Morphology

Question 1

What is a word?

Answer 1

Is the smallest unit of language that can be surrounded by pauses and can take primary stress

Question 2

What does it mean that full lexical words have primary stress?

Answer 2

That one syllable is pronounced with slightly higher pitch and greater volume than the others

Question 3

What does full lexical words with more than one syllable have?

Answer 3

secondary word stress

Question 4

What is the definition of a morpheme?

Answer 4

A minimal structural shape or piece that expresses meaning. EX: dog

Question 5

What is a free morpheme?

Answer 5

A minimal shape that can be used in discourse with no other forms attached to it. EX: the form flex as in flex your muscle. Is a fully pronouncable and usable word on its own.

Question 6

What is a bound morpheme?

Answer 6

A morpheme that must be attached to some other morpheme in order to be used naturally in discourse. Bound morphemes can be affixes, clitics or roots

Question 7

What is a root?

Answer 7

a root expresses the basic lexical meaning of a word and cannot be further divided into smaller pieces.

Question 8

What are free roots?

Answer 8

Those that have a pronouncable an meaningful bare form, a form that has no other morphemes attached to it. (like flex or dog)

Question 9

what is a bound root ?

Answer 9

A root that has no pronouncable and meaningful “bare form” -another morpheme is requried in order for it to be a fully understandble word. l

Question 10

What are clitics

Answer 10

Grammatical functors that attach phonologically to some other word, but which distribute more freely than prefixes or suffixes.The word a clitic attehes to is known as a host. Ex: a and the

Question 11

What are strong verbs

Answer 11

All verbs that form their past tense by changing a vowel

Question 12

What are weak verbs?

Answer 12

All verbs that form their past tense by adding -ed

Question 13

What does ablaut mean?

Answer 13

In OE most verbs formed their past tenses by changing a root vowel

Question 14

What can we call the basic form of a word?

Answer 14

A stem. a stem might consit of just a root.

Question 15

What are Derivational morphemes?

Answer 15

Morphemes added to roots to create new stems are called derivational morphemes because they create or derive new stems from simpler ones
EX: the derivational suffix called -able or -ible in a word such as paintable or flexible

Question 16

What is inflectional morphology?

Answer 16

Do not create new stems, but rather adjust the shape and meaning of a given stem to adapt it to a paricular syntactic and discourse context.

Question 17

Give examples of an vestigial (a remnant left over from an earlier state) derivational process that forma a trnsitive stem from and intransitive root by changing the vowel

Answer 17

fall-fell
rise-raise
lie-lay
sit -set

Question 18

What does contextual meaning mean?

Answer 18

New words can be created or derived for particular purposes and assigned meanings just based on the context in which they occur. All words derive meaning from their contexts to a certain extent.