical suffixes) and “replacive” (root morphemes) morphemes are distinguished. Additive morphemes are outer grammatical suffixes, since, as a rule, they are opposed to the absence of morphemes in grammatical alternation. Look+ed, small + er. The root phonemes of grammatical interchange are considered as replacive morphemes, since they replace one another in the paradigmatic forms. Dr-i-ve - dr-o –ve – dr –i ven.

    On the basis of linear characteristics, “continuous” morphemes and “discontinuous” morphemes are distinguished. By the discontinuous morpheme, opposed to the common, i.e. uninterruptedly expressed, continuous morpheme, a two-element grammatical unit is meant which is identified in the analytical grammatical form comprising an auxiliary word and a grammatical suffix.

              Be …ing – for the continuous verb forms

              Have …en – for the perfect verb forms

              Be …en - for the passive verb forms

Thus, the properties of the morpheme and the word are fundamental from the point of view of their systemic status and therefore require detailed investigations and descriptions. The morpheme is a meaningful segmental component of the word; the morpheme is formed by phonemes; as a meaningful component of the word it is elementary.

References

1.Bloch M.Y. A Course in Theoretical English Grammar. - M., 2000. – p.6-26

2.Блох М.Я. Теоретические основы грамматики – М., 2000

CATEGORIAL STRUCTURE OF THE WORD

1. Grammatical meaning

2. Grammatical form

3.Grammatical categories

4.The theory of oppositions, types of oppositions: privative, gradual, equipollent; binary, ternary etc. Oppositions in grammar

5. Grammatical means

Terms: grammatical category, opposition, paradigm, grammatical meaning and means, opposition, binary opposition, gradual opposition, equipollent, oppositional reduction, neutralization, transposition, synthetical means, analytical means, suppletivity.

Grammatical meaning

The most general meanings rendered by language and expressed by systemic correlations of word-forms are interrupted in linguistics as categorical grammatical meanings. Grammatical meaning is useful to compare with lexical meaning. Both of these types of meanings have differences and similarities. Their similarity consists in content-based part of linguistic units, they are the units of content and both of them have abstract character.

The difference between lexical and grammatical meaning is first, that lexical meanings are much more numerous than grammatical.

A table, a house, a bird à each of it has lexical meaning but they are united by the grammatical meaning “thingness”.

Second, lexical meanings are individual, grammatical meanings are above individual. Third, appearing as the generalization of individual lexical meanings, grammatical meaning in diachronic approach is later formation than lexical.

Forth, grammatical meaning is obligatory and is determined in every unit of the lexicon, though lexical meaning of some units of the lexicon may be completely lost (article) or unclear (prepositions, particles, conjunctions).

Grammatical form

Grammatical form is closely connected with grammatical meaning. There is double way to view the outer side of linguistic units. From one side the attention of a researcher can be on morphological structure of a word, on the mechanics of the combination of morphemes inside of it, and from the other side from what kind of grammatical meaning and additional meaning.

Tables à From lexical aspect there are 2 morphemes in this word which consists of a stem and flexion. From grammatical point of view this is the form of plural number which is made up from the singular form and the element denoting plurality.

Has been waiting à From the morphological point we deal with analytical form of the verb to wait, consisting of 4 morphemes: three of them are free (has, been, wait-) and “-ing” is a bound morpheme.

Grammatical categories

Grammatical category is a system of expressing a generalized grammatical meaning by means of paradigmatic correlation of grammatical forms. Grammatical categories are divided into following types:

a) nominal and verbal. Grammatical categories which characterize nominal parts of speech are called nominal (case, gender, number and so on), and those which characterize verbal parts of speech are called verbal (aspect, mood, voice, tense and others).

b) general and individual. Under general category we understand the category without any concrete lingual connection to any language. And individual category is a category realized in concrete language (for example, a category of tense in the English language).

c) word-changing and classifying. First are realized by opposing two or more linguistic forms on the level of paradigmatics. Word-changing grammatical category is not fixed constantly to the form of the word, is not its permanent classification feature and is not indicated in the dictionaries as the feature of lexeme. Word-changing categories are the category of number of nouns, the category of comparison of adjectives, the category of tense of verbs and so on. Classifying grammatical categories are category of transitiveness/intransitiveness, animateness/inanimateness.

d) morphological and syntactical. Morphological categories refer to the sphere of morphology and characterize the number of grammatical features of words as parts of speech (categories of number, case, gender, mood, voice and etc.) syntactical grammatical categories are transitiveness and intransitiveness, coordination/subordination, predicativeness, modality and so on.

e) overt and covert. Overt grammatical categories are those which are determined by the word-form without turning to context. Table – tables

covert grammatical categories are those which potentially are in lexeme but are determined through the context. For example, most English verbs have notes vt (verb transitive) and vi (verb intransitive), so the category of transitiveness/ intransitiveness of the verb but is manifested in the context.

    He walks in the park every evening (intran.).

    He walks his dog in the park every evening (trans.).