Surely every student has come across 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. Let's also deal with what morphemic parsing is.
What is a morpheme?
Morpheme is the smallest meaningful part of a word. The term was first introduced by the famous scientist Badouin de Courtenay in the middle of the 19th century and is still used in linguistics.
All words are made up of morphemes. They are the building blocks that make up words. Each component has its own meaning and role. The following types of morphemes are distinguished: obligatory and optional. The obligatory is always present in the word and is called the root. Optional may or may not be part of the lexeme. These morphemes are called affixes. Let's look at each species separately.
Required morphemes
As already mentioned, there is only one obligatory morpheme in Russian, and it is called the root. There is no such word that would exist without this morpheme. Words without a root (with the exception of someservice parts of speech) are absent in Russian.
It is the main one, as it carries the main lexical meaning. For example, the lexeme forest, forest, forester combines one root - forest. All these words have a similar meaning associated with the forest. The only thing is their difference in shades. Thus, a forest is a space covered with trees; forest - related to the forest; the forester is the person who guards it.
There are several roots in complex words, for example, in the word bright-faced there are two roots - light and face. Keep this in mind when parsing the word. Basically, compound words have two roots, in some cases there may be words with a large set.
Optional morphemes
Optional morphemes of the Russian language - affixes. Among them are the following:
- prefixes, or prefixes;
- postfixes, or suffixes;
- inflections, or endings;
- interfixes.
They may or may not be present in the word. Moreover, each new optional morpheme gives it a new meaning.
The first two types of morphemes convey lexical and grammatical meaning. Inflections express only the grammatical meaning of the word. Even zero, that is, having no sound expression, the ending shows what grammatical meaning the lexeme has.
Prefixes and postfixes
Let's first analyze those morphemes that give new lexical and grammatical shades.
Prefixes are always placed at the beginning of a word and change its meaning. In RussianThere are about 70 prefixes in the language. Most of them are formed from prepositions. At school, they are often called prefixes. Each prefix has its own meaning and changes the connotation of the word. For example, to go - to move somewhere; drive up - get closer to something.
This changes the lexical meaning of the word, but the part of speech to which it belongs remains unchanged.
Postfixes are always located between the root and inflection (if it exists in the word). They serve not only to form a new meaning, but also to form a new part of speech. So, with the help of the suffix -n- from the noun forest, the adjective forest was delighted.
Some suffixes form a new shade of meaning. So, there are diminutive suffixes, such as: -ushk-, -chik-, -points- and others. With the help of them, lexemes with a new shade of meaning are formed. For example: ear - ear, finger - finger, basket - basket.
A word can have several prefixes and suffixes. It all depends on the structure of the lexeme, its meaning. Therefore, when parsing a word by morphemes, you should pay special attention to this.
Interfixes
These morphemes serve to connect several roots in compound words. For example, the word loafer consists of two words - forehead and shaking. They are interconnected by the interfix -o-. Interfixes are not always taught at school, often they are only talked about in high school, and then briefly.
Step word
Having learned that a morpheme is a significant part of a lexeme, one more thing should be rememberedimportant part - the basis. This is the invariable part of the word, that is, its part without an ending. The basis contains the main lexical meaning and can consist of only one root or a root and an affix (affixes). In verbs, the stem can be interrupted by an ending if there is a postfix -sya or -s. For example, in the word the stem was bought, it will be interrupted by the ending and look like buying-a-s.
Flexions
These morphemes are used to express grammatical meaning. In the school curriculum, they are called endings. With their help, grammatical meaning is determined. For nouns, this is gender, number, case. Inflections are present in all parts of speech, except for invariable ones, such as adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions. In these parts of speech, they are not distinguished. In all other parts of speech, if there is no ending, it is taken as zero.
For example, in the word forest the ending will be null, in the word forest the ending will be -a. At the same time, the ending of this word will express that this noun is plural and is in the nominative case.
Morphemic parsing of the word
So, we found out that a morpheme is the smallest meaningful part of a lexeme. Now let's talk about morpheme parsing. In order to properly morpheme parse, you must adhere to the following rules.
1. First, we write out the analyzed lexeme 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 changeable. If yes,go to step 3, if not, go to step 4.
3. We find the end. To do this, decline by gender or cases, numbers. The part that changes will be the ending.
4. We select the basis. A stem is the whole word without an ending.
5. We find the root. To do this, we select single-root words from different parts of the word.
6. Select the prefix that comes before the root.
7. Selecting suffixes. To do this, we select words with similar suffixes, but different roots. Remember that some words may have multiple prefixes and suffixes. For example, the word unpleasant has two prefixes: pre-unpleasant. And in the word dreamer there are three suffixes: dream-a-tel-nitsa.
That's the whole analysis of the composition.
An example of morpheme parsing
Let's parse one word so that you see the principle of morphemic parsing and remember the sequence of actions. Take for example the sentence: "I haven't seen the old man for a long time."
1. Write out the word "old man".
2. Declined: old man, old man - noun, changeable.
3. They declined again: old man, old man, old people, the end of the old man's word is a.
4. We discard the ending. The basis is the old man.
5. We select single-root lexemes: old age, grow old - the root is old.
6. We don't have anything before the root, which means there is no prefix in the word.
7. We select words with the suffix -ik-, if any. Man, nose - suffix - ik.
As you can see, there is nothing complicated in parsing the word. The main thing is to strictly follow the algorithm,so as not to stray and correctly define everything, as well as understand what a morpheme is. Examples with various morphemes should also be learned to choose correctly.
If you doubt the correctness of the parsing, you can always find the morpheme dictionary of the Russian language and look in it what morphemes this or that word consists of, how exactly it is formed. You can use dictionaries edited by Potiha Z. A. or Tikhonov A. N.
So, we learned that a morpheme is the smallest meaningful part of a word, determined what morphemes are, talked about each of them. We also found out how to correctly do morphemic parsing of a word and considered an example of this parsing. We remembered dictionaries that will help you check the correctness of parsing a word. We hope you found this article helpful.
