"Final" Flashcards
What is morphology
Morphology is the study of the internal structure or words and how they’re found.
What is a morpheme?
A morpheme is the smallest unit with meaning in linguistics.
What three characteristics does a morpheme have.
Minimal form, a specific identifiable meaning, and a pattern of arrangement.
What is an allomorph?
An allomorph are morphs with the same meaning that are in complementary distribution.
Concatenative morphology
Where you can easily put hyphens between each morpheme.
Non-concatenative
Hyphens cannot be placed neatly between morphemes.
Free morpheme
Morphemes that can stand on their own as a word.
Bound morpheme
Morphemes that cannot be uttered alone, they are attached to other morphemes
Simple words
These are words that have a single morpheme. (house, boy, light)
Complex words
These are words with a root and at least one affix. (redo, showed, beautiful)
Compound words
These have two root words often without affixes. (playboat, firetruck)
Content words
These words have specific meaning and are often nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives. (play, mouse, fuzzy)
Function words
These are words that are articles, conjunctions, modals, pronouns, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs. (is, was/were, could, under)
Inflectional affixes
Affixes that do not change the part of speech of the base/root. This is because they have a purely grammatical meaning. This means they can portray tense, possession, agreement, etc. (ex. Work[ing], student[‘s])
Derivational affixes
Affixes that do change the part of speech that the base is. This is seen in words like drive[er], love[er], etc. (Except for piglet or cloudlet)
How many inflectional endings does English have?
English has 8
Noun plural
(-Z): RUG[S]
Noun; Possessive
(-S): PARENT[‘S]
Verb; Past tense suffix
(-ED): WASH[ED]
Verb; Third person singular subject agreement suffix in present-tense
(-ES): LAUNCH[ES]
Verb; Progressive suffix
(-ING): PLAY[ING]
Verb; Past participle
(-EN): EAT[EN]
Adj; Comparative degree suffix
(-ER): FUNNI[ER]
Adj; Superlative degree suffix
(-EST): TALL[EST]
Morphosyntax
when one uses inflections/morphological markers to specify information about a word in a sentence setting.
Inflectional features
parent categories like number, tense, person, of inflectional values.
Inflectional values
singular/plural, present/past, 1st/2nd person.
Number
This shows whether a noun is singular, dual, or plural. Ex. (CAT[S])
Case
Nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, etc.
Nominative case
Indicating that a noun or pronoun is the subject of a sentence or clause.
Accusative case
Used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb.
Dative case
Used to express direction towards an indirect object, the recipient of an action.
Genitive case
Marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, usually a noun.
Person
`1st, 2nd, 3rd
Grammatical gender
Masculine, feminine, neuter
Aspect
How an action, event, or state denoted by a verb, extends over time.
Perfective aspect
(completed): I have eaten (Action has completed at an earlier point in time)
Progressive
I am eating (action is ongoing and is not complete)
Simple
I ate (action occurs at a point in time)
Perfect-progressive
I have been eating (action has been going on and may influence the future.)
Indicative
Statement
Subjunctive
Hypothetical
Optative
Wish
Imperative
Command
Voice
Active/passive
Agreement
When a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates. Noun phrase (this house, these houses)
What is cumulative expression or multiple exponence?
More than one specific inflectional value is expressed by a single morpheme.
Denotative meaning
The literal meaning of something.
Connotative meaning
The added nuance that indicates
something about the speaker or listener.
Euphemistic
Imparts a positive nuance (e.g. uncle Keith passed away last year)
Dysphemistic
Imparts a negative/insulting/vulgar nuance. (e.g uncle keith croaked last year)
Syntax
the study of sentence form and the placement of morphemes within said phrase.
AdvP
(AdvP+) Adv
AdjP
(AdvP+) Adj
PP
P NP
NP
(D) (AdjP+) N (PP+)
VP
(AdvP+) V (NP) (AdvP+) (PP+) (AdvP+)
TP
NP (T) VP
What factors contribute to the meaning of sentences?
Word meaning, word order, internal structure
Internal structure
the meaning of sentences because there can be structural ambiguity, which means we must not only look into the word meaning but how the words relate to each other. This can be seen when one sentence has several meanings (ex. The little mouse and boy drank water from the river→ who is little, the boy or mouse or both?).
Behaviorism
The theory that human and animal behaviors can be conditioned. It looks into the function of language vs. the form and how it differs with conditioning. Cause and effect.
Verbal behavior
A type of human behavior that is influenced by operant conditioning. Operant conditioning is a system of rewards and punishments (the behavior is subject to consequence).
According to the Behaviorist view, how does language acquisition proceed? Give an example.
Children acquire language based solely on the environment. There would be more leeway on responses earlier on and as the child grows it narrows
What aspects of this view did Noam Chomsky criticize? In what ways did Chomsky’s view of language acquisition differ from Skinner’s?
Chomsky believed that the reinforcement theory was only superficially applicable. The idea that autonomous language acquisition must be taken into consideration and argues for a mentalistic/ nativistic view in language.
What were some novel features of Chomsky’s original conception of syntactic theory, as laid out in Syntactic Structures (1957)?
Some novel features of Chomsky’s syntactic theory are grammar, phrase structure, and transformations. He looks into rule generation and the connection in that. He also touches on language acquisition.
Competence
A speaker’s knowledge of their language. They are able to understand and speak their language.
Performance
Specific utterances of language by a native speaker.
Subject
is who or what the sentence is about.
Predicate
What said object is doing.
Transitive verb
Has a direct object, for example ‘The crew closed the site’.
Intransitive verb
Has no direct object so ‘The baby slept quietly’.
Ditransitive verb
Has both a subject and direct object. These can look like ‘ Luke gave her a book’ or ‘Shelly drew Marcus a portrait’.
Pragmatics
The study of a speaker’s meaning with context, along with the literal meaning of the utterance.
Locutionary act
(utterance itself/meaning of words)
Illocutionary act
(function of the utterance)
Perlocutionary act
(intended effect of the utterance)
Performative verbs
Used in direct speech acts. They describe the type of speech act being uttered. (ask, give, pass, etc.)
