Grammar and Morphology Flashcards
What is a morpheme?
The smallest grammatical unit.
What is a free morpheme?
A morpheme that can stand on its own as a word.
What is an affix (or bound morpheme)?
A morpheme that cannot stand on its own as a word, but combines with others to create a new word.
What is a phrase?
A group of words centred around a head word.
What is a head word?
The central word in a phrase which gives the phrase its name and may be modified by other words.
What is modification in a phrase?
The adding of additional words to provide more detail to a head word in a phrase either before it (pre-modification) or after it (post-modification).
What is a clause?
A group of words centred around a verb, which may be either grammatically complete (main clause) or incomplete (subordinate clause).
What is active voice?
A clause where the agent (doer) of an action is the subject.
What is passive voice?
A clause where the patient (the entity affected by an action) is in the subject position, and the agent either follows or is left out.
What is tense?
How the time of an event is marked (usually through verb inflection): past, present & future.
What is aspect?
An element of marking the time of an event, by specifying whether they are progressive (ongoing) or perfective (completed).
What is coordination?
The joining of two or more independent clauses via co-ordinating conjunctions.
What is subordination?
The joining of two or more clauses where only one is independent (the main clause) and the others dependent (subordinate clause/clauses).
What is a sentence?
A larger unit of meaning, which may be formed of a single clause (simple sentence) or several clauses (compound or complex sentences).
What are minor sentences?
Sentences without a verb.
What is sentence function?
The purpose a sentence fulfils in communication: as a statement, question, command or exclamation.
What are the types of sentence functions?
Declaratives, interrogatives, imperatives and exclamatives.
What is word class?
The grammatical category into which words can be placed, including noun, adjective, verb, adverb, determiner, pronoun, preposition, conjunction.
Is there a future tense in English?
There is a debate over whether or not there is a future tense in English.
What is morphology?
Morphology is the area of language study that deals with the way that words are formed from smaller units called morphemes.
