Segmentation of words into morphemes

Lecture 6. Word-structure

Synonymy and antonymy

Words may also be classified by the criterion of semantic similarity and semantic contrasts into synonyms and antonyms.

Synonyms are words different in their sound-form, but similar in their denotational meaning and interchangeable at least in some contexts. For example, to begin, to start, to commence, initiate, originate, create, arise.

Synonyms may also be defined as words belonging to the same part of speech and possessing one or more identical or nearly identical denotational meanings, interchangeable, at least, in some contexts, without any considerable alteration in denotaional meaning, but differing in phonemic shape, morphemic composition, shades of meaning, connotations, affective value, style, valency and idiomatic use.

Synonyms form a synonymic set comprising a synonymic dominant. The synonymic dominant is the most general synonym containing the specific features rendered by all the other members of the set.For example, the word ghost in the set specter, phantom, spirit, spook.

If the difference in the meaning of synonyms concerns the notion or the emotion expressed, the synonyms are classed as ideographic synonyms. For example, lonely, alone.

Contextual synonyms are similar in meaning only under some specific distributional conditions. For example, the verbs bear, suffer, stand are semantically different and not interchangeable except when used in the negative form can’t bear, can’t suffer, can’t stand.

Antonyms are words different in their sound-form and characterized by different types of semantic contrast of their denotational meaning and interchangeable at least in some contexts.

For example, to ask, toanswer.

Antonyms may also be defined as two or rarely more words of the same part of speech that are identical in style and nearly identical in distribution, associated and used together so that their denotative meanings render contrary or contradictory notions. For example, the antonymic pair love:: hate. There are derivational antonyms: unknown:: known; useful:: useless.

Polysemantic words may have antonymous meanings in their semantic structure; for example, to dust means “to wipe the dust” and “to spread the dust”. This feature is called enantiosemy.

Antonyms may be grouped into contradictories, e.g. dead:: alive, contraries, e.g. cold:: hot, and incompatibles, e.g. red entails the exclusion of black, blue yellow.

Words consist of morphemes. A morpheme is defined as the smallest two-facet linguistic unit, in which a given sound-pattern is associated with a certain meaning and which cannot be further segmented into smaller units of the same level without loosing its constitutive essence, and which can function in speech only as a constituent part of the word.

E.g.: words like reader, driller fall into the morphemes read-, drill-, and –er, by virtue of the recurrence of the morpheme –er in these and other similar words and by virtue of the recurrence of the morphemes read- and drill- in such words as reading, a reading-room and to drill, a drill, drilling, a drill-press.

By the morphemic structure all English words fall into two classes:

Class 1 – segmentable words allowing of segmentation into morphemes; e.g. reader, reading-room.

Class 2 – non-segmentable words not allowing of segmentation into morphemes; e.g.: house, husband, man, woman.

Segmentable words have different degrees of morphemic segmentability. By the degrees of morphemic segmentability we distinguish three types of morphemic segmentability: complete, conditional and defective.

Complete morphemic segmentability is characteristic of those words whose morphemic structure is transparent enough to let the morphemes stand out clearly and be easily isolated. The transparent morphemic structure of a segmentable word is conditioned by the fact that its constituent morphemes recur with the same meaning in a number of other words. E.g.: reader, reading, reading-room cf. with briefer, briefing, briefing-room.

Conditional morphemic segmentability characterizes words whose segmentation into the constituent morphemes is doubtful for semantic reasons because they are composed of pseudo-morphemes or quasi-morphemes.

E.g.: In words like retain, detain and receive, deceive the sound-clusters [ri], [di] seem, on the one hand, to be singled out quite easily due to their recurrence in a number of words. On the other hand, they have nothing in common with the phonetically identical morphemes re- and de- as found in the words like rewrite, reorganize.

Neither the sound-clusters [ri] or [di], nor the sound-clusters [-tain] or [-ceive] possess any lexical or functional meaning of their own. The type of meaning that can be ascribed to them is only a differential and distributional meaning.

Defective morphemic segmentability is the property of words in which one of the component morphemes is a unique morpheme that seldom or never recurs in other words. One of the component morphemes is a unique morpheme in the sense that it does not recur in a different linguistic environment. E.g.: the morpheme pock- in the word pocket is a unique morpheme because the sound-cluster [pok] does not occur in any other word of Modern English. The morpheme pock- has the status of a morpheme with a denotational meaning as it is the nucleus of the word and carries a differential and distributional meaning as it distinguishes pocket from the words locket, hogget, cellaret. Here the morpheme –et is also singled out.

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