STYLISTIC MORPHOLOGY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

The main unit of the morphological level is a morpheme – the smallest meaningful unit which can be singled out in a word. There are two types of morphemes: root morphemes and affix ones. Morphology chiefly deals with forms, functions and meanings of affix morphemes.

Affix morphemes in English are subdivided into word-building and form-building morphemes. In the latter case affixation may be: 1) synthetical (boys, lived, comes, going); 2) analytical (has invited, is invited, does not invite); 3) based on the alteration of the root vowel (write-wrote); 4) suppletive (go-went).

There are few language (or paradigmatic) synonyms among English morphemes and only some of them form stylistic oppositions, e.g, he lives – he does live. Come! – Do come! Don’t forget – Don’t you forget. This scarcity of morphological EM which is predetermined by the analytical character of the English language is compensated by a great variety of SD.

Morphological SD as a deliberate shift in the fixed distribution of morphemes can be creted by means of: a) the violation of the usual combinability of morphemes within a word, e.g. the plural of uncountable nouns (sands, waters, times), or the Continuous forms of the verbs of sense perception (to be seeing, to be knowing, to be feeling); b) the violation of the contextual distribution of morphemes, which is called form transposition.

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