Morphological Means in Russian: Clarification of the Concept

Abstract

The concept of “morphological / grammatical means” is widely used in studies on the Russian language, although there is no generally accepted interpretation. This work analyzes the reflection of this concept in Russian studies and clarifies the status of those linguistic units that are traditionally referred to as morphological means: form-building affixes, alternating sounds (internal inflection), stress, supplementary word stems, auxiliary words, intonation, as well as word order. Our research has shown that these linguistic units have different functional status in the morphological structure of the Russian language. First, these are categorical, or actually morphological, means, represented by formative affixes and auxiliary words. They are carriers of morphological meanings in the structure of abstracted morphological forms – the basic units of inflectional Russian morphology. Secondly, a non-categorical means, syncretic and accidental for morphology, are supplementary stems that contain not only lexical, but also morphological meaning and thus duplicate the expression of morphological information in a word form with a form-building affix. Thirdly, these are linguistic units that are not elements of the morphological structure, but have morphological significance, which is manifested in their ability to differentiate homonymous morphological forms in the structure of word forms (alternating sounds and stress) or utterances (intonation). Word order can also perform a similar function. The study allows us to clarify the definition of the concept under consideration: morphological means are linguistic units that are carriers of morphological meanings and constituents of morphological forms.