Linguistics Flashcards
applied linguistics
The application of insights from theoretical linguistics to practical matters such as language teaching, remedial linguistic therapy, language planning or whatever.
arbitrariness
An essential notion in structural linguistics which denies any necessary relationship between linguistic signs and their referents, e.g. objects in the outside world.
areas of linguistics
Any of a number of areas of study in which linguistic insights have been brought to bear, for instance sociolinguistics in which scholars study society and the way language is used in it. Other examples are psycholinguistics which is concerned with the psychological and linguistic development of the child.
competence
According to Chomsky in his Aspects of the theory of syntax (1965) this is the abstract ability of an individual to speak the language which he/she has learned as native language in his/her childhood. The competence of a speaker is unaffected by such factors as nervousness, temporary loss of memory, speech errors, etc. These latter phenomena are entirely within the domain of performance which refers to the process of applying one’s competence in the act of speaking. Bear in mind that competence also refers to the ability to judge if a sentence is grammatically well-formed; it is an unconscious ability.
context
A term referring to the environment in which an element (sound, word, phrase) occurs. The context may determine what elements may be present, in which case one says that there are ‘co-occurrence restrictions’ for instance 1) /r/ may not occur after /s/ in a syllable in English, e.g. */sri:n/ is not phonotactically permissible in English; 2) the progressive form cannot occur with stative verbs, e.g. We are knowing German is not well-formed in English.
contrast
A difference between two linguistic items which can be exploited systematically. The distinction between the two forms arises from the fact that these can occupy one and the same slot in a syntagm, i.e. they alternate paradigmatically, e.g. the different inflectional forms of verbs contrast in both English and German. Forms which contrast are called distinctive. This can apply to sounds as well, for instance /p/ and /b/ contrast in English as minimal pairs such as pin /p?n/ : bin /b?n/ show.
convention
An agreement, usually reached unconsciously by speakers in a community, that relationships are to apply between linguistic items, between these and the outside world or to apply in the use of rules in the grammar of their language.
creativity
An accepted feature of human language — deriving from the phenomenon of sentence generation — which accounts for speakers’ ability to produce and to understand a theoretically infinite number of sentences.
descriptive
An approach to linguistics which is concerned with saying what language is like and not what it should be like (prescriptivism).
diachronic
Refers to language viewed over time and contrasts with synchronic which refers to a point in time. This is one of the major structural distinctions introduced by Saussure and which is used to characterise types of linguistic investigation.
displacement
One of the key characteristics of human language which enables it to refer to situations which are not here and now, e.g. I studied linguistics in London when I was in my twenties.
duality of patterning
A structural principle of human language whereby larger units consist of smaller building blocks, the number of such blocks being limited but the combinations being almost infinite. For instance all words consist of combinations of a limited number of sounds, say about 40 in either English or German. Equally all sentences consist of structures from a small set with different words occupying different points in the structures allowing for virtually unlimited variety.
economy
A principle of linguistic analysis which demands that rules and units are to be kept to a minimum, i.e. every postulated rule or unit must be justified linguistically by capturing a generalisation about the language being analysed, if not about all languages.
extralinguistic
Any phenomenon which lies outside of language. An extralinguistic reason for a linguistic feature would be one which is not to be found in the language itself.
figurative
Any use of a word in a non-literal sense, e.g. at the foot of the mountain where foot is employed figuratively to indicate the bottom of the mountain. Figurative usage is the source of the second meaning of polysemous words.
formalist
An adjective referring to linguistic analyses which lay emphasis on relatively abstract conceptions of language structure.
general linguistics
A broad term for investigations which are concerned with the nature of language, procedures of linguistic analysis, etc. without considering to what use these can be put. It contrasts explicitly with applied linguistics.
generative
A reference to a type of linguistic analysis which relies heavily on the formulation of rules for the exhaustive description (generation) of the sentences of a language.
head
The centre of a phrase or sentence which is possibly qualified by further optional elements, in the phrase these bright new signs the head is signs as all other elements refer to it and are optional. The term is also used in lexicology to refer to the determining section of a compound; in family tree, the element tree is head and family is modifier. This has consequences for grammar, especially in synthetic languages, such as German where in a compound like Stammbuch the gender is neuter (with das) because the head Buch is although the modifying word is masculine (der Stamm).
