Morphology

Question 1

What is morphology?

Answer 1

Literally “the study of forms”, used to describe the study of the basic elements in a language

Question 2

What is a morpheme?

Answer 2

A minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function

Question 3

What are the two different types of morphemes?

Answer 3

1. Free morphemes - those that can stand alone as a single word, e.g., ‘new’, ‘care’
2. Bound morphemes - those that cannot stand alone as a single word, e.g., ‘ist’, ‘ed

Question 4

All affixes in English are what type of morpheme?

Answer 4

Bound morphemes

Question 5

Free morphemes when attached with bound morphemes are referred to as what in words?

Answer 5

Stems

Question 6

There are two categories of free morphemes. What are they?

Answer 6

1. Lexical morphemes - the set of words that carry the “content” of the messages wanting to be conveyed (nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs)
2. Functional morphemes - a “closed” class of words that make “sense” of a sentence (articles, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns)

Question 7

There are two categories of bound morphemes. What are they?

Answer 7

1. Derivational morphemes - involved in the derivation of words, changing the word’s meaning and potentially its type (e.g., ‘ism’, ‘ize’)
2. Inflectional morphemes - indicates the grammatical function of a word, but does not change its type (e.g., ‘ing’, ‘ed’)

Question 8

How many inflectional morphemes are in the English language and what type of affixes are they?

Answer 8

Eight, all suffixes

Question 9

What are morphs?

Answer 9

The actual forms used to realize morphemes

Question 10

What are allomorphs?

Answer 10

A variant phonetic form of a morpheme that sounds different but has the same meaning

Question 11

What is the process of reduplication?

Answer 11

Repeating all or part of a form