Morphemes can also be divided into lexical morphemes and grammatical morphemes. The lexical are utilised in the construction of new words, i.e., compound words and affixes. The grammatical are used to “express grammatical relationships between a word and its context”. Here context refers to the meaning, situation and concept.
Where a morpheme is an abstract concept, a morph is what occurs in speech. The majority of morphemes are effected by one morph. When this is not the case the morphs are referred to as allomorphs.
A zero morph is symbolised by Æ. It allows words without a clear morph denoting plurality to be preserved, e.g., dice. Similarly, the empty morph was created to “handle cases where a formal feature cannot be allocated to any morpheme”.
“a minimal same of form and meaning”
This early definition of a morph does not apply to English completely. This is because not all allomorphs have the same construction, and not all morphs with the same or similar meaning, are similar I form. For instance, the word sheep is both the singular and the plural. In other words it has different meanings, but an identical form. This is because there is no allomorph to denote plurality. Instead, linguists created the term zero morph, with the symbol Æ, to indicate that there is a difference. Similarly with men and women, the difference between the singular and the plural is not an additional allomorph. Indeed, the change is indicated by a switching of vowels, from a to e.
The morph -ceive in perceive, receive and conceive prose a problem for Bloomfield’s definition in that it has no meaning. Only combined with another morph, for example, per- re- or con-, does it have meaning. Although these are concepts, and as such the constituents do not always have meanings, there are cases in which “things” have this same problem. The morph cran- in cranberry has no meaning, while the morph blue- in blueberry does. The -o- in thermometer has no meaning, and is only there to assist in the combination of the other two morphs. The morphs that we have just discussed are bound morphs. As mentioned earlier, they cannot, on their own, produce words.
Morphology is a discipline in which the terms can have more than one definition and where the definitions themselves are up for debate. There is debate on the validity of some terms, e.g., zero morph, and some terms do not take into account the intricacies of the English language. As such it is not only a discipline characterised by disorder, but is also in an exiting stage of development in which growth takes place.
