Morphology Flashcards
affix
bound morpheme that attaches to a stem
Affixation
process of forming words by adding affixes to morphemes
agglutinating language
a type of synthetic language in which the relationships between words in a sentence are indicated primarily by bound morphemes. morphemes are joined together loosely so that it us easy to determine where the boundaries between morphemes are
allomorph
one set of non distinctive realizations of a particular morpheme that have the same function and are phonetically similar
alternation
uses morpheme-internal modifications to make new words or morphological distinctions
ambiguity
the phenomenon by which a single linguistic form can be the form of more than one distinct linguistic expression. the form that is shared by more than one expression is said to be ambiguous
analytic language
type of language in which most words consist of one morpheme and sentences are composed of sequences of these free morphemes. grammatical relationships are often indicated by word order
bound morpheme
morpheme that has some associated basic meaning but that is unable to stand alone as a word on its own right
bound root
morpheme that has some associated basic meaning, but that is unable to stand alone as a word in its own right
closed lexical category
in which the members are fairly rigid established and additions are made very rarely and only over long periods of time
compounding
word formation process by which words are formed through combining two or more are formed through combining 2 or more independent words
conjunction
a lexical category that consists of function words
content morpheme
morpheme that carries semantic content (as opposed to merely performing grammatical function)
content word
a word whose primary purpose is to contribute semantic content to the phrase in which it occurs. all free content morphemes are content words
derivation
a process by which an underlying form is changed as phonological rules act upon it
determiner
the name of a lexical category and syntactic category that consists of expressions such as a this all etc. syntactically, consists of those expressions of category noun phrase
form
a structure or shape of any particular linguistic item
free morpheme
a morpheme that can stand alone as a word