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, root or stem
agglutinating language
a language in which words are made up of a linear sequence of distinct morphemes and each component of meaning is represented by its own morpheme.
allomorph
a variant form of a morpheme, that is, when a unit of meaning varies in sound without changing the meaning
alternation
a variation in the form and/or sound of a word or word part.
ambiguity
a quality of language that makes speech or written text open to multiple interpretations
analytic language
a language that primarily conveys relationships between words in sentences by way of helper words (particles, prepositions, etc.) and word order, as opposed to utilizing inflections (changing the form of a word to convey its role in the sentence)
bound morpheme
a grammatical unit that never occurs by itself, but is always attached to some other morpheme. The plural morpheme -s in dogs.
bound root
a root that cannot occur as a separate word apart from any other morpheme.
closed lexical category
the category of function words—that is, parts of speech (or word classes)—that don’t readily accept new members. English include pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, and prepositions.
open lexical category
include nouns, lexical verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.
compounding
the process of combining two words (free morphemes) to create a new word (commonly a noun, verb, or adjective)
conjunction
a word that: syntactically links words or larger constituents, and. expresses a semantic relationship between them.
content morpheme
a root that forms the semantic core of a major class word. They have lexical denotations that are not dependent on the context or on other morphemes.
content word
words that have meaning. They can be compared to grammatical words, which are structural. Nouns, main verbs, adjectives and adverbs
derivation
the formation of a new word or inflectable stem from another word or stem. It typically occurs by the addition of an affix
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 (such as a morpheme, word, or sentence)