Chapter 4 morphology

Question 1

Affix

Answer 1

A bound morpheme that modifies the meaning and/or syntactic (sub)category of the stem in some way

Question 2

Affixation

Answer 2

The morphological process whereby an affix is attached to a root or stem.

Question 3

Agglutination

Answer 3

The formation of derivation or inflectional words by putting together constituents of which each expresses a single definite meaning.

Question 4

Allomorphs

Answer 4

Variants of a morpheme

Question 5

alternation

Answer 5

In morphology, the morphological process that uses morpheme-internal modifications to make new words or morphological distinctions.

Question 6

ambiguity

Answer 6

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.

Question 7

analytic language

Answer 7

a language in which most words are single morphemes

Question 8

bound morpheme

Answer 8

a morpheme that must be attached to another element.

Question 9

bound root

Answer 9

Morpheme that has some associated basic meaning, but that is unable to stand alone as a word in its own right

Question 10

closed lexical category

Answer 10

lexical category in which the members are fairly rigidly established and additions are made very rarely and only over long periods of time.

Question 11

compounding

Answer 11

creating a new word by combining two or more existing words

Question 12

conjunction

Answer 12

connects words or groups of words

Question 13

content morpheme

Answer 13

morpheme that carries semantic content (as opposed to merely preforming a grammatical function).

Question 14

content word

Answer 14

A word whose primary purpose is to contribute semantic content (as opposed to merely preforming a grammatical function)

Question 15

derivation

Answer 15

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.

Question 16

determiner

Answer 16

words that specify something about a noun. Includes articles, demonstrative pronouns, and qualifiers.

Question 17

form

Answer 17

the structure or shape of any particular linguistic item, from individual segments to string words.

Question 18

free morpheme

Answer 18

A morpheme that can be a word by itself

Question 19

function morpheme

Answer 19

Morpheme that provides information about the grammatical relationships between words in a sentence.

Question 20

function word

Answer 20

A word that has little semantic content and whose primary purpose is to indicate grammatical relationships between other words within a phrase.

Question 21

fusional language

Answer 21

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.

Question 22

hierarchical structure

Answer 22

The dominance relationship among morphemes in a word, or among constituents in a phrase.

Question 23

homophony

Answer 23

The phenomenon by which two or more distinct morphemes or nonphrasal linguistic expressions happen to have the same form, i.e., sound the same.

Question 24

incorporation

Answer 24

Morphological process by which several distinct semantic components are combines into a single word in a polysynthetic language.

Question 25

infix

Answer 25

An affix that occurs within a base.

Question 26

inflection

Answer 26

The modification of a word’s form to indicate the grammatical subclass to which it belongs.

Question 27

input

Answer 27

The linguistic form before the application of a rule or a set of rules.

Question 28

lexical category

Answer 28

A word-level syntactic categories noun (N), verb (V), adjective (A), and preposition (P)

Question 29

lexicon

Answer 29

A speaker’s mental dictionary, which contains information about the syntactic properties, meaning, and phonological representation of a language’s words.

Question 30

morpheme

Answer 30

The smallest unit of language that carries information about meaning or function

Question 31

morphology

Answer 31

The system of categories and rules involved in word formation and interpretation.

Question 32

open lexical category

Answer 32

Lexical category into which new members are often introduced

Question 33

output

Answer 33

The linguistic form obtained after an application of a rule or a set of rules.

Question 34

partial reduplication

Answer 34

A morphological process in which part of a stem is repeated to form a new word.

Question 35

polysynthetic language

Answer 35

A type of language that attaches several affixes to a stem to indicate grammatical relationships.

Question 36

prefix

Answer 36

An affix that is attached to the front of its base

Question 37

preposition

Answer 37

introduces a phrase that usually ends in a noun or pronoun

Question 38

productive

Answer 38

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.

Question 39

pronoun

Answer 39

The name or part of a morpheme that is repeated in reduplication.

Question 40

reduplication

Answer 40

A morphological process that repeats all or part of the base to which is attached.

Question 41

root

Answer 41

In a Complex word, the morpheme that remains after all affixes are removed.

Question 42

simultaneous affix

Answer 42

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.

Question 43

suffix

Answer 43

An affix that is attached to the end of its base.

Question 44

suppletion

Answer 44

A morphological process that marks a grammatical contrast by replacing a morpheme with an entirely different morpheme.