Ch 4 Vocab Flashcards
Morphology
The study of how words are constructed from morphemes
Lexicon
A mental repository of information about a given language
Form
The structure or shape of any linguistic item
Lexical Category
Any class of words grouped together based on morphological properties
Open Lexical Category
A lexical category to which new members are often introduced
Closed Lexical Category
A lexical category to which new members are rarely introduced
Determiner
A lexical category that consists of words such as “a, the, this, your” etc.
Conjunction
A lexical category that consists of words such as “and, or, but” etc.
Preposition
A lexical category that consists of words such as “on, under, behind” etc.
Root
The base of a word, to which other affixes can attach
Derivation
A morphological process that changes a word’s lexical category or its meaning in some predictable way
Affix
A bound morpheme that attaches to a stem
Stem
The base, consisting of one or more morphemes, to which the affix is added
Inflection
A morphological process whereby the form of a word is modified to indicate some grammatically relevant information, such as number, tense, gender, etc
Morpheme
The smallest linguistic unit with a meaning or grammatical function
Suffix
An affix that follows a stem
Prefix
An affix that precedes a stem
Homophone
An affix that sounds alike but that can have different meanings or functions
Free Morpheme
A morpheme that can be used as a linguistic unit on its own
Bound Morpheme
A morpheme that must be attached to another morpheme to have meaning
Bound Root
A morpheme that has some meaning on its own but cannot stand alone as a word
Productive
A morpheme or rule that can be used to produce novel grammatical forms
Content Morpheme
Morpheme that carries semantic content
Function Morpheme
Morpheme that provides information about grammatical relationships between the words in a sentence
Content Word
A word whose primary purpose is to contribute semantic content to the phrase in which it occurs
Function Word
A word that has little semantic content and whose primary purpose is to indicate grammatical relationships between other words within a phrase
Infix
A type of bound morpheme that is inserted into the middle of the stem
Simultaneous Affix
An affix that is articulated at the same time as some other affix or affixes in a word’s stem (only possible in signed languages)
Compounding
The process of forming words by combining two or more independent words
Total Reduplication
Reduplication in which an entire morpheme is repeated
Partial Reduplication
Reduplication in which only part of a morpheme is repeated
Reduplication
Process of forming new words by doubling either an entire word or part of a new word
Reduplicant
The morpheme or part of a morpheme being reduplicated
Alternation
The morphological process that uses morpheme-internal modifications to make new words or morphological distinctions
Suppletion
A morphological process between forms of a word wherein one form cannot be phonologically or morphologically derived from the other
Analytic Language
Type of language in which most words consist of one morpheme and sentences are composed of sequences of these free morphemes
Agglutinating Language
A synthetic language in which the relationships between words are indicated primarily by bound morphemes, the components of which are usually easy to separate
Fusional Language
A synthetic language in which the relationships between the words in a sentence are indicated by bound morphemes that are difficult to separate from the stem
Polysynthetic Language
A type of synthetic language that attaches several affixes to a stem to indicate grammatical relationships
Input
The linguistic form before the application of a rule or a set of rules
Output
The linguistic form obtained after an application of a rule or a set of rules
Hierarchical Structure
The dominance relationship among morphemes in a word or among constituents in a phrase
Ambiguity
The phenomenon by which a single linguistic form can be the form of more than one distinct linguistic expression
Allomorph
One of a set of nondistinctive realizations of a particular morpheme that have the same function and are phonetically similar
Affixation
Process of forming words by adding affixes to morphemes
Alternation
The morphological process that uses morpheme-internal modifications to make new words or morphological distinctions
Incorporation
Morphological process by which several distinct semantic components are combined into a single word in a polysynthetic language
