Morphology Flashcards
morpheme
the smallest meaningful constituent of a word
free morphemes
can stand alone as words (most roots)
bound morphemes
cannot stand alone as words, appear with a root and sometimes other bound morphemes (some roots, prefixes, suffixes, and other affixes)
affix
an additional element placed at the beginning or end of a root, stem, or word, or in the body of a word, to modify its meaning or category
prefix
added at the beginning of a word to form a derivative
suffix
added at the end of a word to form a derivative
lexical morphemes
have a sense in and of themselves or function to modify the meaning of a word
grammatical morphemes
don’t convey meaning of themselves, express a relationship between lexical morphemes or change the grammatical function or category of lexical morphemes
content words
have independent meaning, free lexical morphemes (nouns, verbs, and adjectives)
function words
do not have independent meaning, free grammatical morphemes (prepositions, articles, and conjunctions)
inflectional morphemes
modify the tense, number, possession, or comparison of a word/root; changes its grammatical function without changing its meaning or category (all suffixes, grammatical)
derivational morphemes
change the semantic meaning or category of the affected word/root (prefixes or suffixes, lexical or grammatical)
order of appearance
if a word contains both a derivational and inflectional suffix, the inflectional suffix typically comes last
number of allowable affixes
a syntactic category (either word or phrase) can take multiple derivational affixes, but no more than one inflectional affix
derivation
the addition of a derivational affix, changing the syntactic category of a word
category extension
extension of a morpheme from one syntactic category to another
compound
creating a new word by combining two free morphemes
root creation
a brand-new word based on no preexisting morphemes
clipped form
a shortened form of a preexisting morpheme
blend
a combination of parts of two preexisting forms
acronym
a word formed from the first letters of each word in a phrase (FEMA, fee-ma)
abbreviation
a word formed from the names of the first letters of the prominent syllables of a word or of words in a phrase (FBI, F-B-I)
proper name
forms a word from a proper name
folk etymology
forms a word by substituting a common native form for an exotic (often foreign) form with a similar pronounciation
back formation
a word formed by removing what is mistaken for an affix
8 kinds of inflectional morphemes
plural, possessive, comparative, superlative, present tense, past tense, past participle, present participle
main verb
always the right-most verb in a simple sentence
auxiliary verb order
modal, have, be (could have been)
modals
always first verb form, followed by an uninflected verb form
have
as an auxiliary, always followed by a past participle
be
as an auxiliary, always followed by present participle
do
as an auxiliary, never occurs with any other auxiliary verbs, only with a main verb
allomorph
a variant phonetic form of a morpheme which varies in sound or spelling without changing the meaning
complementary distribution
when 2 items never occur in the same environment
productivity
the more combinations a morpheme can occur in, the more productive it’s said to be
