MORPHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AS THE BASIS OF WORD FORMATION PROCESS

Abstract

Since the invention of language systems, all the languages of the world have been subject to constant change: words change, some die out, and new words are invented or modified again and again. Vocabulary expansion cannot be avoided because a variety of objects, criteria, states, terms, modes of action, contexts, events, etc. must always be described and nominated. In linguistics, the branch of morphology deals with this phenomenon. Morphology studies the construction of word forms and words, works out the combinatorics of such units as bases and affixes, derives the meaning of complex words identifying, on the basis of which mechanisms new words arise. Words are the basis of language. At the morphological level, words consist of one or more morphemes. Morphemes, which from the Greek means “form, kind”, are the smallest lexical units of meaning or grammatical function into which a word can be broken down. In the article we visually describe English morphemes in their functional — grammatical and lexical — and structural aspects — free and bound, as well as inflexive and derivational morphemes. The work defines the study of a word and its structure, focusing on the smallest meaningful parts into which a word can be divided. In addition to morphological, the article traces the semantic features of morphemes. We also provide a comparative table of inflective and derivational affixes in English. Next, we identify eight inflective morphemes and describe derivational morphemes — suffixes and prefixes. The following methods were used in writing the article: the method of continuous sampling from lexicographic sources; the analysis of dictionary definitions and word-formation models; the information retrieval method for selecting the research material; the contextual, functional and dictionary definitions analysis method for tracing linguopragmatic features of English language neologisms; the deduction and induction method for summarizing data and formulating conclusions; the component analysis method for marking the semantic content of the study. The main task of the article is to lay the foundation for solving the linguistic problem of morphology, based on the concept of morphological structure and a clear differentiation of its components.