Conclusion: ways of classifying word-parts

It was argued that many words are divisible into parts. We were concerned with classifying these parts, and discussing further their relation to word-meanings. We have introduced the following distinctions:

• morphemes and allomorphs, bound and free

• roots, affixes and combining forms

• prefixes and suffixes.

Allomorphy, concerned as it is with differences in how a morpheme is pronounced, may seem at first to have little connection with meaning. We saw that allomorphy does have a role in the identification of morphemes, and hence in the issue of whether a word should be regarded as polymorphemic or not, despite the lack of clearcut meanings for the morphemes concerned.

I hope to have persuaded readers to be wary of definitions of the term ‘morpheme’ that refer to it as a unit of meaning. At the same time, one must acknowledge that, in large swathes of English vocabulary (in words such as unhelpfulness, un-Clintonish or de-Yeltsinise, for example) a close relationship between morphemes and meaning is discernible. In fact, one of the most prominent features of English vocabulary as it has accumulated over the centuries (one of its chief glories, in the eyes of many scholars and writers) is the existence both of words in which morphological structure and meaning seem closely associated, and of many words in which the relationship is obscure. The availability of these two elements in English vocabulary helps to make possible a kind of stylistic variety in English writing which is hard to match in languages where word-structure is more uniform.