A course In Modern English Lexicology

§ 15. Differential Meaning
words and morphemes the latter may possess
specific meanings of their own, namely the differential and the distributional meanings. D i f f e r e n t i a l m e a n i n g is the semantic component that serves to distinguish one word from all others containing identical morphemes. In words consisting of two or more morphemes, one of the constituent morphemes always has differential meaning. In such words as, e. g., bookshelf, the morpheme -shelf serves to distinguish the word from other words containing the morpheme book-, e.g. from book-case, book-counter and so on. In other compound words, e.g. notebook, the morpheme note- will be seen to possess the differential meaning which distinguishes notebook from exercisebook, copybook, etc. It should be clearly understood that denotational and differential meanings are not mutually exclusive. Naturally the morpheme -shelf in bookshelf possesses denotational meaning which is the dominant component of meaning. There are cases, however, when it is difficult or even impossible to assign any denotational meaning to the morpheme, e.g. cran- in cranberry, yet it clearly bears a relationship to the meaning of the word as a whole through the differential component (cf. cranberry and blackberry, gooseberry) which in this particular case comes to the fore. One of the disputable points of morphological analysis is whether such words as deceive, receive, perceive consist of two component morphemes.1 If we assume, however, that the morpheme -ceive may be singled out it follows that the meaning of the morphemes re-, per, de- is exclusively differential, as, at least synchronically, there is no denotational meaning proper to them.
1 See ‘Word-Structure’, § 2, p. 90. 24
Distributional meaning is the meaning of the
§ 16. Distribu-
order and arrangement of morphemes making
tional
up the word. It is found in all words contain-
ing more than one morpheme. The word singer, e.g., is composed of two morphemes sing- and -er both of which possess the denotational meaning and namely ‘to make musical sounds’ (sing-) and ‘the doer of the action’
(-er). There is one more element of meaning, however, that enables us to understand the word and that is the pattern of arrangement of the component morphemes. A different arrangement of the same morphemes, e.g.
*ersing, would make the word meaningless. Compare also boyishness and
*nessishboy in which a different pattern of arrangement of the three morphemes boy-ish-ness turns it into a meaningless string of sounds.1
WORD-MEANING AND MOTIVATION
From what was said about the distributional meaning in morphemes it follows that there are cases when we can observe a direct connection between the structural pattern of the word and its meaning. This relationship between morphemic structure and meaning is termed morphological motivation.
The main criterion in morphological motiva-