Morphology Flashcards
What is a word?
Is the smallest unit of language that can be surrounded by pauses and can take primary stress
What does it mean that full lexical words have primary stress?
That one syllable is pronounced with slightly higher pitch and greater volume than the others
What does full lexical words with more than one syllable have?
secondary word stress
What is the definition of a morpheme?
A minimal structural shape or piece that expresses meaning. EX: dog
What is a free morpheme?
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.
What is a bound morpheme?
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
What is a root?
a root expresses the basic lexical meaning of a word and cannot be further divided into smaller pieces.
What are free roots?
Those that have a pronouncable an meaningful bare form, a form that has no other morphemes attached to it. (like flex or dog)
what is a bound root ?
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
What are clitics
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
What are strong verbs
All verbs that form their past tense by changing a vowel
What are weak verbs?
All verbs that form their past tense by adding -ed
What does ablaut mean?
In OE most verbs formed their past tenses by changing a root vowel
What can we call the basic form of a word?
A stem. a stem might consit of just a root.
What are Derivational morphemes?
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
What is inflectional morphology?
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.
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
fall-fell
rise-raise
lie-lay
sit -set
What does contextual meaning mean?
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.
