Morphology Flashcards
What is a word?
A word is the smallest independent linguistic unit that carries meaning.
Words can be analyzed using six criteria: orthographic, phonetic, phonological, morphological, semantic, and syntactic.
What is morphology?
Morphology is the study of word formation, including:
* How words are constructed from morphemes
* The creation of new words and word forms in various languages
* How word forms change depending on syntactic context.
What is a morpheme?
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful linguistic unit.
Free morphemes can stand alone (e.g., ‘book’), while bound morphemes must attach to other morphemes (e.g., prefixes like ‘un-‘ or suffixes like ‘-ness’).
What parts can be assigned to morphemes?
A:
* Prefix: Attached to the beginning of a base (e.g., ‘un-‘).
* Suffix: Attached to the end of a base (e.g., ‘-ness’).
* Infix: Inserted into the middle of a base (e.g., ‘abso-bloody-lutely’).
* Base: The central part of a word to which affixes are attached.
* Root: The irreducible core of a word.
What types of morphemes can be distinguished?
A:
* Free vs. Bound: Free morphemes can occur independently; bound morphemes require attachment.
* Inflectional vs. Derivational:
* Inflectional: Modify a word’s grammatical function (e.g., plural -s).
* Derivational: Create new words or change the grammatical category (e.g., ‘-ness’).
What problems occur with the notion of morpheme?
A:
* Zero morphemes: Changes occur without visible alteration (e.g., singular ‘sheep’ vs. plural ‘sheep’).
* Truncation: Shortened forms (e.g., ‘lab’ from ‘laboratory’).
* Vowel alternation: Internal vowel changes (e.g., ‘foot’ → ‘feet’).
* Meaningless morphemes: Elements like ‘fer’ in ‘transfer’ lack consistent meaning.
What is allomorphy?
A: Variation of a morpheme’s form based on context.
Includes phonological conditioning, morphological conditioning, and lexical conditioning.
What is productivity in morphology?
A: The ability of affixes and word-formation processes to create new words. Factors affecting productivity:
* Transparency: How clear the meaning of the affix is.
* Usefulness: The practical need for the affix.
* Frequency of Base: Common bases lead to higher productivity.
How are words stored in the mental lexicon?
A: Words are stored as:
* Whole-word representations: Frequent words stored in their entirety.
* Decomposed elements: Less frequent words stored as morphemes.
What are productivity measures?
A:
* Type Frequency: Number of distinct words with an affix.
* Token Frequency: Total occurrences of an affix in a corpus.
* Neologisms: New words formed in a specific time.
* Hapax Legomena: Words that appear only once in a corpus.
What restricts the productivity of affixes?
A:
* Pragmatic Constraints: Fashion and context (e.g., ‘mega-‘ was trendy at one time).
* Structural Constraints:
* Phonological: Restrictions based on sounds (e.g., ‘-en’ attaches to monosyllabic bases).
* Morphological: Restrictions based on word structure (e.g., ‘-ment’ only for certain verbs).
* Semantic: Gender-neutral words avoid redundant affixes (e.g., *doctoress).
* Blocking: Avoiding words with identical forms or unnecessary synonyms.
What are key word-formation processes?
A:
* Affixation: Adding prefixes, suffixes, or infixes (e.g., ‘unhappy’).
* Compounding: Combining two bases (e.g., ‘greenhouse’).
* Conversion: Changing the word class without altering form (e.g., ‘water’ as noun and verb).
* Truncation: Shortening words (e.g., ‘condo’ from ‘condominium’).
* Blending: Merging parts of two words (e.g., ‘smog’ from ‘smoke’ + ‘fog’).
What are the properties of English affixes?
A:
* Phonological: Some affixes trigger stress changes (e.g., ‘explanation’).
* Morphological: Affixes attach in specific positions and sequences.
* Semantic: Affixes like ‘-ess’ can add gender distinctions (e.g., ‘actress’).
* Syntactic: Some affixes change word classes (e.g., ‘-ly’ turns adjectives into adverbs).
How can we identify the directionality of conversions?
A: Use the overt analogue criterion: Compare the structure of existing words to determine whether the base or derived form is primary.
What is inflectional morphology?
A: The study of how words are modified to express grammatical relationships (e.g., plural ‘-s’, past tense ‘-ed’).
