Ch4 Morphology Vocab

Question 1

affix

Answer 1

is a bound morpheme: this means that it cannot function as an independent word.

Question 2

affixation

Answer 2

Affixation is a morphological process whereby a bound morpheme, an affix, is attached to a morphological base.

Question 3

agglutinating language

Answer 3

a grammatical process in which words are composed of a sequence of morphemes (meaningful word elements), each of which represents not more than a single grammatical category

Question 4

allomorph

Answer 4

is a morph that has a unique set of grammatical or lexical features.

Question 5

alternation

Answer 5

the phenomenon of a morpheme exhibiting variation in its phonological realization.

Question 6

ambiguity

Answer 6

a quality of language that makes speech or written text open to multiple interpretations.

Question 7

analytic language

Answer 7

any language that uses specific grammatical words, or particles, rather than inflection (q.v.), to express syntactic relations within sentences.

Question 8

bound morpheme

Answer 8

is 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

Question 9

bound root

Answer 9

a root which cannot occur as a separate word apart from any other morpheme.

Question 10

closed lexical category

Answer 10

rarely acquire new members. They include conjunctions (e.g., and, or, but), determiners (e.g., a, the), pronouns (e.g., he, she, they), and prepositions (e.g., of, on, under).

Question 11

compounding

Answer 11

a word formation process based on the combination of lexical elements

Question 12

conjunction

Answer 12

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.

Question 13

content morpheme

Answer 13

a root that forms the semantic core of a major class word.

Question 14

content word

Answer 14

are words that have meaning.

Question 15

derivation

Answer 15

the formation of a word by changing the form of the base or by adding affixes to it (e.g., “hope” to “hopeful”).

Question 16

determiner

Answer 16

are a nominal syntactic category distinct both from adjectives and nouns, despite the close affinity among them.

Question 17

form

Answer 17

a meaningful unit of speech

Question 18

free morpheme

Answer 18

a morpheme (or word element) that can stand alone as a word. It is also called an unbound morpheme

Question 19

function morpheme

Answer 19

a morpheme which simply modifies the meaning of a word, rather than supplying the root meaning.

Question 20

function word

Answer 20

a word whose purpose is more to signal grammatical relationship than the lexical meaning of a sentence

Question 21

fusional language

Answer 21

is a language in which one form of a morpheme can simultaneously encode several meanings.

Question 22

hierarchical structure

Answer 22

o any ordering of units or levels on a scale of size, abstraction, or subordination.

Question 23

homophony

Answer 23

the linguistic phenomenon whereby words of different origins become identical in pronunciation

Question 24

incorporation

Answer 24

is when a noun (usually a direct object) is moved into the verb.

Question 25

infix

Answer 25

an affix inserted inside a word stem.

Question 26

inflection

Answer 26

process of word formation in which items are added to the base form of a word to express grammatical meanings.

Question 27

input

Answer 27

the processible language the learners are exposed to while listening or reading

Question 28

lexical category

Answer 28

classes of words (e.g., noun, verb, preposition), which differ in how other words can be constructed out of them.

Question 29

lexicon

Answer 29

a book containing an alphabetical arrangement of the words in a language and their pronounciations

Question 30

morpheme

Answer 30

the smallest grammatical unit of speech

Question 31

morphology

Answer 31

the study of forms, is the branch of linguistics that deals with the internal structure of complex words.

Question 32

open lexical category

Answer 32

open if the new word and the original word belong to the same category.

Question 33

output

Answer 33

is the language they produce, either in speaking or writing (i.e. The productive skills).

Question 34

partial reduplication

Answer 34

involves a reduplication of only part of the word.

Question 35

polysynthetic language

Answer 35

a language where words are made with lexical morphemes (substantive, verb, adjective, etc) as if parts of sentences were bound together to constitute one word, which can sometimes be very long.

Question 36

prefix

Answer 36

an affix which is placed before the stem of a word.

Question 37

preposition

Answer 37

words that “link to other words, phrases, and clauses” and that “express spatial or temporal relations.”

Question 38

productive

Answer 38

the degree to which native speakers of a language use a particular grammatical process, especially in word formation.

Question 39

pronoun

Answer 39

is a word or a group of words that substitutes a noun or noun phrase.

Question 40

reduplicant

Answer 40

a word-formation process in which meaning is expressed by repeating all or part of a word

Question 41

reduplication

Answer 41

a word-formation process in which meaning is expressed by repeating all or part of a word

Question 42

root

Answer 42

is the core of a word that is irreducible into more meaningful elements.

Question 43

simultaneous affix

Answer 43

An affix is articulated at the same time as some other affix or affixes in a word’s stem.

Question 44

stem

Answer 44

Stem is any morpheme which a syntactical affix can be added to

Question 45

suffix

Answer 45

also sometimes called a postfix or ending) is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word

Question 46

suppletion

Answer 46

the occurrence of phonemically unrelated allomorphs of the same morpheme (such as went as the past tense of go or better as the comparative form of good)