И. В. Арнольд лексикология современного английского языка Издание

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§ 5.3 ANALYSIS INTO IMMEDIATE CONSTITUENTS

A synctironic morphological analysis is most effectively accomplished by the procedure known as the analysis into immediate constituents (IC’s). Immediate constituents are any of the two meaningful parts forming a larger linguistic unity. First suggested by L. Bloomfield¹ it was later developed by many linguists.² The main opposition dealt with is the opposition of stem and affix. It is a kind of segmentation revealing not the history of the word but its motivation, i.e. the data the listener has to go by in understanding it. It goes without saying that unmotivated words and words with faded motivation have to be remembered and understood as separate signs, not as combinations of other signs.

The method is based on the fact that a word characterised by morphological divisibility (analysable into morphemes) is involved in certain structural correlations. This means that, as Z. Harris puts it, “the morpheme boundaries in an utterance are determined not on the basis of considerations interior to the utterance but on the basis of comparison with other utterances. The comparisons are controlled, i.e. we do not merely scan various random utterances but seek utterances which differ from our original one only in stated portions. The final test is in utterances which are only minimally different from ours."³

A sample analysis which has become almost classical, being repeated many times by many authors, is L. Bloomfield’s analysis of the word ungentlemanly. As the word is convenient we take the same example. Comparing this word with 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. Some of the cases resembled the word even more closely; these were: unearthly, unsightly, untimely, unwomanly and the like. 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 word 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 analysis resulted in separating a free and a bound form: 1) un~ + gentlemanly, 2) gentleman + -ly. The third cut has its peculiarities. The division into gent-+-lemon 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

¹ Bloomfield L. Language. London, 1935. P. 210.

² See: Nida E. Morphology. The Descriptive Analysis of Words. Ann Arbor, 1946. P. 81.

³ Harris Z.S. Methods in Structural Linguistics. Chicago, 1952. P. 163.