Introduction: morphologic and phonologic analysis

This paper assumes that the linearity of morphemes and phonemes is revealed in the linguistic structure of the textuality of King Solomon’s Book of Proverbs. This assumption is supported by Corder’s theory of linear grammar, which treats the sentences of a language as a “string” of grammatical categories like beads in a necklace or alternatively as a series of “slots” to be filled by words of category appropriate to each slot. This study utilizes the descriptive method of research which focuses on the morphological and phonological segmentation analysis of textuality. It specifically retrieves every morpheme and phoneme of every verse in the textuality in terms of the free and bound morphemes, as well as the segmental and suprasegmental phonemes. The linear morphologic segmentation of morphemic contents in the six selected verses of King Solomon’s Book of Proverb’s reveal ninety free morphemes (roots) and forty bound morphemes (affixations). Out of the ninety free morphemes, fifty-two are lexical morphemes (content words), and thirty-eight are grammatical morphemes (function words). Of the fifty-two lexical morphemes, twenty are in simple form, four are compound, twenty-seven are complex, and one is a compound complex in linguistic form. Of the thirty-eight grammatical morphemes, thirteen are determiners, six are conjunction, eleven are prepositions, six are pronouns, and two are auxiliary. Of the forty bound morphemes, seventeen are inflectional morphemes (suffixes), and twenty-three are derivational morphemes (affixations). Generally, the textuality reveals eighty-two morphemes: forty-six simple, six compound, twenty-seven complex, and three compound-complex according to linguistic form. As to the linear phonologic segmentation of the phonemic contents of the Proverbs, it reveal a continuous succession of vowels and consonants speech sounds within the suprasegmental prosody of six rising-sustained intonation of the six verses. All these verses, which are compound in form contain a non-final prosody (2-3-2) for the first main clause, and a final prosody (2-3-1) for the second main clause. Therefore, it has been proven that the linearity of morphemes and phonemes is revealed in the linguistic structure of the textuality of King Solomon’s Book of Proverbs. Since we always look at poetry as the epitome of sophistication in writing, these findings call for earnest efforts to consider introducing slight revisions in the curriculum to bring into focus not only the morphologic and phonologic structure prevailing in literary pieces, but the three structures of grammar: syntax, morphology, and phonology.