Surely every student was faced with such a definition as a morpheme. This concept is quite closely related to the composition of the word, and its knowledge helps to perform morphemic analysis. Let's talk about what it is. We will also understand what morphemic analysis is.
What is a morpheme?
A morpheme is the least
significant part of a word. The term was first introduced by the famous scientist Baduan de Courtenay in the middle of the XIX century and is still used in linguistics.
All words are composed of morphemes. They are the bricks from which words are made. Each component has its own meaning and role. The following types of morphemes are distinguished: mandatory and optional. Mandatory is always present in the word and is called the root. Optional can both be part of the token and not be part of it. These morphemes are called affixes. Let's look at each view separately.
Mandatory morphemes
As already mentioned, the mandatory morpheme in the Russian language is only one, and it is called the root. There is no such word that would exist without this morpheme. Words without a root (exception - some auxiliary parts of speech) are absent in Russian.
It is the main one, as it carries the main lexical meaning. For example, the token forest, forest, forest ranger combines one root - the forest . All these words have a similar meaning associated with the forest. The only thing is their difference in shades. So, a forest is a space covered with trees; forest - related to the forest; a forester is a person who guards him.
In complex words there are several roots, for example, in the word bright-faced there are two roots - light and face . Do not forget about this when parsing a word. Basically, complex words have two roots; in some cases, words with a large set may occur.
Optional morphemes
Optional morphemes of the Russian language are affixes. Among them are the following:
- prefixes, or prefixes;
- postfixes, or suffixes;
- inflections, or endings;
- interfixes.
They may be present in the word or not. Moreover, each new optional morpheme gives it a new meaning.
The first two types of morphemes convey lexical and grammatical meaning. Flexions express only the grammatical meaning of the word. Even the zero, that is, having no sound expression, ending shows what grammatical meaning the token has.
Prefixes and Postfixes
Let us first examine those morphemes that give new lexical and grammatical shades.
Prefixes are always located at the beginning of a word and change its meaning. In Russian, there are about 70 prefixes. Most of them are formed from prepositions. At school, they are often called prefixes. Each prefix has its own meaning and changes the tone of the word. For example, to go - to move somewhere; drive up - get closer to something.
At the same time, the lexical meaning of the word changes , but the part of speech to which it belongs remains unchanged.
Postfixes are always located between the root and inflection (if it is in the word). They serve not only to form a new meaning, but also to form a new part of speech. So, using the suffix -n- from the noun forest, the forest adjective was delighted.
Some suffixes form a new shade of meaning. So, there are diminutive suffixes, such as: -shush- , -chik- , -ochk- and others. Using them, tokens are formed with a new connotation of meaning. For example: an ear - an ear , a finger - a finger, a basket - a basket .
A word can have several prefixes and suffixes. It all depends on the structure of the lexeme, its meaning. Therefore, when analyzing morphemes of a word, special attention should be paid to this.
Interfixes
These morphemes serve to connect several roots in complex words. For example, the word shaker consists of two words - forehead and shake . They are interconnected by the –– interfix. Interfixes are not always studied at school, often they are talked about only in high school, and then briefly.
Word basis
Having learned that the morpheme is a significant part of the lexeme, one should also recall another important part - the basis. This is the unchangeable part of the word, that is, its part without ending. The base contains the basic lexical meaning and can consist of only one root or root and affix (affixes). In verbs, the stem can be interrupted by the ending if there is a postfix –s or –s . For example, in the word bought the base will be interrupted by the ending and look like bought-a-b .
Inflections
These morphemes are used to express grammatical meaning. In the school curriculum, they are called endings. With their help, the grammatical meaning is determined. For nouns, this is gender, number, case. Inflections are present in all parts of speech, excluding the immutable, such as adverb, union, preposition. In these parts of speech they do not stand out. In all other parts of speech, in the absence of an ending, it is taken as zero.
For example, in the word forest the ending will be zero , in the word forest the ending will be –a . In this case, the end of the word will express that the given noun is plural and is in the nominative case.
Morphemic parsing of the word
So, we found out that the morpheme is the least significant part of the token. Now let's talk about morpheme parsing. In order to correctly make morphemic analysis, it is necessary to adhere to the following rules.
1. First, we write out the analyzed token from the sentence or text in the form in which it is present there.
2. We determine the part of speech and whether it is variable. If so, go to step 3; if not, go to step 4.
3. Find the ending. To do this, we bow by childbirth or case, numbers. The variable part will be the ending.
4. Select the basis. Basis is the whole word without ending.
5. Find the root. For this, we select cognate words from different parts of the word.
6. Select the prefix that stands in front of the root.
7. Select suffixes. To do this, we select words with similar suffixes, but with different roots. Remember that some words may have several prefixes and suffixes. For example, the word unpleasant has two prefixes: pre-not-pleasant . And in the word dreamer there are three suffixes: dream-a-tel-nitsa .
That's the whole analysis of the composition.
Morphemic parsing example
Let's take a look at one word so that you see the principle of morphemic analysis and remember the sequence of actions. Take for example the sentence: "I have not seen the old man for a long time."
1. Written out the word "old man . "
2. Declined: the old man, the old man - a noun, changeable.
3. Declined again: the old man, the old man, the old people , the ending of the old man's words - a.
4. Discard the ending. The basis is the old man .
5. We select one-root lexemes: old age, aging - the root is old.
6. We have nothing before the root, which means that there is no prefix in the word.
7. We select the words with the suffix -ik-, if any. Man, nose - suffix - ik.
As you can see, there is nothing complicated in parsing a word. The main thing is to strictly follow the algorithm so as not to go astray and correctly determine everything, as well as understand what a morpheme is. Examples with different morphemes should also be learned to choose the right ones.
If you doubt the correctness of the analysis, you can always find the morpheme dictionary of the Russian language and look in it of what morphemes this or that word consists of, how exactly it is formed. You can use the dictionaries edited by Potikhi Z. A. or Tikhonov A. N.
So, we learned that a morpheme is the least significant part of a word, determined what morphemes are, talked about each of them. They also figured out how to correctly make a morphemic word analysis and examined an example of this analysis. They remembered dictionaries that will help you verify the correct parsing of a word. We hope the article was useful to you.