hierarchy
Any order of elements from the most central or basic to the most peripheral, e.g. a hierarchy of word classes in English would include nouns and verbs at the top and elements like adjectives and adverbs further down with conjunctions and subordinators still further down. The notions of top and bottom are intended in a metaphorical sense.
idealisation
A situation where the linguist chooses to ignore details of language use for reasons of greater generalisation.
language
A system which consists of a set of symbols (sentences) — realised phonetically by sounds — which are used in a regular order to convey a certain meaning. Apart from these formal characteristics, definitions of languages tend to highlight other aspects such as the fact that language is used regularly by humans and that it has a powerful social function.
lay speaker
A general term to refer to an individual who does not possess linguistic training and who can be taken to be largely unaware of the structure of language.
level
A reference to a set of recognisible divisions in the structure of natural language. These divisions are largely independent of each other and are characterised by rules and regularities of organisation. Traditionally five levels are recognised: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics. Pragmatics may also be considered as a separate level from semantics. Furthermore levels may have subdivisions as is the case with morphology which falls into inflectional and derivational morphology (the former is concerned with grammatical endings and the latter with processes of word-formation). The term ‘level’ may also be taken to refer to divisions within syntax in generative grammar.
linguistics
The study of language. As a scientific discipline built on objective principles, linguistics did not develop until the beginning of the 19th century. The approach then was historical as linguists were mainly concerned with the reconstruction of the Indo-European language. With the advent of structuralism at the beginning of the 20th century, it became oriented towards viewing language at one point in time. The middle of this century saw a radically new approach — known as generative grammar — which stressed our unconscious knowledge of language and underlying structures to be found in all languages.
linguistic determinism
Refers to the view, propounded by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, that language determines the way in which people think. Also termed the linguistic relativity hypothesis.
marked
A term used to state that a particular form is statistically unusual or unexpected in a certain context. For instance zero plurals in English such as sheep or deer are marked.
metalanguage
The language which is used to discuss language; see also object language.
metaphor
An application of a word to another with which it is figuratively but not literally associated, e.g. food for thought. This process is very common in the use of language and may lead to changes in grammar as with the verb go in English where its spatial meaning has come to be used metaphorically for temporal contexts as in He’s going to learn Russian.
onomastics
The linguistic study of names, both personal and place names. This field is particularly concerned with etymology and with the general historical value of the information which names offer the linguist.
paradigm
The set of forms belonging to a particular word-class or member of a word-class. A paradigm can be thought of as a vertical list of forms which can occupy a slot in a syntagm. Pronounced [?pær?daim].
parameter
Any aspect of language which can obtain a specific value in a given language, e.g. canonical word-order which can have the verb in a declarative sentence either before the subject, after the subject or after both subject and object. Contrast principle in this respect.
performance
The actual production of language as opposed to the knowledge about the structure of one’s native language which a speaker has internalised during childhood (see Competence).
productivity
A reference to the extent that a given process is not bound in its application to a certain input. For instance the prefixation of re- to verbs in modern English is productive because this can be done with practically all verbs, e.g. re-think, re-do, re-write. The term also refers — in syntax — to the ability of speakers to produce an unlimited number of sentences using a limited set of structures.
psychological reality
The extent to which the constructs of linguistic theory can be taken to have a basis in the human mind, i.e. to somehow be reflected in human cognitive structures. Many linguists are divided on this issue, one extreme claiming that this requirement of a theory is not necessary, other saying that it is the ultimate test of any respectable theory.
reflexiveness
The possibility of using language to talk about language; this is one of its delimiting characteristics with respect to other communication systems.
rhetoric
The technique of speaking effectively in public. Regarded in the past as an art and cultivated deliberately.
root
1) In grammar the unalterable core of a word to which all suffixes are added, e.g. friend in un-friend-li-ness. 2) In etymology, the earliest form of a word. 3) In phonetics, the part of the tongue which lies furthest back in the mouth.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
The notion that thought is determined by language. While few linguists nowadays accept this strict link, there would seem to be some truth to the postulation of the two American anthropologists/linguists.
sign language
A communication system in which people use their hands to convey signals. In recent years sign language has been the object of linguists’ attention and has come to be regarded as a fully-fledged system comparable to natural language with those individuals who are congenitally deaf and who learn sign language from childhood.
