SIGNIFICANCE OF MORPHOPHONOLOGICAL ELEMENTS IN THE PROCESS OF WORD FORMATION

Abstract

The article considers the role of morphophonological elements such as stress, alternation of phonemes in the choice of suffixes in the deminutative word formation, and the nature of the relationship between them. It is traditionally believed that Russian word formation is agglutinative, since the affix dominates, and the stress and alternation of phonemes are subordinate to it. The Russian language is fusional in the typological characteristics, as fusional characteristics that manifest themselves in alternation of phonemes, alternation of stress, declension, conjugation and derivation, define the typological features of the Russian language. Therefore, the article suggest that Russian word formation is also fusional. Fusion is expressed in the fact that the morphological characteristics of the deriving word predict the choice of suffixes, which are variants within the same paradigm of allomorphs of the word-forming affix. The research showed that stress, phoneme alternation and suffix are functionally equal, since suffix can also specify the stress and the alternant of the derived word. Consequently, the alternation of allomorphs of suffixes, as well as alternations in a word stem, including the rules for choosing allomorphs, is not an object of word-formation analysis, but relate to morphophonology. Thus, the hypothesis of functional equivalence of stress, phoneme alternation, and affix alternation is confirmed in the description of word formation of masculine diminutives with suffixes -ик, -ок (-ек), -ушек (-юшк, -ишек), -анёк (-енёк), as shown in the suffix allomorph selection table.