The main unit of the morphological level is a morpheme. The words consist of morphemes separate parts with grammatical significance. The primary element of a word is the root. It is the main unchangeable part of the word conveying lexical meaning. Besides words contain affixes - prefixes and suffixes, which modify the meaning of the word, and suffixes also change the word from one part of speech to another – work-worker. The stem is the part of the word which includes the root and affixes. Endings or flections express different grammatical meanings implied in words of all grammatical forms, affixation is the most frequently used. Prefixes and suffixes are used in the majority of known languages. In Russian for ex, prefixes are more common in verbs and suffixes in nouns,. There are some common features in English and Russian affixes from the point of view of their origin. Some suffixes were independent words before they became affixes, for ex. English – freedom, dom had the meaning of decision, power, independent word. Some affixes were borrowed from latin and greek like –able, -ism, -ist, -extra, which are more or less alive in present day English and Russian. In the course of historical development the boundaries between morphemes in a word may change. Words change morphologically. The main factors contributed to this change were discovered by the Russian philologist Pr.Bogorididsky who called this changes simplification (опрощение) and decomposition (переразложение) simplification is a grammatical process in the result of which a word loses the independent meanings of its component parts. For ex in Russian the word ВКУС is not divided now into prefix в and root кус, though this word was considered to be compound, now it is treated as one morphemic word. In English words friend used to be suffix ND, in the word Forbid, prefix FO, but now in present day English they are treated as one morphemic word.
GRAMMATICAL MEANINGS
They may be expressed:
1. with the help of affixes
2. with the help of internal vocalic or consonantal changes in the root (take – took, can-could, food-feed, иду-шел, беру-брал)
3. sometimes grammatical meanings may be expressed by reduplication when a part of a root or a stem is repeated to indicate some grammatical concepts, usually plurality or intensity or as a means of emphasis which is characteristic of English and Russian. Like да да, нет нет, добрый добрый. In English it is also typical of child’s speech like a red red apple, blue blue sky.
4. Grammatical meanings may be expressed not only with the help of a word but by means of relational words which accompany presentational words.
Among relational words we distinguish:
1. Prepositions which express relations between parts of a sentence. Prepositions play an important role serving to differentiate relations which are often indicated by case flections like in Russian (у окна, из окна,) and they are more important in languages with no case flexion like English (at the window, from the window).
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2. Conjunctions serve to connect words, group of words and sentences or clauses. This connection is realized either by coordination or subordination. Accordingly conjunctions are divided into coordinative and, but, и, но, and subordinative when, that, unless.
3. Articles. The first grammatical function of the article is to signify the noun, the second – to denote whether the thing is known to the listener or not. The third – articles show the number, historically the articles appeared in the result of the tendency to indicate the number of a noun.
4. Auxiliary words. They have no independent meaning of their own but help to build analytical forms of the word. In English there are auxiliaries of tense – shall will, aspect – to be, voice – to be, auxiliaries are characteristic of an analytical type of morphological structure. In the majority of languages the verbs to be to have are used as auxiliaries.
5. Finally some form (relational) words are used to express grammatical meanings, but their grammatical function is not clearly cut. in English like Girlfriend. Boyfriend, hecat, shecat when there are no indicators of gender.
6. Particles. (частицы) in Russian they are used to denote the category of mood, (сидел бы). In English particle to indicates infinitive.
some other ways of expressing the grammatical meanings.
Word order is especially important in languages with no case flexions – for analytic type of language.
Supplitive forms which express different grammatical meanings – хорошо – лучше