Ch. 4 Morphology Flashcards
affix
a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form.
affixation
process of adding a morpheme—or affix—to a word to create either a different form of that word or a new word with a different meaning
agglutination language
type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination.
allomorph
any of the versions of a morpheme, such as the plural endings s (as in bats ), z (as in bugs ), and iz (as in buses ) for the plural morpheme.
alternation
the phenomenon of a morpheme exhibiting variation in its phonological realization.
ambiguity
the presence of two or more possible meanings within a single sentence or sequence of words, as opposed to lexical ambiguity
analytic language
a language that primarily conveys relationships between words in sentences by way of helper words and word order, as opposed to utilizing inflections.
bound morpheme
a morpheme (the elementary unit of morphosyntax) that can appear only as part of a larger expression; a free morpheme (or unbound morpheme) is one that can stand alone.
bound root
a root which cannot occur as a separate word apart from any other morpheme.
closed lexical category
parts of speech (or word classes)—that don’t readily accept new members.
compounding
composition or nominal composition is the process of word formation that creates compound lexemes.
conjunction
linguistic elements that link two or more words, phrases, clauses, or sentences within a larger unit, in such a way that a specific semantic relation is established between them.
content morpheme
a root that forms the semantic core of a major class word.
content word
words that name objects of reality and their qualities.
derivation
the process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix, such as un- or -ness.
determiner
a word, phrase, or affix that occurs together with a noun or noun phrase and serves to express the reference of that noun or noun phrase in the context.
form
a meaningful unit of speech
free morpheme
a morpheme that can appear only as part of a larger expression; a free morpheme is one that can stand alone. A bound morpheme is a type of bound form, and a free morpheme is a type of free form.
function morpheme
a morpheme which simply modifies the meaning of a word, rather than supplying the root meaning.
function word
words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker.
fusional language
a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features.
hierarchal structure
an organizational structure where every entity in the organization, except one, is subordinate to a single other entity.
homophony
a set of words are pronounced identically, but have different meanings.
incorporation
a phenomenon by which a grammatical category, such as a verb, forms a compound with its direct object (object incorporation) or adverbial modifier, while retaining its original syntactic function.
infix
an affix inserted inside a word stem.
inflection
a process of word formation, in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness.
input
the exposure learners have to authentic language in use. This can be from various sources, including the teacher, other learners, and the environment around the learners.
lexical category
a part of speech is a category of words that have similar grammatical properties.
lexicon
a language’s inventory of lexemes.
morpheme
a meaningful morphological unit of a language that cannot be further divided
morphology
the study of the forms of words.
open lexical category
the category of content words—that is, parts of speech (or word classes) that readily accept new members.
output
the language spoken by second language learners themselves
partial reduplication
a reduplication of only part of the word.
polysynthetic language
highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes. They are very highly inflected languages.
prefix
an affix that is joined before a root or stem.
preposition
are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations or mark various semantic roles.
productive
the degree to which native speakers use a particular grammatical process, especially in word formation.
pronoun
a word that substitutes for a noun or noun phrase.
reduplicant
The reduplicated segment in a word resulting from a reduplication process.
reduplication
in which the root or stem of a word or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change.
root
a word that does not have a prefix in front of the word or a suffix at the end of the word.
stem
a part of a word used with slightly different meanings and would depend on the morphology of the language in question.
suffix
is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word.
suppletion
the occurrence of an unrelated form to fill a gap in a conjugation (e.g. went as the past tense of go ).
