Chapter 3
Morphological Structure of English Words
We have discussed the historical, cultural and social factors that facilitate (使……容易；推动) the development of the English vocabulary. Borrowing, as we see, has been playing an active role in the expansion of vocabulary. In modern times, however, vocabulary is mainly enlarged on an internal basis. That is, we use word-building material available in English to create new words. But before we discuss the actual ways and means to make new words, we need to have a clear picture of the structure of English words and their components (成分) —word-forming elements. This chapter will discuss morphemes(语素；词素), their classification(分类) and identification(辨别), the relationship between morphemes and word-formation(构词法).
3.1 Morphemes
Traditionally, words are usually treated as the basic and minimal units of a language to make sentences, which are combinations of words according to syntactic rules(句法规则). Structurally, however, a word is not the smallest unit because many words can be separated into even smaller meaningful units. Take decontextualization for example. This is one word, but can be broken down into de-, con-, text, -a/ , -iz(e), -ation , each having meaning of its own. These segments (部分) cannot be further divided; otherwise, none of them would make any sense. Though -ation has a number of variants (变体) such as -tion, -sion, -ion, they belong to the same suffix as they have the same meaning and grammatical function and occur owing to (因为；根据) different sound environment. These minimal meaningful units are known as morphemes (morphe is the Greek word for 'form'; -eme as in 'phoneme' (音素) means 'class of' ). In view of word-formation, the morpheme is seen as 'the smallest functioning unit in the composition of words' (Crystal 1985). Syntactically(从句法上看), however, a morpheme is the minimal form of grammatical analysis (语法分析). For instance, each of the word-forms studies, studying, studied, consists of the morpheme study + ; the forms -es in studies, -ing in studying, -ed in studied are morphemes, which express grammatical concepts (语法概念) instead of deriving new words (See Classifying Morphemes).
