Theoretical Grammar of English

Study questions

1. 
   What do you understand by “grammatical structure of a language”?
   
2. 
   What is the difference between synthetic and analytical languages?
   
3. 
   What are the basic grammatical means of the English language?
   
4. 
   Describe all the grammatical means of English.
   
5. 
   Compare the grammatical structure of English with the grammatical structure of your native language?
   
6. 
   What is the difference between lexical and grammatical meanings?
   

Lecture 3

The Morphemic Structure of the English Language

Problems to be discussed:

• 
  what operation is called "Morphemic analysis?
  
• 
  language and speech levels and their corresponding units
  
• 
  morpheme-morph-allomorph
  
• 
  types of morphemes from the point of view of their:
  

1. 
   function
   
2. 
   number correlation between form and meaning.
   

There are many approaches to the questions mentioned above. According to Zellig Harris(27) "The morphemic analysis is the operation by which the analyst isolates minimum meaningful elements in the utterances of a language, and decides which occurrences of such elements shall be regarded as occurrences of "the same" element".

The general procedure of isolating the minimum meaningful elements is as follows:
Step 1. The utterances of a language are examined (obviously) not all of them, but a sampling which we hope will be statistically valid. Recurrent partials with constant meaning (ran away in John ran away and Bill ran away) are discovered; recurrent partials not composed of smaller ones (way) are alternants or morphs. So are any partials not recurrent but left over when all recurrent ones are counted for. Every utterance is composed entirely of morphs. The division of a stretch of speech between one morph and another, we shall call a cut.
Step 2. Two or more morphs are grouped into a single morpheme if they:

1. 
   have the same meaning;
   
2. 
   never occur in identical environments and
   
3. 
   have combined environments no greater than the environments of some single alternant in the language.
   

Step 3. The difference in the phonemic shape of alternants of morphemes are organized and stated; this constitutes morphophonemics
Compare the above said with the conception of Ch. Hockett.