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The word (Morpheme (Morphemic structure of words, Defintion is the…

- - - - Fundamental assumption
        
        each linguistic unit has a constant and specific meaning
        two possible main directions of linguistic research:
        1.phonetics - we study the speech event without reference to its meaning
        2.semantics - we study the relation of the event to the features of meaning
        
        the connection between the linguistic forms (phonetics) and their meanings(semantics)
        
        each combination of signaling units is arbitrarily (довільно) assigned to some features of the practical world
        
        linguistic study must
        start from the form not from the meaning
        
        each linguistic form has a constant and definite meaning, different from the meaning of any other linguistic form in the same language
        
        if the forms are different their meanings are also different
- - - - A sample analysis which has become almost classical, being repeated many times by many authors, is Bloomfield`s analysis of the word ungentlemanly. Comparing the word with the other utterances the listener recognises the morpheme un- as a negative prefix because he has often come across words built on the pattern un- + adjective stem: uncertain, unconscious, uneasy, unfortunate, unmistakable, unnatural. One can also come across the adjective gentlemanly
        
        Thus at the first cut we obtain the following immediate constituents: un – + gentlemanly. If we continue our analysis we see that although gent occurs as a free form in low colloquial usage, no such words as lemanly may be found either as a free or as a bound constituent, so this time we have to separate the final morpheme. We are justified in so doing as there are many adjectives following the pattern noun stem + -ly, such as womanly masterly, scholarly, soldierly with the same semantic relationship of „having the quality of the person denoted by the stem”; we also have come across the noun gentleman in other utterances.
        
        The two first stages of the analysis resulted in separating a free and a bound form:
        1) un- + gentlemanly,
        2) gentleman + -ly.
        The third cut has its peculiarities.
        The devision into gent- + -leman is obviously impossible as no such patterns exist in English, so the cut is gentle + man.
        A similar pattern is observed in nobleman, and so we state adjective stem + -man. The word gentle is open to discussion. If we compare it with such adjectives as brittle, fertile, juvenile, little, noble, subtle and some more containing the suffix -le/-ile added to a bound stem, they form a pattern for our case.
        
        To sum up: as we break the word we obtain at any level only two ICs, one of which is the stem of the given word. All the time the analysis is based on the patterns characteristic of the English vocabulary. As a pattern showing the interdependence of all the constituents segregated at various stages we obtain the following formula:
        un- + {[(gent- + -le) + -man] + -ly} This method of analysis is extremely fruitful in discovering the derivational structure of words.