Chapter 4 Flashcards
affix
bound morpheme that attaches to a stem
affixation
process of forming words by adding affixes to them
agglutinating language
type of synthetic language in which the relationships between words in a sentence are indicated primarily by bound morphemes.
allomorph
one of a set of non-distinctive realizations of a particular morpheme that have the same function and are phonetically similar
alternation
morphological process that uses morpheme internal modifications to make new words or morphological distinctions
ambiguity
phenomenon by which a single linguistic form can be the form of more than one linguistic expression
analytic language
type of language in which most words consist of one morpheme and sentences are conformed of sequences of these free morphemes. Grammatical relationships are often indicated by word order
bound morpheme
morpheme that always attaches to other morphemes, never existing as a word by itself
bound root
morpheme that has some associated basic meaning but is unable to stand alone as a word
closed lexical category
lexical category in which members are fairly rigidly established and new members are rarely added and when they are it is over a long period of time
compounding
word formation process by which words are formed through combining two or more independent words
conjunction
lexical category that consists of function words such as and, but and however
content morpheme
morpheme that carries semantic content (not just grammatical function)
content word
word whose primary purpose is to contribute semantic content to the phrase in which it occurs
derivation
in morphology, process that changes a word’s lexical category or its meaning in some predictable way
determiner
the name of a lexical and syntactic category that consists of expressions such as the, a, this, all, etc.
form
structure or shape of any particular linguistic item, from individual segments to strings of words
free morpheme
morpheme that can stand alone as a word