Morphology

Question 1

morpheme

Answer 1

the smallest meaningful constituent of a word

Question 2

free morphemes

Answer 2

can stand alone as words (most roots)

Question 3

bound morphemes

Answer 3

cannot stand alone as words, appear with a root and sometimes other bound morphemes (some roots, prefixes, suffixes, and other affixes)

Question 4

affix

Answer 4

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

Question 5

prefix

Answer 5

added at the beginning of a word to form a derivative

Question 6

suffix

Answer 6

added at the end of a word to form a derivative

Question 7

lexical morphemes

Answer 7

have a sense in and of themselves or function to modify the meaning of a word

Question 8

grammatical morphemes

Answer 8

don’t convey meaning of themselves, express a relationship between lexical morphemes or change the grammatical function or category of lexical morphemes

Question 9

content words

Answer 9

have independent meaning, free lexical morphemes (nouns, verbs, and adjectives)

Question 10

function words

Answer 10

do not have independent meaning, free grammatical morphemes (prepositions, articles, and conjunctions)

Question 11

inflectional morphemes

Answer 11

modify the tense, number, possession, or comparison of a word/root; changes its grammatical function without changing its meaning or category (all suffixes, grammatical)

Question 12

derivational morphemes

Answer 12

change the semantic meaning or category of the affected word/root (prefixes or suffixes, lexical or grammatical)

Question 13

order of appearance

Answer 13

if a word contains both a derivational and inflectional suffix, the inflectional suffix typically comes last

Question 14

number of allowable affixes

Answer 14

a syntactic category (either word or phrase) can take multiple derivational affixes, but no more than one inflectional affix

Question 15

derivation

Answer 15

the addition of a derivational affix, changing the syntactic category of a word

Question 16

category extension

Answer 16

extension of a morpheme from one syntactic category to another

Question 17

compound

Answer 17

creating a new word by combining two free morphemes

Question 18

root creation

Answer 18

a brand-new word based on no preexisting morphemes

Question 19

clipped form

Answer 19

a shortened form of a preexisting morpheme

Question 20

blend

Answer 20

a combination of parts of two preexisting forms

Question 21

acronym

Answer 21

a word formed from the first letters of each word in a phrase (FEMA, fee-ma)

Question 22

abbreviation

Answer 22

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)

Question 23

proper name

Answer 23

forms a word from a proper name

Question 24

folk etymology

Answer 24

forms a word by substituting a common native form for an exotic (often foreign) form with a similar pronounciation

Question 25

back formation

Answer 25

a word formed by removing what is mistaken for an affix

Question 26

8 kinds of inflectional morphemes

Answer 26

plural, possessive, comparative, superlative, present tense, past tense, past participle, present participle

Question 27

main verb

Answer 27

always the right-most verb in a simple sentence

Question 28

auxiliary verb order

Answer 28

modal, have, be (could have been)

Question 29

modals

Answer 29

always first verb form, followed by an uninflected verb form

Question 30

have

Answer 30

as an auxiliary, always followed by a past participle

Question 31

be

Answer 31

as an auxiliary, always followed by present participle

Question 32

do

Answer 32

as an auxiliary, never occurs with any other auxiliary verbs, only with a main verb

Question 33

allomorph

Answer 33

a variant phonetic form of a morpheme which varies in sound or spelling without changing the meaning

Question 34

complementary distribution

Answer 34

when 2 items never occur in the same environment

Question 35

productivity

Answer 35

the more combinations a morpheme can occur in, the more productive it’s said to be