Chapter 4 - The Morphological Component Flashcards
Morphemes
The smallest units of meaning; therefore they cannot be broken down further and remain meaningful.
Morphology
The study of the structure and classification of words and the units that make up words.
Bound morpheme
A meaningful grammatical unit that cannot occur alone.
Free morpheme
A meaningful grammatical unit that can stand alone.
Root
A morpheme, usually but not always a free morpheme, that serves as a building block for other words and carries the main meaning of those words.
Affix
A bound morpheme that can be added to a root.
Prefix
An affix added to the beginning of the root.
Suffix
An affix added to the end of a root.
Compound
A word made up of two or more roots.
Closed-form compound
A compound word with no space or hyphen between the different roots.
Hyphenated compound
A compound that has a hyphen or hyphens between the different roots of the compound.
Open-form compound
Has spaces between its roots.
Head of a compound
The core meaning of the compound; also determines the grammatical function of the compound.
Lexical categories
Major grammatical classes into which words (not morphemes) can be divided.
Parts of speech
A system of grammatical categories for classifying words according to their usage or function.
Derivational morphemes
Bound morphemes that change the meaning or lexical category of a word.
Inflectional morphemes
Bound morphemes that do not change the essential meaning or lexical category of a word. They change grammatical functions (other than lexical category).
Morphrophonemic rules
Rules that specify which allomorph of a morpheme will be used in a specific phonetic environment.
Typology
A branch of linguistics that studies the structural similarities of languages.
Morphological typology
The study and classification of language based on how morphemes create words.
Analytic (or isolating) language
A language in which most words are single morphemes.
Synthetic language
Uses bound morphemes to affect the meaning or mark the grammatical function of a free morpheme.
Fusional (inflectional) language
One type of synthetic language in which one bound morpheme may convey several bits of information.
Agglutinating language
A type of synthetic language in which each bound morpheme adds only one specific meaning to the root morpheme.
Polysynthetic language
A synthetic language in which each word is the equivalent to a whole sentence in other languages.
Open classes of words (content words)
Types of words (nouns, adjectives,verbs, and adverbs) that grow in number in a language.
Closed classes of words (function words)
Types of words (prepositions and pronouns) the growth of which is very limited.
Neologisms
Newly formed words
Compounding
Creating a word with more than one root.
Acronyms
Words that are formed from the first letter or letters of more than one word.
Clipping
Deleting a section of a word to create a shortened form (eg. ex)
Blending
The process of taking two or more words (compounding), clipping parts off one or more of the words, and then combining them.
Blend
A word that is the result of the process of blending.
Derivation
The process of forming a new word by adding a derivational affix to a word.
Analogy
A process by which one form of a word (or other linguistic phenomenon) is used as the model for constructing another word or structure.
Back-formation
Used to form a new word through the process of analogy by removing an affix or what appears to be an affix from that word.
Eponyms
Words formed from people’s names (eg. Braille, Kanye’d)
Etymology
The study of the history of words.
