Chapter 4 - The Morphological Component

Question 1

Morphemes

Answer 1

The smallest units of meaning; therefore they cannot be broken down further and remain meaningful.

Question 2

Morphology

Answer 2

The study of the structure and classification of words and the units that make up words.

Question 3

Bound morpheme

Answer 3

A meaningful grammatical unit that cannot occur alone.

Question 4

Free morpheme

Answer 4

A meaningful grammatical unit that can stand alone.

Question 5

Root

Answer 5

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.

Question 6

Affix

Answer 6

A bound morpheme that can be added to a root.

Question 7

Prefix

Answer 7

An affix added to the beginning of the root.

Question 8

Suffix

Answer 8

An affix added to the end of a root.

Question 9

Compound

Answer 9

A word made up of two or more roots.

Question 10

Closed-form compound

Answer 10

A compound word with no space or hyphen between the different roots.

Question 11

Hyphenated compound

Answer 11

A compound that has a hyphen or hyphens between the different roots of the compound.

Question 12

Open-form compound

Answer 12

Has spaces between its roots.

Question 13

Head of a compound

Answer 13

The core meaning of the compound; also determines the grammatical function of the compound.

Question 14

Lexical categories

Answer 14

Major grammatical classes into which words (not morphemes) can be divided.

Question 15

Parts of speech

Answer 15

A system of grammatical categories for classifying words according to their usage or function.

Question 16

Derivational morphemes

Answer 16

Bound morphemes that change the meaning or lexical category of a word.

Question 17

Inflectional morphemes

Answer 17

Bound morphemes that do not change the essential meaning or lexical category of a word. They change grammatical functions (other than lexical category).

Question 18

Morphrophonemic rules

Answer 18

Rules that specify which allomorph of a morpheme will be used in a specific phonetic environment.

Question 19

Typology

Answer 19

A branch of linguistics that studies the structural similarities of languages.

Question 20

Morphological typology

Answer 20

The study and classification of language based on how morphemes create words.

Question 21

Analytic (or isolating) language

Answer 21

A language in which most words are single morphemes.

Question 22

Synthetic language

Answer 22

Uses bound morphemes to affect the meaning or mark the grammatical function of a free morpheme.

Question 23

Fusional (inflectional) language

Answer 23

One type of synthetic language in which one bound morpheme may convey several bits of information.

Question 24

Agglutinating language

Answer 24

A type of synthetic language in which each bound morpheme adds only one specific meaning to the root morpheme.

Question 25

Polysynthetic language

Answer 25

A synthetic language in which each word is the equivalent to a whole sentence in other languages.

Question 26

Open classes of words (content words)

Answer 26

Types of words (nouns, adjectives,verbs, and adverbs) that grow in number in a language.

Question 27

Closed classes of words (function words)

Answer 27

Types of words (prepositions and pronouns) the growth of which is very limited.

Question 28

Neologisms

Answer 28

Newly formed words

Question 29

Compounding

Answer 29

Creating a word with more than one root.

Question 30

Acronyms

Answer 30

Words that are formed from the first letter or letters of more than one word.

Question 31

Clipping

Answer 31

Deleting a section of a word to create a shortened form (eg. ex)

Question 32

Blending

Answer 32

The process of taking two or more words (compounding), clipping parts off one or more of the words, and then combining them.

Question 33

Blend

Answer 33

A word that is the result of the process of blending.

Question 34

Derivation

Answer 34

The process of forming a new word by adding a derivational affix to a word.

Question 35

Analogy

Answer 35

A process by which one form of a word (or other linguistic phenomenon) is used as the model for constructing another word or structure.

Question 36

Back-formation

Answer 36

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.

Question 37

Eponyms

Answer 37

Words formed from people’s names (eg. Braille, Kanye’d)

Question 38

Etymology

Answer 38

The study of the history of words.