Chapter 4: Morphology Flashcards
affix
a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form
affixation
a morphological process whereby a bound morpheme, an affix, is attached to a morphological base
agglutinating language
form words through the combination of smaller morphemes to express compound ideas.
allomorph
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.
alternation
a variation in the form and/or sound of a word or word part
ambiguity
any word, phrase, or statement that could have more than one possible meaning.
analytic language
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).
bound morpheme
cannot occur on their own
bound root
a root which cannot occur as a separate word apart from any other morpheme.
close lexical category
Closed classes include pronouns, conjunctions, determiners, and determiners. These examples of parts of speech don’t readily accept new members.
compounding
occurs when two or more words or signs are joined to make a longer word or sign.
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
carry some semantic content as opposed to performing a grammatical function
content word
words that have meaning.
derivation
the formation of a word by changing the form of the base or by adding affixes to it
determiner
a word or affix that belongs to a class of noun modifiers that expresses the reference, including quantity, of a noun.
form
a meaningful unit of speech , as a morpheme , word, phrase, sentence
free morpheme
can occur as separate words
function morpheme
A morpheme which simply modifies the meaning of a word, rather than supplying the root meaning.
function word
words that exist to explain or create grammatical or structural relationships into which the content words may fit.
fusional language
a language in which one form of a morpheme can simultaneously encode several meanings.
hierarchical structure
constituent morphemes of a word can be organized into a branching or hierarchical structure, sometimes called a tree structure
homophony
the linguistic phenomenon whereby words of different origins become identical in pronunciation.
incorporation
the compounding of a word (typically a verb or preposition) with another element (typically a noun, pronoun, or adverb).
