Morphology

Question 1

mental lexicon

Answer 1

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

Question 2

morpheme

Answer 2

The smallest possible unit of meaning within a language
- phoneme is to sound as morpheme is to meaning

Question 3

bound morpheme

Answer 3

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

Question 4

productivity

Answer 4

the ability to create new words with a morpheme
-ness vs. -th

Question 5

content morpheme

Answer 5

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

Question 6

functional morpheme

Answer 6

morphemes that only convey grammatical information (no reference per se)
- E.g., -s, -en, -er, and
- sometimes, but not always, closed classes

Question 7

root

Answer 7

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

Question 8

affix

Answer 8

the extra pieces added directly onto the word to change
its meaning
- ALWAYS bound
- can be inflectional or derivational

Question 9

inflection

Answer 9

marks some kind of grammatical function/information
- E.g., cat → cats; dance → danced
- abstract meaning that is hard to define

Question 10

derivation

Answer 10

changes the meaning or category of a word or morpheme
- E.g., cat → catlike, catty; man → manly → unmanly

Question 11

circumfix

Answer 11

an affix with two parts, one appearing at the beginning of the root, one appearing at the end (not used in english)

Question 12

infix

Answer 12

an affix inserted into a stem (very marginal in English)
- E.g., abso-f***ing-lutely 🙊🙉

Question 13

compounding

Answer 13

combining two free (or independent) morphemes
together
- extremely common in English!
- E.g., doghouse, babysit, bookbag, etc
- exocentric & endocentric

Question 14

endocentric

Answer 14

bluebird: an actual type of bird

Question 15

exocentric

Answer 15

red-eye: not actually a kind a eye

Question 16

reduplication

Answer 16

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?

Question 17

alternation

Answer 17

changing part of a root to produce new meaning
- E.g., ring, rang rung; man & men

Question 18

suppletion

Answer 18

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

Question 19

conversion

Answer 19

the change in category of a word while its form remains unaltered
- E.g., hammer, face, pet

Question 20

clipping

Answer 20

the removal of part(s) of a word to form a new word
- In English:
- refrigerator → fridge
- gymnasium → gym

Question 21

acronyms

Answer 21

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

Question 22

blends

Answer 22

combining sounds from two words
- In English:
- smog < smoke + fog
- brunch < breakfast + lunch

Question 23

initialism

Answer 23

cannot be pronounced as words
- DVD, WTF, TV, SUV

Question 24

morphological typology

Answer 24

helps us understand and compare these differences across languages
- The way of classifying languages by their common
morphological structures

Question 25

analytic/isolating languages

Answer 25

few morphemes per word
(usually less than 2)
- May use compounding and some derivation, but very little
inflection
- E.g., Mandarin, Yoruba

Question 26

synthetic language

Answer 26

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

Question 27

agglutinative/agglutinating languages

Answer 27

a form of synthetic
language in which each affix represents one unit of meaning
- Morpheme boundaries are easy to see
- E.g., Hungarian, Turkish

Question 28

fusional language

Answer 28

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

Question 29

polysynthetic language

Answer 29

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

Question 30

derived word structure

Answer 30

1. morphemes attach the root first
2. certain morphemes must attach to certain word classes
3. derivation occurs before inflection
   - words try to remain in the same class/category for as
   long as they can

Question 31

allomorphs

Answer 31

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