Language Myth 7 Flashcards
Affix
an additional element placed at the beginning or end of a root, stem, or word, or in the body of a word, to modify its meaning.
Affixation
the process of inflection or derivation that consists of adding an affix
agglutinating language
form words through the combination of smaller morphemes to express compound ideas
allomorph
any of two or more actual representations of a morpheme
Alternation
the phenomenon of a morpheme exhibiting variation in its phonological realization
Ambiguity
a quality of language that makes speech or written text open to multiple interpretations
Analytic language
a language that conveys relationships between words in sentences primarily by way of helper words (particles, prepositions, etc.) and word order, as opposed to using inflections
Bound morpheme
A morpheme that cannot stand alone with meaning
Bound root
a root which cannot occur as a separate word apart from any other morpheme.
Closed lexical category
pronouns (you, them), modal verbs (could, must), determiners (a, the), prepositions (of, in), and conjunctions (and, but)
Compounding
the process of word formation that creates compound lexemes
Conjunction
a word used to connect clauses or sentences or to coordinate words in the same clause
Content morpheme
a root that forms the semantic core of a major class word
Content word
words that possess semantic content and contribute to the meaning of the sentence in which they occur
Derivation
the obtaining or developing of something from a source or origin
Determiner
a modifying word that determines the kind of reference a noun or noun group has
Form
A meaningful unit of speech
Free morpheme
A morpheme that can carry meaning on its own, and does not require a prefix, suffix, or infix to give it meaning
Function morpheme
a morpheme which simply modifies the meaning of a word, rather than supplying the root meaning
Function word
a word whose purpose is more to signal grammatical relationship than the lexical meaning of a sentence
Fusional language
Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features
Hierarchical structure
the format of linguistic representations
Homophony
the linguistic phenomenon whereby words of different origins become identical in pronunciation
Incorporation
a phenomenon by which a grammatical category, such as a verb, forms a compound with its direct object (object incorporation) or adverbial modifier, while retaining its original syntactic function
Infix
an affix inserted inside a word stem
Inflection
a change in the form of a word (typically the ending) to express a grammatical function or attribute such as tense, mood, person, number, case, and gender
Input
the exposure learners have to authentic language in use
Lexical category
grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech is a category of words that have similar grammatical properties
Lexicon
the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge
Morpheme
a meaningful morphological unit of a language that cannot be further divided (e.g. in, come, -ing, forming incoming )
Morphology
the study of the forms of words
Open lexical category
It is open if the new word and the original word belong to the same category
Output
the language the learner produces
Partial reduplication
involves consonant ablaut or vowel alternation
Polysynthetic language
words that are composed of multiple morphemes
Prefix
word, letter, or number placed before another
Preposition
word governing, and usually preceding, a noun or pronoun and expressing a relation to another word or element in the clause
Productive
the degree to which speakers of a language use a particular grammatical process, especially in word formation
Pronoun
a word that can function by itself as a noun phrase and that refers either to the participants in the discourse
Reduplicant
The reduplicated segment in a word resulting from a reduplication process
Reduplication
A word-formation process in which all or part of a word is repeated to convey some form of meaning
Root
either a base word, or a part of a word to which affixes are added
Simultaneous affix
an affix that takes place at the same time as its base
Stem
a part of a word responsible for its lexical meaning
Suffix
a morpheme added at the end of a word to form a derivative, e.g., -ation, -fy, -ing, -itis
Suppletion
the occurrence of an unrelated form to fill a gap in a conjugation
