Morphology Flashcards
Mental lexicon
contains phonological, syntactic, and semantic information about individual words and/or morphemes
Morphology
the study of words and word formation
Words
meaningful linguistic units that can be combined to form phrases and sentences
Morphemes
the smallest unit of language that carries information about meaning or function
Why is morphology important?
Important for literacy/reading development; offers insights into how language works
Types of morphemes
Free and Bound
Free morphemes
can be standalone words; cannot be split into smaller meaningful parts
Bound morphemes
cannot be standalone words; convey meaning
Roots
‘core’ meaning of word; can have other morphemes added to them
Bound roots
not all roots are free morphemes; some roots like ‘-ceive’ and ‘-duce’ are bound
Affixes
a type of bound morpheme; must be added to other morphemes
Types of affixes
Prefixes, suffixes, infixes, circumfixes
When dividing a word into its constituent morphemes, two principles must be observed:
a morpheme must be the smallest unit that has meaning, and the principle of compositionality (the meaning of the whole word must be derivable from its parts
Allomorphs
morphemes that have a consistent meaning, but appear in different forms depending on where they occur (fully predictable based on phonological environment)
Complex base
consists of a root plus an affix (ex. un-believable)
What sometimes happens when we add an affix to a base?
the word changes categories
Noun
can be singular or plural; follow determiners; can be modified by adjectives
Verb
take tense affixes; can take objects
Adjective
cannot take an object; can modify nouns but not verbs
Derivational morpheme
an affix that derives a new word from an existing word; may change word category and will change fundamental meaning
Inflectional morpheme
an affix that modifies a word to express grammatical category; never changes word category or fundamental meaning
Reduplication
a process where the root of a word is repeated; can be total or partial
Compounding
links two or more free morphemes together; changes the fundamental meaning of the word and may change the category
Internal change
ex. run - ran, come - came
Suppletion
the use of two or more phonetically distinct roots for different forms of the same word (ex. am - is - are)
All human children…
acquire a language, can ‘pick up’ any language they are exposed to, acquire all languages at the same rate, go through the same stages of language acquisition, end up with quite uniform knowledge of language
U-shape development
Phase 1: Children correctly use standard irregular past tense forms
Phase 2: Children incorrectly attach regular past tense morpheme to irregular verb
Phase 3: Children bring the standard irregular forms back into their irregular forms
