Morphology Flashcards
What is Morphology?
The study of words
how words are composed of smaller units referred to as morphemes
What exactly is a word?
A minimal free form
Arbitrary pairings of sound and meaning
What are the rules for words?
- words cant be interrupted
- words can move as units
- the relation of words to surrounding elements is not entirely fixed
- words can occur in isolation
What are morphemes?
- the atoms of meaning
- a sound-meaning pair that cannot be broken up into smaller segments
- not the same thing as a syllable
What are the two classes of morphemes?
Free and Bound
What is the difference between free and bound morphemes?
Free- can stand alone, lexical, grammatical
Bound- an affix, needs a root word to have meaning
Prefixes:
an affix attached to the beginning of a root
Suffixes:
an affix attached to the ending of a root
Circumfixes:
an affix added to both the beginning and end of a root
Infixes:
an affix inserted into a root
What are allomorphs?
The individual units of a morpheme
Give an example of a suppletive stem
how go changes to went, they are two different words
one describing a present motion/movement, the other describing a past movement
What are the three types of word formation?
- compounding (free morpheme+free morpheme aka two root words)
- derivation (free+bound, changes syntactic category)
- inflection (free+bound, creates different forms of a word but doesn’t change syntactic category)
What are some other sources of words?
Acronyms, abbreviations and coinage
