ling1111 morphology - lecture 5b

Question 1

Syntax

Answer 1

The component of language that arranges words into phrases and sentences. The principles of syntax account for the grammaticality of sentences, their hierarchical structure, their word order, et cetera. That is, syntax is the study of how sentences are structured.

Question 2

syntactic category

Answer 2

Traditionally called ‘parts of speech’. E.g. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions.

Question 3

Phrasal category

Answer 3

The class of syntactic categories that comprises the highest-level categories, including NP, VP,AdjP, PP and AdvP. See also lexical category functional category.

Question 4

Lexical category

Answer 4

A general term for the word-level syntactic categories of noun, verb, adjective, adverb and preposition.

Question 5

Head (of a phrase)

Answer 5

The central word of a phrase whose lexical category defines the type of phrase, e.g. the noun man is the head of the noun phrase the man who came to dinner; the verb wrote is the head of the verb phrase wrote a letter to his mother; the adjective red is the head of the adjective phrase very bright red.

Question 6

Two classes of words?

Answer 6

Content words - Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs

Function words - Conjunctions, Pronouns, Articles/determiners, verbal auxiliaries, prepositions

Question 7

Morpheme

Answer 7

The smallest unit of linguistic meaning or function, e.g sheepdogs contains three morphemes, sheep, dog and the function morpheme for plural, s.

Question 8

Morphology

Answer 8

The study of the structure of words; the component of the grammar that includes the rules of word formation.

Question 9

Free morpheme

Answer 9

A single morpheme that constitutes a word e.g. “duck” or “house”

Question 10

Affix

Answer 10

A bound morpheme attached to a stem or root; see prefix, suffix, infix, circumfix, stem, root.

Question 11

Bound morpheme

Answer 11

A morpheme that must be attached to other morphemes, e.g -ly, -ed, non-. Bound morphemes are prefixes, suffixes, infixes, circumfixes and some roots, such as cran in cranberry; see also free morpheme.

Question 12

Infix

Answer 12

A bound morpheme that is inserted in the middle of a word or stem.

Question 13

Root

Answer 13

The morpheme that remains when all affixes are stripped from a complex word, e.g system from un + system + atic + al + ly.

Question 14

two classes of morphemes?

Answer 14

Inflectional and derivational

Question 15

Inflectional morphemes

Answer 15

No syntactic category change, small/no meaning change. Required by grammar. Cannot stack in English.
E.g. Bunny (N) - Bunnies (N)
hopped (V), hopping (V), hops (V)

Question 16

derivational morphemes

Answer 16

syntactic category (can) change, more meaning change. Not required by grammar. Have a lexical function
E.g. Happy (Adj)
Happily (Adv)
Unhappiness (N)

Question 17

Adjectival inflectional morphology

Answer 17

e.g. fat, fatter and fattest.

Question 18

Irregulars : Words that behave idiosyncratically in regard to their inflectional morphemes

Answer 18

Nouns: child/children; ox/oxen; brother/brethren, sheep/sheep; aircraft/aircraft

Verbs: sing/sang/sung; sink/sank/sunk
put/put/put; hit/hit/hit; rid/rid/rid

Adjectives: good/better/best
bad/worse/worst

Question 19

The verb ‘to be’ is an irregular exception for inflectional morphemes

Answer 19

am/are/is/was/were : when an inflection changes the phonological word entirely, without any pattern it is called suppletion

Question 20

Lexemes (to do with inflections)

Answer 20

A lexeme is an abstract concept that encompasses a set of words with the same meaning, syntactic category (plus any other attributes); it is typically written in small caps. A lexeme is of a single syntactic category (the noun RECORD and the verb RECORD are different lexemes)

e. g. - swim, swam, swum, swimming are different forms of SWIM.
- child and children are different forms of CHILD
- cat and cats are different forms of CAT.
- am, are, is, was, were, being, been are forms of BE

Question 21

Derivational ‘morphology’

Answer 21

Morphemes that attach to words to form entirely new lexemes are called derivational morphemes. They add semantic meaning. e.g. morpheme: hood; has the meaning of status… such as childhood.

morpheme: -ness; meaning quality, state or condition. Example kindness
morpheme: -er; meaning agent who does (verb); example driver

Question 22

Allomorphs

Answer 22

Morphemes have underlying forms and complimentary distributed surface forms. The English plural has 3 allomorphs
buses= bus + əz (after sibilant fricatives)
cats= cat + s (after voiceless consonants)
dogs= dog + z (after everything else)