3.4   Identifying Morphemes(词素的区分)

    Since morphemes are the minimal distinct units, they should be identifiable by their forms, meaning and distribution. Generally speaking, lexical morphemes are easy to define:

Mono-morphemic:        land, sky

Double-morphemic:       chill + y, mis + take

Triple-morphemic:        anti + govern + ment, sports + man + ship

Four-morphemic:          un + friend + li + ness, morph + olog( i) + cal + ly

Over-four-morphemic:    inter + nation + al + iz(e) + ation

    

      If the morphemes are always consistent in form and meaning, there should be no difficulty in identification(区分). However, there is often mismatch(不一致) between form and meaning. Some morphemes are identical(相同的) in form but different in meaning, for instance, -er in teacher, clearer and eraser. -er in teacher means 'one who', but -er in clearer indicates 'the comparative degree', and -er in eraser denotes 'an object'. Therefore, -er in each case is a different morpheme.

     Some morphemes are not meaningful in isolation(单独) but acquire meaning by virtue of(通过) their connection in words (Fromkin and Rodman, p116). The classic examples are cranberry(越橘), huckleberry (黑果；乌饭树浆果)and boysenberry(博弈增莓), each seeming to be a kind of berry. But when cran-, huckle- and boysen- are isolated, they are meaningless and they are incapable of forming new words with other morphemes rather than with berry. There are other morphemes which occur in many words, but their meaning is difficult to define, for instance, -ceive in conceive (想象；设想), perceive(感觉，察觉；认为) and receive. Some forms are meaningful, but not morphemes, such as fl- meaning 'moving light' in flash , flame and flicker(闪烁，忽隐忽现), and gl-meaning 'static light' in glow(发光，燃烧)_，glisten (闪耀；反光)and glitter(闪光；光彩夺目). These are only sound symbols often employed by poets in their literary creation but do not qualify as morphemes.

     The identification of inflectional morphemes is more problematic. In most cases, an inflectional morpheme can be segmented (切分)from the stem of a word and naturally can be added to the stem like the plural morpheme {s} in gloves, tables and classes. But what is the plural morpheme in men, sheep and feet ? The same is true of the past tense morpheme {ed} , which is explicit and segmentable in walked, loaded and danced. How can we isolate the past tense morpheme from knew, taught and cut ? To solve the problem, we have to resort to other ways.