File 4 - Morphology Flashcards
Affix
Bound morpheme that attaches to a stem.
Affixation
Process of forming words by adding affixes to morphemes.
Agglutinating Language
A type of synthetic language in which the relationships between words in a sentence are indicated primarily by bound morphemes. In agglutinating languages, morphemes are joined together loosely so that it is easy to determine where the boundaries between morphemes are.
Allomorph
One of a set of nondistinctive realizations of a particular morpheme that have the same function and are phonetically similar.
Alternation
In phonology, a difference between two or more phonetic forms that one might expect to be related. 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 a string of words) can be the form of more than one distinct linguistic expression. The form that is shared by more than one expression is said to be ambiguous.
Analytic Language
Type of language in which most words consist of one morpheme and sentences are composed of sequences of these free morphemes. Grammatical relationships are often indicated by word order.
Bound Morpheme
Morpheme that always attaches to other morphemes, never existing as a word itself.
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
Word formation process by which words are formed through combining two or more independent words.
Conjunction
A lexical category that consists of function words such as “and”, “but”, “however”, etc.
Content Morpheme
Morpheme that carries semantic content (as opposed to merely performing a grammatical function).
Content Word
A word whose primary purpose is to contribute semantic content to the phrase in which it occurs. All free content morphemes are content words.
Derivation
In phonology, a process by which an underlying form is changed as phonological rules act upon it. In morphology, a morphological process that changes a word’s lexical category or its meaning in some predicable way.
Determiner
The name of a lexical category and a syntactic category that consists of expressions such as “the”, “a”, “this”, “all”, etc. Syntactically, consists of those expressions that when combined with an expression of category noun to their right result in an expression of category noun phrase.
Form
The structure or shape of any particular linguistic item, from individual segments to strings of words.
Free Morpheme
A morpheme that can stand alone as a word.