Grammar - Morphology Flashcards
Root
A morpheme in a word that gives the word its principle meaning.
Stem
Any morpheme or combination of morphemes to which inflectional affix can be added.
Free
A stand-alone word.
Bound
A word element that cannot stand alone as a word, including both prefixes and suffixes.
Prefix
Affixes added to the beginning of a base word to slightly change its meaning.
Affix
A letter or group of letters which is added to either the beginning or the end of a word to form a different word with a different meaning.
Suffix
One or more letters added to the end of a base word to change its conjugation, word type, or other grammar properties like plurality.
Infix
An affix inserted inside a word stem.
Inflectional
Used to create a variant form of a word in order to signal grammatical information without changing the meanings of words.
Derivational
Characterized by inflections indicating a semantic relation between a word and its base.
Morphological Over-Generalisation
Use of a sound in a wider range than permitted by the adult language.
Affixation
The process of adding an affix to a word to create either a different form of that word or a new word with a different meaning.
Abbreviation
A shortened form of a word or phrase.
Shortening
The dropping of the latter part of a word to produce a new and shorter word of the same meaning.
Compounding
When two or more words are combined together to form a new word.
Blending
Joining the beginning of one word and the end of another to make a new word with a new meaning.
Backformation
The process of forming a new word by removing actual or supposed affixes from another word.
Conversion of Word Class
A word-formation process that assigns an existing word to a different word class, part of speech, or syntactic category.
Initialism
An abbreviation consisting of the first letters of each word in the name of something, pronounced as separate letters.
Acronym
An abbreviation formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word.
Contraction
When two words are shortened in form and are put together to form one new word.