structuralism
A type of linguistic analysis which stresses the interrelatedness of all levels and sub-levels of language. It was introduced at the beginning of the century by Ferdinand de Saussure (1957-1913) as a deliberate reaction to the historically oriented linguistics of the 19th century and subsequently established itself as the standard paradigm until the 1950’s when it was joined, if not replaced, by generative grammar.
synchronic
A reference to one point of time in a language. This may be the present but need not be. Forms a dichotomy with diachronic. Structural studies of language are usually synchronic and the Indo-Europeanists of the 19th century were diachronic in their approach.
taxonomic
A reference to linguistics in which the main aim is to list and classify features and phenomena. It is usually implied that no attempt for linguistic generalisations is made.
theoretical linguistics
The study of the structure of language without any concern for practical applications which might arise from one’s work.
underlying representation
A representation of what is assumed by the linguist to be the structure which lies behind or forms the initial stage in the generation of a surface structure item. For instance one could say that /di:b/ is the underlying representation for German ‘thief’ and that the surface form [di:p] arises through the application of an automatic rule of final devoicing.
unproductive
Refers to a process which is bound to specific lexemes and hence cannot be used at will by speakers, e.g. umlaut is an unproductive process in German because it cannot be applied in plural formation with new words. Unproductive processes can nonetheless be statistically common, again umlaut is unproductive but occurs with words which have a high frequency in German because they belong to the core of the language — mainly names of beings, parts of the body, etc.
zero
Any element which is postulated by the linguist but which has no realisation in language, e.g. the plural morpheme which some linguists might assume to be present, but not realised, in a word like die Wagen.
zoosemiotics
The investigation of communications systems used by animals.
Phonetics
Phonetics is the study of human sounds.
Phonology
Phonology is the study of the sound system of a language or languages.
affricate
A phonetic segment which consists of a stop followed immediately by a fricative. Affricates act as units phonologically and are synchronically indivisible, e.g. /t?/ in church /t??:t?/ or judge /d??d?/.
allophone
The realisation of a phoneme. Each segment has different realisations which are only partly distinguishable for speakers. A phoneme can have different allophones, frequently depending on position in the word or on a preceding vowel, e.g. [l] and [?] in English (at the beginning and end of a word respectively) or [ç] and [x] in German (depending on whether the preceding vowel is front or not). Allophones are written in square brackets.
alphabet
A system of letters intended to represent the sounds of a language in writing. For all west European languages the Latin alphabet has been the outset for their writing systems. However, because each language has a different sound system different combinations of letters have arisen and letters have come to be written with additional symbols attached to them.
alveolar
A classification of sounds which are formed at the alveolar ridge (the bone plate behind the upper teeth). Alveolar sounds are formed with the tip or the blade of the tongue. Examples are /t,d,s,z,l,n/ in English or German.
alveolo-palatal
A classification of sounds which are formed with the hard palate as passive articulator and the blade of the tongue as active articulator. Examples are the two English fricatives [?] and [?].
ambi-dental
A description of the manner of articulation of the Modern English fricatives /?/ and /ð/. It is preferred to inter-dental as the tongue is not usually positioned between the teeth for these sounds.
articulatory phonetics
One of three standard divisions of phonetics which concerns itself with the production of sounds (compare acoustic and auditive phonetics).
auditory phonetics
One of the three standard divisions of phonetics which is concerned with the perception of sounds.
bilabial
Any sound produced using both lips, e.g. [p] oder [m].
cardinal vowels
A system of 8 rounded and 8 unrounded vowels which was originally developed by the English phonetician Daniel Jones and which is intended as a system of reference for the unambiguous classification of vowel values in a language. The cardinal vowels are represented in a quadrangle with vowels at each corner and two closed mid and open mid vowels, a pair in the front and a pair in the back of the quadrangle.
consonant
One of the two main classes of sound. Consonants are formed by a constriction in the supra-glottal tract (or occasionally at the vocal folds as with the glottal stop [?]). They divide into the chief types stops — /p,t,k/ for instance, fricatives — /f, ?, s/ — and approximants — /j, w/. Consonants contrast with vowels in their relatively low sonority and are hence found typically in the margins of syllables, i.e. in onsets and codas as in stopped /st?pt/.
contrastive
Refers to any elements which are in opposition to each other. A phonetic distinction is contrastive if it has significance on the phonological level, i.e. if it distinguishes meaning.
