Chapter 4 morphology Flashcards
Affix
A bound morpheme that modifies the meaning and/or syntactic (sub)category of the stem in some way
Affixation
The morphological process whereby an affix is attached to a root or stem.
Agglutination
The formation of derivation or inflectional words by putting together constituents of which each expresses a single definite meaning.
Allomorphs
Variants of a morpheme
alternation
In morphology, the morphological process that uses morpheme-internal modifications to make new words or morphological distinctions.
ambiguity
The phenomenon by which a single linguistic form (e.g. a word or string of words) can be the form of more than one distinct linguistic expression.
analytic language
a language in which most words are single morphemes
bound morpheme
a morpheme that must be attached to another element.
bound root
Morpheme that has some associated basic meaning, but that is unable to stand alone as a word in its own right
closed lexical category
lexical category in which the members are fairly rigidly established and additions are made very rarely and only over long periods of time.
compounding
creating a new word by combining two or more existing words
conjunction
connects words or groups of words
content morpheme
morpheme that carries semantic content (as opposed to merely preforming a grammatical function).
content word
A word whose primary purpose is to contribute semantic content (as opposed to merely preforming a grammatical function)
derivation
In morphology, a word-formation process by which a new word is built from a stem–usually through the addition of an affix–that changes the word class and/or basic meaning of the word.
determiner
words that specify something about a noun. Includes articles, demonstrative pronouns, and qualifiers.
form
the structure or shape of any particular linguistic item, from individual segments to string words.
free morpheme
A morpheme that can be a word by itself
function morpheme
Morpheme that provides information about the grammatical relationships between words in a sentence.
function word
A word that has little semantic content and whose primary purpose is to indicate grammatical relationships between other words within a phrase.
fusional language
A type of 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.
hierarchical structure
The dominance relationship among morphemes in a word, or among constituents in a phrase.
homophony
The phenomenon by which two or more distinct morphemes or nonphrasal linguistic expressions happen to have the same form, i.e., sound the same.
incorporation
Morphological process by which several distinct semantic components are combines into a single word in a polysynthetic language.
infix
An affix that occurs within a base.
inflection
The modification of a word’s form to indicate the grammatical subclass to which it belongs.
input
The linguistic form before the application of a rule or a set of rules.
lexical category
A word-level syntactic categories noun (N), verb (V), adjective (A), and preposition (P)
lexicon
A speaker’s mental dictionary, which contains information about the syntactic properties, meaning, and phonological representation of a language’s words.
morpheme
The smallest unit of language that carries information about meaning or function
morphology
The system of categories and rules involved in word formation and interpretation.
open lexical category
Lexical category into which new members are often introduced
output
The linguistic form obtained after an application of a rule or a set of rules.
partial reduplication
A morphological process in which part of a stem is repeated to form a new word.
polysynthetic language
A type of language that attaches several affixes to a stem to indicate grammatical relationships.
prefix
An affix that is attached to the front of its base
preposition
introduces a phrase that usually ends in a noun or pronoun
productive
Describes a rule (such as a morphological rule stating under what circumstances an affix may be added to a stem) that can be applied in novel situations to produce novel grammatical forms.
pronoun
The name or part of a morpheme that is repeated in reduplication.
reduplication
A morphological process that repeats all or part of the base to which is attached.
root
In a Complex word, the morpheme that remains after all affixes are removed.
simultaneous affix
An affix that is articulated at the same time as some other affix or affixes in a word’s stem; exists only in visual-gestural languages.
suffix
An affix that is attached to the end of its base.
suppletion
A morphological process that marks a grammatical contrast by replacing a morpheme with an entirely different morpheme.
