Morphological Form and Word Form: On Clarifying the Basic Notions of Russian Morphology

The article presents an interpretation analysis of the notions of morphological form (MF) and word form (WF) in Russian linguistics of the late 19th - early 21st centuries. The main attention is paid to MF as the basic unit of the inflectional morphological structure of the Russian language. Based on the analysis of more than 70 sources of scientific, reference, and educational literature, rather contradictory interpretations of this notions are revealed, and their historical evolution is traced. Many authors consider MF as a morphological variety of the word, thus identifying it with WF. Often MF is defined as a means of expressing morphological meanings, which is equivalent to its identification with a morphological means. Depending on how the morphological means is understood, MF appears either as a one-sided unit of the language - the aspect of expression of the formative affix, or - more frequently -as a two-sided unit, that is, the affix itself. Interpretations of MF through the notions of a word and a morphological means (affix) are most common. MF is also interpreted as “a linguistic sign in which the grammatical meaning finds its regular expression”; “an abstract grammatical analogue of a word form”; “a member of the paradigm of morphological inflection”; “inflectional grammatical meaning”, etc. WF is also ambiguously defined in linguistic literature. There are two types of definitions. Some definitions represent WF as a unit of language (for example, “a given word in a given grammatical form” and so on); others as a unit of speech (“concrete realization of a word in sentences and phrases” and so on). Such a wide discrepancy in the interpretation of these basic morphological units complicates mutual understanding between researchers of the Russian language and causes difficulties in the study of morphology at a university. The interpretations of MF and WF proposed by the author are based on the concept of different levels of the existence of the morphological structure. MF is viewed as a linguistic unit that exists at the level of an abstract morphological system. It represents the unity of the morphological means (affix or auxiliary word) and the generalized basis of the words of this part of speech: [(main verb.) + -u]. At the level of words, MF is represented in WF as a unit of language - this is the unity of MF and lexemes: [(sizh) + -u]. At the level of utterances, it is represented in WF as a speech unit - this is WF as an element of an utterance in the version of its morphological content, which is predetermined by the context and participates in the formation of the semantic structure of the utterance. The fundamental difference between MF and WF lies in its abstraction from specific words and statements. The author hopes that the proposed interpretations of the main morphological units will be positively accepted by linguists as a basis for further discussion aimed at developing their common understanding.

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