Chapter 4: Morphology

Question 1

affix

Answer 1

a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form

Question 2

affixation

Answer 2

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

Question 3

agglutinating language

Answer 3

form words through the combination of smaller morphemes to express compound ideas.

Question 4

allomorph

Answer 4

Nondistinctive realizations of a particular morpheme that have the same function and are phonetically similar. For example, the English plural morpheme can appear as [s] as in cats, [z] as in dogs, or [‘z] as in churches. Each of these three pronunciations is said to be an allomorph of the same morpheme.

Question 5

alternation

Answer 5

a variation in the form and/or sound of a word or word part

Question 6

ambiguity

Answer 6

any word, phrase, or statement that could have more than one possible meaning.

Question 7

analytic language

Answer 7

language that conveys relationships between words in sentences primarily by way of helper words (particles, prepositions, etc.) and word order, as opposed to using inflections (changing the form of a word to convey its role in the sentence).

Question 8

bound morpheme

Answer 8

cannot occur on their own

Question 9

bound root

Answer 9

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

Question 10

close lexical category

Answer 10

Closed classes include pronouns, conjunctions, determiners, and determiners. These examples of parts of speech don’t readily accept new members.

Question 11

compounding

Answer 11

occurs when two or more words or signs are joined to make a longer word or sign.

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

carry some semantic content as opposed to performing a grammatical function

Question 14

content word

Answer 14

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

Question 16

determiner

Answer 16

a word or affix that belongs to a class of noun modifiers that expresses the reference, including quantity, of a noun.

Question 17

form

Answer 17

a meaningful unit of speech , as a morpheme , word, phrase, sentence

Question 18

free morpheme

Answer 18

can occur as separate words

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

words that exist to explain or create grammatical or structural relationships into which the content words may fit.

Question 21

fusional language

Answer 21

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

Question 22

hierarchical structure

Answer 22

constituent morphemes of a word can be organized into a branching or hierarchical structure, sometimes called a tree structure

Question 23

homophony

Answer 23

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

Question 24

incorporation

Answer 24

the compounding of a word (typically a verb or preposition) with another element (typically a noun, pronoun, or adverb).

Question 25

infix

Answer 25

sounds or letters attached to or inserted within a word to produce a derivative word or an inflectional form

Question 26

inflection

Answer 26

the change in the form of a word (in English, usually the addition of endings) to mark such distinctions as tense, person, number, gender, mood, voice, and case

Question 27

input

Answer 27

input refers to what a learner hears and processes in the target language.

Question 28

lexical category

Answer 28

Different types of words (i.e. noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, conjunction, preposition, and interjection)

Question 29

lexicon

Answer 29

the total stock of words and word elements that carry meaning.

Question 30

morpheme

Answer 30

the minimal units of linguistic form and meaning

Question 31

morphology

Answer 31

the study of the forms of words.

Question 32

open lexical category

Answer 32

noun, verb, adjective, adverb, easily allow for the addition of new words.

Question 33

output

Answer 33

refers to the language that is produced

Question 34

partial reduplication

Answer 34

involves consonant ablaut or vowel alternation (e.g. / i-æ/ as in rip rap and /i-o/ as in ping pong). There are three types of partial reduplications namely vowel alternations, onset alternations and rhyming words.

Question 35

polysynthetic language

Answer 35

A polysynthetic language is 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. Those “words” will be translated by several words or even by a complete sentence for less synthetic languages such as English

Question 36

prefix

Answer 36

Affixes that precede the stem

Question 37

preposition

Answer 37

a word governing, and usually preceding, a noun or pronoun and expressing a relation to another word or element in the clause.

Question 38

productive

Answer 38

the degree to which speakers of a language use a particular grammatical process

Question 39

pronoun

Answer 39

a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.

Question 40

reduplicant

Answer 40

The reduplicated element

Question 41

reduplication

Answer 41

a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change

Question 42

root

Answer 42

either a base word, or a part of a word to which affixes are added.

Question 43

simultaneous affix

Answer 43

an affix that takes place at the same time as its base

Question 44

stem

Answer 44

a part of a word responsible for its lexical meaning

Question 45

suffix

Answer 45

Affixes that follow the stem

Question 46

suppletion

Answer 46

the use of two or more phonetically distinct roots for different forms of the same word, such as the adjective bad and its suppletive comparative form worse.