Ministry of higher and secondary special education of the republic uzbekistan state world languages university

III. Typology of morphological level of English and Native Languages


3.1. Theoretical basis of determining necessary constants in morphological level

Key points for discussion: What is morphological typology? What kind of relations does morphological typology have with other levels of linguistic typology? What is morpheme? What is allomorph?

Morphological typology studies the units of morphological level. It deals with two types of comparison:

• 
  morphological or typological classification of languages;
  
• 
  Parts of speech and their grammatical categories.
  

According to the morphological classification the languages are classified due to the typical structural features or means of expression of synthetic relations between words.
Grammatical categories may be of 2 types:

• 
  primary grammatical categories, which deal with parts of speech
  
• 
  secondary grammatical categories, which deal with grammatical categories within every part of speech separately: number, case, gender for nouns, tense, voice, aspect, mood, person, degrees of comparison for adjectives and so on.
  

Besides morphological typology studies morphological paradigm. It classifies languages into languages:

• 
  with highly developed morphology
  
• 
  with less developed morphology
  
• 
  with non-developed morphology
  

A morpheme is an association of a given meaning with a given sound pattern. But unlike a word it is not autonomous. Morphemes occur in speech only as constituent parts of words, not independently, although a word may consist of a single morpheme. Nor are they divisible into smaller meaningful units. That is why the morpheme may be defined as the minimum meaningful language unit.
The term morpheme is derived from Gr morphe ‘form’ + -eme. The Greek suffix -erne has been adopted by linguists to denote the smallest significant or distinctive unit. (Cf. phoneme, sememe.) The morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of form. A form in these cases is a recurring discrete unit of speech.
A form is said to be free if it may stand alone without changing its meaning; if not, it is a bound form, so called because it is always bound to something else. For example, if we compare the words sportive and elegant and their parts, we see that sport, sportive, elegant may occur alone as utterances, whereas eleg-, -ive, -ant are bound forms because they never occur alone.