3.

5 Identifying Morphemes Independently Of Meaning

Identifying morphemes independently of meaning a somewhat different kind of lexical

conditioning can be introduced by means of the prefix re- and its possible allomorphs. This
prefix can be added to verbs quite freely, contributing the meaning ‘again’, as in rewrite,
reread,repaint,revisit. In these words the prefix has a vowel rather like that of see, and can be
represented phonetically as [ri]. But something that looks very much like the same prefix
occurs also in verbs such as revive, return, restore, revise, reverse, this time pronounced with
a so-called ‘reduced vowel’, [r1] or [rə]. What’s more, many of these words have a meaning
in which it is possible to discern an element such as ‘again’ or ‘backward movement’: for
example, revive means ‘bring back to life’, return means ‘come back’ or ‘give back’, restore
means ‘bring back to a former condition’, and revise means ‘look at again, with a view to
changing’. It may therefore seem natural to treat [ri] and [rə] as allomorphs of the same
morpheme. A snag, however, is that there are some roots with which both [ri] and [rə] can
occur, yielding different meanings: for example, the meanings just given for restore and
return are distinct from those for re-store ‘store again’ and re-turn ‘turn again’ (as in I turned
the steaks on the barbecue a minute ago, and I’ll re-turn them soon). The [ri] prefix can be
added to almost any verb, with the consistent meaning ‘again’ (it is productive in all the
senses to be discussed in, whereas the [rə] prefix is lexically much more restricted as well as
harder to pin down semantically. One must conclude that the two prefixes pronounced [ri]
and [rə] belong to distinct morphemes in modern English, their phonetic and semantic
similarities being due to their having the same historical source in that part of English
vocabulary that has been borrowed from Latin via French.

As an alternative to that conclusion, one might consider rejecting the analysis of

revive,return,restore,revise andreverse as consisting of a prefix plus a root, and instead treat
them as monomorphemic. But this has unwelcome consequences too. If revive and revise are
single morphemes, that amounts to saying that they have no parts in common (except
phonologically) with survive and supervise. But that is unwelcome, because it inhibits us
from recognising sur-andsuper-as morphemes that recur in surpass and superimpose. In fact,
many English words (mainly verbs and words related to them) form a complex network, with
what looks like a prefix–root structure (the root being usually bound), but without any clear
consistent meaning being ascribable to either the prefix or the root. Here is just a small part of
that network:

(2) refer prefer confer defer transfer infer

reduce conduce deduce induce

revoke convoke invoke

reserve preserve conserve deserve

relate collate translate

remit commit transmit

pretend contend intend

revolve devolve involve

A similar point can be made about the nouns revolution, devolution and involution
related to revolve, devolve and involve: again, an unusual pattern of allomorphy makes sense
if the same root morpheme is contained in all these words (-volve, with allomorph -volu-), but
it makes no sense if these words have no more in common than e.g. loaf and oaf. Some of the
nouns and verbs that I have just claimed to be related do not have much to do with each other
semantically, one must admit. For example, the meaning of conduce (a rather rare verb) has
nothing to do with that of conduction, and the noun that seems most closely related to
involveis not involution(another rarity) but involvement. However, that just confirms a
central characteristic of these prefix–root combinations: the prefixes and roots that they
comprise are identifiable without reference to meaning. Because of this, all these complex
words must clearly be lexical items. Thus the lexical conditioning to which these morphemes
are subject is of a particularly strong kind: none of them ever occurs except in complex words
that require dictionary listing. The idea that these morphemes occur only in words that are
lexical items fits nicely a salient characteristic of the table at (2), namely its ‘gappiness’. A
list of lexical items is essentially arbitrary; therefore one will not expect to be able to predict
confidently that any one conceivable prefix–root combination will be present in the list. For
example, nothing guarantees that there should be a word such as ‘transvoke’ or ‘premit’ – and
indeed there is not (at least in the ordinary vocabulary of modern English speakers). Two of
the gaps in (2) might be filled if we allowed as fillers not just verbs but other words related to
them: for, even though ‘transduce’ and ‘convolve’ do not exist, we can find transducer,
convolution and convoluted in any dictionary. It may seem at first paradoxical that these
other words should exist while the verbs from which they are formed, in some sense (the
sense in which e.g. helpful is ‘formed from’ help), do not exist. Again, however, this ceases to
be surprising if the Latin-derived prefixes and roots that we have been considering have so
extensively lost any clearly identifiable meanings as to enforce lexical listing for all words
formed with them.