Analysis into immediate constituents

Word families. MORPHOLOGICAL Typology of words

Among morphemes, the root stays a key element forming word families. So, as it has been mentioned, it is the common element of words within a word-family. Thus, -heart- is the common root of the following series of words: heart, hearten, dishearten, heartily, heartless, hearty, heartiness, sweetheart, heart-broken, kind-hearted, whole-heartedly, etc.

The root word heart is unsegmentable. The morphemic structure of all the other words in this word-family is obvious — they are segmentable as consisting of at least two distinct morphemes. They may be further subdivided into: 1) those formed by affixation or affixational derivatives consisting of a root morpheme and one or more affixes: hearten, dishearten, heartily, heartless, hearty, heartiness; 2) compounds, in which two, or very rarely more, stems simple or derived are combined into a lexical unit: sweetheart, heart-shaped, heart-broken or 3) derivational com­pounds where words of a phrase are joined together by composition and affixation: kind-hearted. This last process is also called phrasal derivation ((kind heart) + -ed)).

A synchronic morphological analysis is most effectively accom­plished by the procedure known as the analysis into immediate constituents (IC's). Immediate constituents are any of the two meaningful parts forming a larger linguistic unity. The main opposition dealt with is the opposition of stem and affix. It is a kind of segmentation revealing not the history of the word but its m o t i v a t i o n, i.e. the data the listener has to go by in understanding it.

The method is based on the fact that a word characterized by mor­phological divisibility (analysable into morphemes) is involved in cer­tain structural correlations.

A sample analysis which has become almost classical, being repeat­ed many times by many authors, is L. Bloomfield's analysis of the word ungentlemanly. As the word is convenient we take the same example. Comparing this word with other utterances the listener recognizes the morpheme -un- as a negative prefix because he has often come across words built on the pattern un- + adjective stem: uncertain, unconscious, uneasy, unfortunate, unmistakable, unnatural. One can also come across the adjective gentlemanly. Thus, at the first cut we obtain the following immediate constituents: un- + gentlemanly. If we continue our analysis, we see that although gent occurs as a free form in low colloquial usage, no such word as lemanly may be found either as a free or as a bound constituent, so this time we have to separate the final morpheme. We are justified in so doing as there are many adjectives following the pattern noun stem + -ly, such as womanly, masterly, scholarly, soldierly with the same se­mantic relationship of 'having the quality of the person denoted by the stem'; we also have come across the noun gentleman in other utterances. The two first stages of analysis resulted in separating a free and a bound form: 1) un- + gentlemanly, 2) gentleman-+ -ly. The third cut has its peculiarities. The division into gent- + -leman is obviously impossible as no such patterns exist in English, so the cut is gentle- + -man. A similar pattern is observed in nobleman, and so we state adjective stem + man. The word gentle is open to discussion. It is obviously divisible from the etymo­logical viewpoint: gentle < (O)Fr gentil<Lat genii Us permits to dis­cern the root or rather the radical element gent- and the suffix -il. But since we are only concerned with synchronic analysis this division is not relevant.

If, however, we compare the adjective gentle with such adjectives as brittle, fertile, fickle, juvenile, little, noble, subtle and some more containing the suffix -le/-ile added to a bound stem, they form a pat­tern for our case. The bound stem that remains is present in the follow­ing group: gentle, gently, gentleness, genteel, gentile, gentry, etc.

One might observe that our procedure of looking for similar utter­ances has shown that the English vocabulary contains the vulgar word gent that has been mentioned above, meaning 'a person pretending to the status of a gentleman' or simply 'man', but then there is no such struc­ture as noun stem + -le, so the word gent should be interpreted as a shortening of gentleman and a homonym of the bound stem in ques­tion.

To sum up: as we break the word we obtain at any level only two IC's, one of which is the stem of the given word. All the time the analy­sis is based on the patterns characteristic of the English vocabulary. As a pattern showing the interdependence of all the constituents seg­regated at various stages we obtain the following formula:

un- + {[(gent- + -le) + -man] + -ly}

Breaking a word into its immediate constituents we observe in each cut the structural order of the constituents (which may differ from their actual sequence). Furthermore we shall obtain only two constituents at each cut, the ultimate constituents, however, can be arranged ac­cording to their sequence in the word: un+-gent-+-le+-man+-ly.

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