Morphology Flashcards
Morphemes:
- A minimal unit of meaning.
- Can consist of more than one morpheme.
Examples of Morphemes:
- Peace= 1 morpheme
- Peace + Ful- Peaceful = 2 Morphemes
- Peace + Ful + Ly = 3 Morphemes.
Free Morphemes:
- Words that can be used by themselves.
- Independent of its own meaning, don’t need a morpheme to complete its meaning.
- Free Morphemes: Open Class Words - Girl, Fish, Tree and Love.
- Free Morphemes: Closed Class Words - The, And, For, It.
Bound Morphemes:
-Divided into two categories: Affixes and Roots.
Bound Roots:
Such as ‘ceive’ cannot be used by themselves.
Affixes:
-The prefixes and suffixes that we add to the beginning or ending of a word.
-Affixes are divided into:
-derivational affixes +Prefixes and Suffixes
-Inflectional affixes
+Suffixes
Derivational Affixes:
-When added to a word, creates a new word with a new meaning.
-A new word is derived out of a word.
-CHANGES WORD CLASS.
-These belong to a new grammatical category.
+Affixes can turn nouns into adjectives: Beauty+ful = Beauitful.
+Change verbs into adverbs: Precise+ly = Precisely
+Change adjectives to nouns: sing+er =Singer
+Can also keep the words in the same category: Blue+ish=Bluish
Inflectional Affixes:
- Are all suffixes
- When added to the end of a word, doesn’t change its meaning.
- NO change in word class.
- Changes things such as the person, tense, number of a word. A total of 8 in English.
Inflectional Affixes 1:
The third person singular S.
Example: Anakin Kill’s’ younglings.
Inflectional Affixes 2:
The past tense ED.
Example: Ron kiss’ed’ Hermione.
Inflectional Affixes 3:
The progressive ING.
Example: Han is fall’ing’ into the salad pit.
Inflectional Affixes 4:
The pass partle simple EN.
Example: The emperor has fall’en’ and cannot get up.
Inflectional Affixes 5:
The plural S.
Example: Vampire’s’ make the worst boyfriend’s’.
Inflectional Affixes 6:
The possessive S.
Example: That’s Luke’s’ hand isn’t it?
Inflectional Affixes 7:
The comparative ER.
Example: Picard is cool’er’ than Kirk.
Inflectional Affixes8:
The superlative EST.
Example: That’s the sweet’est’ thing i’ve ever seen.
Allo-morphemes:
Some morphemes have two or more pronunciations.
Example:
Cats and Cliffs = Voiceless ‘s’ /s/
Dogs and Girls = Voiced ‘s’ /z/
What are the two word categories called:
Content words and function words.
-All words are either of the two.
Content words:
- Have a clear lexical meaning.
-Class is composed of: Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives and Adverbs.
+ Words for: people, things, actions, attributes and ideas. - Are open class - as new words can be and are added to this category.
-With technology, marketing and food, we have created new words such as: ‘tweet’, ‘defriend’ or ‘frankenfood’.
Function Words:
-Don’t have a clear lexical meaning.
-Provides a functional purpose in a language.
-Words such as: Conjunction, Article, Prepositions and Pronouns.
-Are closed class.
+no changes are added to this category.
The process of word formations:
- In inflectional and derivation.
- Borrowing
- Affixation
- Clipping
- Blending
- Conversion
- Coinage
- Acronyms and initialisms
- Metaphor.
Compounding:
When two separate words are combined together to form one word.
- Example: Bookcase, Sunburn, Wallpaper.
- Can also create compound adjectives:
Good-looking, Low-paid.
-And create compound of adjectives and noun:
Fast + Food = Fastfood
(adj) (noun) (adj+noun)
Blending:
When two separate words are combined to form a single new term.
-First letter of word is joined to second part of word.
Example:
> Smurk = Smoke+Murk
> Smaze = Smoke+Maze
- Can also occur when describing a mixture of two languages: Spanglish = Spanish+English.
Clipping:
The reduction of what is noticeable in blending, but becomes more apparent in clipping.
Example:
-exam= examination
-gas=gasoline
-ad=advertisement
English speakers also clip each others name:
Ed,Liz,Mike,Ron
Hypocorisms:
A particular type of reduction, that Australian and British English use.
-A longer word is reduced to a single syllable.
-The ‘y’ or ‘ie’ is added to the end of the word.
Example:
- Movie= Moving picture
- Bickie= Biscuit
- Telly= Television
Backformation:
A specialized type of reduction process, where a word of a type (usually a noun) is reduced to form a word of another type (usually a verb).
Example:
(Noun) —————————— (Verb)
Television Televise
Donation Donate
Emotion Emote
Conversion:
A change in the function of a word, when a noun comes to be used as a verb (without any reduction).
-Aka a ‘category change’ or ‘functional shift’.
-Words such as ‘butter’, ‘bottle’, ‘chair’ have been converted into verbs: ‘buttered’, ‘bottled’, ‘chair’
-Conversion process includes:
+ Verbs into nouns
+Phrasal Verbs into nouns
+Noun into verbs
Phrasal Verbs:
- To print out
- To take over
Coinage:
- The invention and general use of new terms.
- Common for trade names of commercial products that become general words.
- Usually without capital letters: vasaline,nylon,zipper.
- Google is a form of coinage, a company name that’s used in normal regular.
- Eponyms=new words based on the name of a name of a person or a place.
Acronyms:
New words formed from the initial letters of a set of other words.
- CD= Computer Disk
- SPCA= Society for the presentation of cruelty to animals.
Derivation:
Words that are not given a separate listing in dictionaries.
- Affixes= are ‘un, mis,pre,ful,less’
- Example: ‘un’happy, ‘mis’fortunate, joy’ful’, boy’ish’.
Prefixes:
Words beginning with ‘un,mis’ -‘mis’lead.
Suffixes:
Words ending with ‘less’, ‘ish’ - point’less’
Infixes:
An affix that is incorporated inside of another word, occasionally used when emotionally expressing certain words.
- Example: Halle’bloody’lujah!
- Not so common in English
Analogy:
The formation of this new word, however was helped by a different process.
- Example: Yuppie was a new word by analogy with the earlier word hippie and another short lived analogy of yippie.
Borrowing:
Process by which a word from one language is adapted for use in another language.
Example:
Pizza is borrowed from Italy
Yoghurt and coffee is borrowed from Turkey.
