MORPHOPOEIA: THE WORD AS A LITERARY WORK AND ITS MORPHEMIC STRUCTURE

This paper examines the morphemic structure of the word as a minimalistic literary work in its own right, in the size of a single lexical unit. Morphopoeia is a genre of word creation, the material of which is morphemes and the work is a separate word, a neologism. As a new word is not reproduced but produced in language (“linguistic impudence”, according to Mikhail Panov), then it becomes an independent communicative unit and acquires properties of a sentence. Further it can be subjected to actual division into theme and rheme as functionally distributed between its constituent morphemes. Semantic relations between morphemes within a new word can be antonymous, which leads to the creation of oxymoronyms — words consisting of morphemes that are opposite in meaning (e.g. “glocal”, combining “global” and “local”). The article also examines the density of the morphemic row and its quantitative index “word’s compactness”: the more semantic units are correlated with the phonetic units due to the morphemic compression of the word, the denser and more compact it is. The paper also considers the phenomenon of “jumping” morphemes — mobile morphological elements, capable of moving from one fragment of the lexical system to another. Finally, the article establishes the place of morphopoetics, which examines morphopoeia, within the framework of morphemics: the study of mechanisms of word formation should also include free, mobile combinations of morphemes in word-creation.