dental
A place of articulation characterised by the tip of the tongue being held against the back of the upper teeth, for instance in the pronunciation of /t,d/ in Italian, Swedish, etc. Indicated by a subscript diacritic representing a tooth, i.e. [?, ?]. The initial sounds in English this and think are sometime referred to as dental fricatives but the description ambi-dental is more appropriate as the tip of the tongue need only be in the region of the teeth.
diphthong
A vowel which is articulated with a change in tongue position between the beginning and end, e.g. /ai/ in English or German. Not all diphthongs have phonological status in a language. Historically, diphthongs tend to develop from long vowels.
discrete
A characteristic of human language where there is no continuous transition from one unit to another, e.g. /p/ and /b/ are separate, discrete sounds and speakers pronounce one or the other but not something intermediary between the two.
ease of articulation
A putative reason for sound change. It may play a role in allegro speech and possibly effect the sound system over time but cannot be assumed to be a generally valid principle on the phonological level.
fricative
A type of sound which is characterised by air passing a constriction somewhere between the glottis and the lips, e.g. [x, s, ?, f]. Turbulence arises when air flows through a narrow gap and it is this which causes the noise typical of fricatives. Fricatives can be voiced or voiceless. The equivalent term spirant is sometimes found.
glide
A sound which from the point of view of phonological classification lies between a vowel and a consonant, e.g. /j/ and /w/ in English. It is formed with little friction and has a high degree of sonority which accounts for why glides are found near the nucleus of syllables. Sometimes called a semi-vowel.
glottal
A term referring to sounds produced at the gap in the vocal folds. Such sounds can either be stops [?] or fricatives [h, ?] — voiceless and voiced respectively.
homophone
Any set of words pronounced the same way, e.g. English poor and pour /p?:/ (Received Pronunciation) and German Ferse and Verse.
homorganic
Any set of sounds which are articulated at the same point in the vocal tract, e.g. the sounds in the syllable-coda of mind /maind/ both of which are alveolar.
intonation
That part of the sound system of a language which involves the use of pitch to convey information. It consists of both accent (concerns individual words) and sentence melody (concerns word groups).
IPA
A system of transcribing the sounds of languages which consists of some Latin and Greek letters and a variety of additional symbols and diacritics. The goal is to represent each recognisable sound in a unique fashion. The IPA was developed at the end of the last century; the acronym stands for International Phonetic Alphabet.
labial
A reference to a sound which is formed at the lips; this encompasses both bilabials like /p, m/ and labio-dentals like /f, v/.
labio-dental
Describes a consonant which is formed by the lower lip making contact with the upper teeth as in English and German [f] and [v].
labio-velar
Describes a consonant which is articulated by a constriction at the velum with rounding of the lips at the same time, e.g. with [w] in English.
levelling
The disappearance of contrasts — usually phonological or morphological — in the course of a language’s development.
manner of articulation
One of the three conventional parameters (the others are place of articulation and voice) which are used to specific how a sound is produced. Common types are plosives, fricatives and affricates.
minimal pair
Any two words which are only distinguished by different sounds in a single position. Such word pairs are used in traditional phonology to determine the status of sounds as phonemes, e.g. German Kunst # Gunst and English railing # sailing which show that the initial sounds in all these words are phonemes in the respective languages. Note that the spelling of minimal pairs is irrelevant.
monophthong
A vowel which is articulated with the tongue in a constant position, e.g. /o:/ in German Boot. Most long vowels in German are monophthongs while those in English are diphthongs, e.g. [b??t] for boat.
nasal
A sound, vowel or consonant, which is produced by opening the nasal cavity (through lowering of the velum).
natural class
A group of sounds which behave similarly. An example would be the group of obstruents (stops and fricatives) as only these are affected by final devoicing in German.
onomatopoeia
The putative imitation of a natural phenomenon (for instance bird song) by phonetic means. Contrary to the opinion of many speakers, onomatopoeia is not a major principle in historical phonology.
optional
A term which refers to allophonic processes which do not necessarily have to be carried out, cf. the shortening of high vowels before nasals as in Received Pronunciation room /ru:m/ > /rum/ or been /bi:n/ > /b?n/; in general terms any process which is not obligatory.
oral
Articulated in the mouth. The term usually implies that the nasal cavity is not involved, e.g. in French there are distinct oral and nasal vowels.
