Morphology Flashcards
What is morphology?
The study of the structure of words.
Morphemes
Smallest unit in language that carries meaning or function
Min. # of morphemes per word
1
Words
Smallest free form found in language
Mental Lexicon
Internal dictionary
Form
The sound that makes up words
Meanings
The concepts words express
Allomorphs
Variant pronunciations of a morpheme based on phonological context
Mono-morphemic
Words that cannot be broken down into meaningful parts
Multi-morphemic
Words that are morphologically complex
Free Morpheme
A morpheme that can stand as an independent word
Bound Morpheme
A morpheme unable to stand alone ex. -s
Root
The morpheme in a word that carries the major component of meaning
Bound root
Carries meaning, has lexical category but cannot stand alone ex. -flate
Affix
No lexical category; always bound
Prefix
Affix attached to the front of its base
Suffix
Affix attached to the back of its base
Infix
Affix attached within another morpheme
Compounds
Contain two or more roots
Affixation
Attachment of an affix to a base (bound morph to a free morph)
Head of Compounds
The morpheme that determines the lexical category of the entire compound (ex. house determines greenhouse is a noun)
Right Headed
The head is the right-most member of the compound (most languages)
3 ways to represent compounds
- Tree structures
- Bracketing
- Feature percolation (category of the entire constituent is the category of the head)
Tests for Compound Status
- Stress Pattern (stress not usually on head of cmpd)
- Placement for regular inflection
- Must stay together
- Semantic Drift (meaning doesn’t have to be a combination of the parts)
Base
Form to which any affix is attached. Can be one or more morphemes
Derivational Affixes
Affixes that change the meaning of words and can change lexical category
Inflectional Affixes
Affixes that only change the meaning slightly and cannot change lexical category
Discontinuous Morphs
Roots and affixes are discontinuous (ex. Arabic & Hebrew)
Building Complex Words (Steps)
- determine root & its lexical category
2. identify affixes and if multiple, which one comes first
Inflection
A morpheme that modifies a word’s form in order to indicate the grammatical subclass to which it belongs
Case
Provides information about the role that a noun plays in a sentence
Gender
Traditional, generally arbitrary, name for a kind of noun class
Noun Classes
In many languages, nouns may be marked for noun class
Number
Common noun class system. Singular vs. plural vs. dual
Tense
Indicates the point in time relative to the time of speaking that an event took place
Aspect
Expresses the duration or time of completion of an event
Differences b/n inflection and derivation (4)
- Category change
- inflectional: do not change grammatical category
- derivational: often change the grammatical category - Ordering
- inflectional affixes always follow derivational - Semantic composition
- inflectional: meaning is the sum of parts
- derivational: sum of parts or drifted meaning - Productivity
- Inflectional: more productive
- derivational: less productive
8 English Inflectional Affixes
- plural -s
- possessive -‘s
- 3rd person agreement -s
- past tense -ed
- progressive aspect -ing
- perfected aspect -ed
- comparative -er
- superlative -est
Root Internal Changes
Changes inside the root can mark grammatical changes
Suppletion
Change in the entire morpheme (can be a result of historical change)
Reduplication
Copy some part of the root and add it to the root
Conversion
A new word is created by assigning an existing word to a new category
Clipping
Creating a new word by shortening an existing multisyllabic word
