Inflection Flashcards
Syntactic/grammatical categories:?
Tense, Aspect, Number, Person,
Gender, Case
What is Exponence?
The realization of morphosyntactic features via
inflection: simple or cumulative
What is simple exponence?
1 form = 1 morphosyntactic feature
common in isolating and agglutinating lgs.
buen+a+s –> BUENO + A (Fem) + S (Pl)
What is cumulative exponance?
1 form = several (>1) morphosyntactic features
Latin cant-ō (1st Pers Sing+Ind+Act) = I sing
what’s extended exponance?
a single
morphological feature is realized on more
than one form at the same time:
E.g. Perfective Aspect in the Latin verb
rexisti
re:k-si-s-ti: ‘you (Sg) ruled’, is realized in the
three suffixes -si, -s, and -ti.
What is context free inflection?
One-to-one mapping between morphosyntactic feature and its phonological representation.
- E.g. English [Progressive] > /-ıŋ/ walking
jumping
crying
What is context-sensitive inflection?
No one-to-one mapping; the phonological realization varies. - E.g. English [Past Tense] " - /-d/ + allomorphs: helped, wated - /-t/: Sent - Ø: Hit
define and give Example of suppletion? (full and partial)
the occurrence of an unrelated form to fill a gap in a conjugation
Full: Go - went
Partial: Think - thought
Ablaut (define and example)
a change of vowel in related words or forms
ex. Sit - sat
in what two ways ca inflection be assigned?
agreement and
government;
Define agreement
one element takes on
the features of another element:
determiners and adjectives take the
categories of the noun.
Government
one element requires that another element takes on certain features: verbs and prepositions require certain case from nouns.
Define valency
the
capacity of a verb to take a specific
number and type of arguments (noun
phrase positions).
give examples of univalent, divalent and trivalent
uni: she DANCED
Bi/Di: She ATE the apple
Tri: She GAVE the book to the man
What’s an ergative language
a language that treats
the Agent of transitive verbs distinctly from the
Subject of intransitive verbs and the Object of
transitive verbs.
What are analytic tenses?
use auxiliary words and are therefore secondary:
- Future: I will write/be writing two exams next
month
- Past: I have/had written two exams before I left.
- Future Perfect: I will have written this exam by
this time tomorrow.
what is indicative mood?
indicates a state of
affairs:
¢ He was here.
¢ I am hungry.
What is imperative mood
expresses commands or requests. The understood subject of imperative sentences is you. ¢ Be here at seven o'clock.
What is the subjunctive mood
expresses a wish
or something that is not actually true.
It uses the past tense or past perfect tense;
when using the verb ‘to be’ in the
subjunctive, were rather than was is used:
- If he were here…
What is verbal modality?
deals with the modal
verbs and the mood of verbs.
- These include the assertion or denial of
any degree of belief, certainty, desire,
obligation, possibility, or probability on
the part of the speaker.
what is voice?
describes relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments
- active vs. passive
what is active voice
the unmarked case, where the Subject
represents the Agent of the action:
e.g. Bill bought the car from John on eBay
What is the passive voice
the marked case,
where the DO of the action has been promoted to the Subject
position and the verb is marked as Passive.
e.g. The car was bought by Bill
