Morphology Flashcards
mental lexicon
the place where your brain stores all word pieces
- formation of new words: pull the pieces you need,
attach them together
- recognizing words: breaking them down and analyzing
the individual pieces
morpheme
The smallest possible unit of meaning within a language
- phoneme is to sound as morpheme is to meaning
bound morpheme
morphemes that must be attached to another morpheme
- usually a closed class (no new morphemes can be added
to this class), but not always
- may or may not be productive
productivity
the ability to create new words with a morpheme
-ness vs. -th
content morpheme
morphemes that contain some kind of semantic meaning (have some sort of reference)
- E.g., think, cat, cold
- often nouns, verbs, adjectives
- usually open classes (new morphemes can be added)
- often free morphemes, but not always
functional morpheme
morphemes that only convey grammatical information (no reference per se)
- E.g., -s, -en, -er, and
- sometimes, but not always, closed classes
root
the base of the word; the foundation to which affixes are
attached
- may or may not be bound
E.g., -game in pregame; cran- in cranberry*; -believe- in
unbelievable
affix
the extra pieces added directly onto the word to change
its meaning
- ALWAYS bound
- can be inflectional or derivational
inflection
marks some kind of grammatical function/information
- E.g., cat → cats; dance → danced
- abstract meaning that is hard to define
derivation
changes the meaning or category of a word or morpheme
- E.g., cat → catlike, catty; man → manly → unmanly
circumfix
an affix with two parts, one appearing at the beginning of the root, one appearing at the end (not used in english)
infix
an affix inserted into a stem (very marginal in English)
- E.g., abso-f***ing-lutely 🙊🙉
compounding
combining two free (or independent) morphemes
together
- extremely common in English!
- E.g., doghouse, babysit, bookbag, etc
- exocentric & endocentric
endocentric
bluebird: an actual type of bird
exocentric
red-eye: not actually a kind a eye
reduplication
formation of a new word by either doubling an entire morpheme or part of a morpheme
- very marginal in English, but some languages use it productively
- E.g., Do you like him, or do you like-like him?
alternation
changing part of a root to produce new meaning
- E.g., ring, rang rung; man & men
suppletion
the connection of unrelated forms to one another
- forms cannot be phonologically or morphologically derived
- no apparent link between the forms
- E.g., be, am, is, was, were; go & went
conversion
the change in category of a word while its form remains unaltered
- E.g., hammer, face, pet
clipping
the removal of part(s) of a word to form a new word
- In English:
- refrigerator → fridge
- gymnasium → gym
acronyms
when you take one sound from each word and put
them together (pronounced as words, unlike initialisms)
- In English:
- radar < RAdio Detection and Ranging
- laser < Light Amplification by Simulated Emission of
Radiation
blends
combining sounds from two words
- In English:
- smog < smoke + fog
- brunch < breakfast + lunch
initialism
cannot be pronounced as words
- DVD, WTF, TV, SUV
morphological typology
helps us understand and compare these differences across languages
- The way of classifying languages by their common
morphological structures
analytic/isolating languages
few morphemes per word
(usually less than 2)
- May use compounding and some derivation, but very little
inflection
- E.g., Mandarin, Yoruba
synthetic language
combining of several morphemes in each
word (an average of 2-3 morphemes per word)
- Usually a high use of inflection
- Agglutinative, fusional, and polysynthetic languages
agglutinative/agglutinating languages
a form of synthetic
language in which each affix represents one unit of meaning
- Morpheme boundaries are easy to see
- E.g., Hungarian, Turkish
fusional language
a form of synthetic language in which one
affix can represent multiple grammatical, semantic, or syntactic
features
- Morpheme boundaries are hard to see
- E.g., Spanish, Russian
polysynthetic language
a form of synthetic language in which words
are composed of many morphemes (3+), also using a high level of
inflection
- Make use of incorporation: more than one root morpheme allowed per
word
- E.g., Ainu, Chukchi, Mohawk, Tiwi
derived word structure
- morphemes attach the root first
- certain morphemes must attach to certain word classes
- derivation occurs before inflection
- words try to remain in the same class/category for as
long as they can
allomorphs
the related forms of the same morpheme
- they should be derivable by rules that are driven by
phonetics
- -ness and -th have the same meaning but are not
allomorphs