organs of speech
Parts of the human anatomy which are used in speech production, e.g the glottis, velum, palate, alveolar ridge, lips and the tongue of course. From an evolutionary point of view one can see that these functions are secondary adaptations and specialisations of organs which have some other primary function.
palatal
A place of articulation at the hard palate in the centre of the roof of the mouth.
phone
Any human sound which has not been classified in the phonology of a language.
phoneme
In traditional phonology the smallest unit in language which disinguishes meaning, e.g /k/ and /g/ as seen in coat and goat. Each phoneme has one or more realisations, called allophones.
phonemics
The study of phonemes in language, their distribution, status and interrelationships.
phonetic
A reference to a phenomenon in the area of phonetics (often as opposed to phonology).
phonetics
The study of human sounds without immediate regard to their systematic status for a certain language.
phonological
A reference to the phonology of a language, i.e. to the deeper and more abstract organisation of the sounds of a language. A language’s phonology is its inventory of phonemes and the rules for their combination, distribution, etc.; in short all the ‘grammatical’ or structural aspects of the sound level. In a wider sense, phonology could be said to subsume phonetics as its ‘surface’ aspect.
phonology
The study of the sound system of one or more languages. Phonology involves the classification of sounds and a description of the interrelationship of the elements on a systematic level.
place of articulation
The point in the vocal tract at which a sound is produced. This can be anywhere from the lips at the front to the glottis (the gap between the vocal folds) at the back. The most common place of articulation is the alveolar ridge just behind the upper teeth.
plosive
A sound which is produced with a complete blockage of the pulmonic airstream. Also called a stop, examples are /p,t,k/.
pronunciation
A collective reference to the manner in which sounds are articulated in a particular language. Given its concrete nature pronunciation is a matter of phonetics rather than phonology.
prosody
A term which refers to all the suprasegmental properties of language such as pitch, loudness, tempo and rhythym.
Received Pronunciation
The standard pronunciation of British English. This stems originally from the speech of the middle and upper classes in London. In the course of the 19th century it developed into a sociolect, particularly when adopted by the public schools, and attained a wide distribution in Wales and Scotland as well. The term was coined by the English phonetician Daniel Jones.
redundancy
Superfluous information in language. Multiple marking of grammatical categories is the most common case of redundancy and is often found in German, e.g. the plural Dörfer which takes both an ending -er and a shift in stem vowel from back to front (umlaut).
rhotic
A reference to a variety of a language in which a syllable-final /r/ is pronounced, for instance (generally) in American English as opposed to Received Pronunciation in England.
rhythm
All the patterns of strong and weak syllables in a language. The rhythym of English (and German) is characterised by the foot which consists of a stressed syllable and all unstressed syllables up to the next stressed one.
segment
A unit of speech which is identifiable and separate from others. It contrasts with the term suprasegmental which refers to those aspects of phonetic structure above the level of individual sounds.
sibilant
A sound which is pronounced with clear, hissing friction which is reminiscent of either /s/ or /?/.
speech
The production of sounds using the organs of speech; contrasts directly with writing which is a secondary medium for communication via language.
stop
A consonant which is formed by blocking off the airstream completely, e.g. /p, t, k/. It contrasts directly with a fricative which does not involve an interruption of the airstream.
stress
The acoustic prominence of a syllable in a word. The physical correlates of stress can vary. Typically it involves the raising of the basic frequency and/or of volume matched by a prolongation of the syllable involved.
structure
A network of connections between elements of a system, for instance syllable structure is the set of relations which exist between parts of a syllable.
suprasegmental
A reference to phenomena which do not belong to the sound segments of language but which typically are spread over several segments, e.g. intonation, stress, tempo, etc.
syllable
The most important structural unit in phonology. A syllable consists of a series of sounds which are grouped around a nucleus of acoustic prominence (usually a vowel). A closed syllable is one which has a coda, an open syllable has a codaless rhyme: got /g?t/ versus go /g??/.
syntagmatic
A reference to the linear (or temporal) sequence of elements which contrasts directly with the vertical axis — the paradigmatic axis.
tongue
The most frequently used active articulator in all languages. The tongue can be divided into the following areas: the tip (Latin apex), blade (Latin lamina), back (Latin dorsum). The distinction between tip and blade is important for the production of dental and alveolar sounds. The tongue may also show a groove, for instance with palato-alveolar fricatives such as /?, ?/. The tip can be made to roll in the escaping air-stream as is the case with the apical rolled /r/ of many Romance languages and in many southern varieties of German. The root of the tongue can be retracted in order to achieve a constriction of the larynx as with the so-called ‘emphatic’ sounds of Arabic.
