"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.