Лекции по теоретической грамматике английского языка. Тивьяева И.В. - 11 стр.

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between house and houses. However, an inflection morpheme can acquire a

lexical meaning in some special cases, for instance if the plural form of a noun

develops a meaning which the singular form has not; thus, the plural form

colours has a meaning, 'flag', which the singular form colour has not. These are

cases of lexicalisation.

4. Distributional analysis. Morphemic analysis. IC-analysis

By the term distribution we understand the occurrence of a lexical unit

relative to other lexical units of the same level (words relative to words /

morphemes relative to morphemes, etc.). In other words by this term we

understand the position which lexical units occupy or may occupy in the text or in

the flow of speech. The distribution of a unit is the sum total of all its

environments. The environment of a unit may be either “right” or “left”. It is

readily observed that a certain component of the word-meaning is described when

the word is identified distributionally.

The distributional analysis is used to fix and study the units of language in

relation to their contextual environments, i. e. adjoining elements in the text. In the

distributional analysis at the morphemic level, phonemic distribution of

morphemes and morphemic distribution of morphemes are discriminated. The

study is conducted in two stages. At the first stage, the analyzed text is divided into

recurrent segments consisting of phonemes. These segments are called “morphs”.

At the second stage, the environmental features of the morphs are established and

the corresponding identifications are effected.

Three main types of distribution are discriminated: contrastive, non-

contrastive and complementary. Contrastive and non-contrastive distribution

concern identical environments of different morphs. The morphs are said to be in

contrastive distribution if their meanings are different. Such morphs constitute

different morphemes (eg. played, playing). The morphs are said to be in non-

contrastive distribution if their meaning is the same. Such morphs constitute

“free alternants”, or “free variants” of the same morpheme (eg. burned, burnt).