transcription
A system of representing sounds in writing unambiguously. For phonological purposes a broad transcription is sufficient as long as the systemic distinctions in the particular language can be recognised. A narrow transcription is more typical of phonetics and may also be necessary in phonology where a feature relies on a phonetic basis which has to be specified. In English it is sufficient to transcribe /r/ as [r], although a narrow transcription would demand [?] as strictly speaking [r] refers to an apical trill as in Spanish perro [pero] ‘dog”.
voiced
Spoken with simultaneous vibration of the vocal folds.
voiceless
Spoken without the vocal folds vibrating; the folds can either be open (the normal state) or closed with the compression of air between them and the supra-glottal stop position producing sounds which are called ejectives.
Morphology
Morphology is the study of the words as they express grammatical categories.
allomorph
A non-distinctive variant of a morpheme, e.g. -keit and -heit in German (Heiterkeit, Schönheit) which vary according to the final consonant of the base to which they are suffixed but share the same grammatical function of nominal derivation.
article
A grammatical word — or affix — used to specify a noun as definite or indefinite. It may vary for gender and case in languages with gender distinctions and a formal case system such as German.
bound
In a general sense any form which cannot occur on its own. Both lexical and grammatical morphemes may be bound, but the number of the former is very limited, e.g. the first part of raspberry in English which does not occur independently.
case
An inflection which indicates the relationship of a noun to other elements in a sentence, e.g. the dative in German which broadly indicates the beneficiary of an action: Sie hat ihm versprochen, nach Hause zu kommen. There are, however, many instances in which case requirements are not semantically motivated, e.g. gratulieren, imponieren with the dative as opposed to beglückwünschen, beeindrucken with the accusative.
closed class
A term which refers to any linguistic level whose elements form a relatively small number which is not altered by the individual speaker. For instance phonemes, grammatical morphemes and syntactic structures are a closed set but the lexicon is definitely an open class as it is continuously expanding.
declension
A term which refers to the inflections of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, i.e. of nouns and the elements which can qualify them. The set of inflections is called a nominal paradigm. The term declension can also be used for classes of nouns which conform to a certain paradigm. It is the equivalent with nouns of the term conjugation with verbs.
definite article
A grammatical word which marks a following noun for definiteness. Not every language has such an element, though it is more common for the indefinite article to be missing. Languages furthermore vary according to whether they demand the definite article when nouns are used generically. This is a major difference between English and German, cf. He is interested in philosophy. Er interessiert sich für die Philosophie.
degree
A relational specification which is found with adjectives and adverbs. There are three degrees: 1) positive as in small, 2) comparative as in smaller and 3) superlative as in smallest.
empty morph
In some morphological analyses, an element which is posited as the carrier of a grammatical category but not present on the surface, for instance the word sheep could be said to contain an empty plural morph: sheep + Ø.
function word
A word which serves the purpose of indicating a grammatical category or relationship. It contrasts explicitly with a content word which has lexical meaning.
inflection
An alteration made to a word to indicate a certain grammatical category, e.g. number and case with nouns or person, number and tense with verbs. The number of inflections in a language can be taken as an indication of its type, a large number being characteristic of synthetic languages. Diachronically inflections arise from clitics which become unseparable from the lexical bases to which they are attached.
irregular
A form which can be regarded as an exception to a given pattern or rule, e.g. the plurals formed with a stem vowel change in Modern English, man : men, tooth : teeth.
morph
Any item of language which cannot be broken down any further without a loss of meaning. A morph usually realises a morpheme, the unit of grammar on an abstract level, e.g. /?n/ in undoable but also /?m/ in impossible.
morpheme
The smallest unit in a grammar which can contrast with another and which carries meaning. A morpheme can be an inflection, e.g. /ri:-/ in rewrite or a lexical word, house, tree, sick. A morpheme is an abstract unit and is realised by a morph; it is the approximate equivalent of a phoneme on the level of phonology.
morphology
The level of linguistics which is concerned with the structure of words, both from the point of view of inflections and of word-formation. It is traditionally located between phonology (the level of sounds) and syntax (the level of sentences).
