Morphology Flashcards
morphology
component of mental grammar that deals with types of words and how words are formed out of smaller meaningful pieces and other words
form
what words sounds like when spoken
lexicon
mental dictionary
derivation
process of creating words out of other words
affixes
added pieces to make new words
inflection
creation of different grammatical forms of words
morphemes
smallest linguistic unit with a meaning
homophonous
affixes that sound alike but have different meanings of functions (-er can be derivational or inflectional)
free morpheme
can stand alone
bound morpheme
cannot stand alone (affixes)
bound roots
roots that cannot stand alone but have some historical meaning (-ceive, -fer, cranberry words)
content morphemes
have concrete meaning
function morphemes
grammatically relevant information (ex. -ing)
aspect
how something unfolds in time (completed, ongoing, frequent, etc.)
compounding
process that forms new words from two or more independent words
reduplication
process of forming new words by doubling an entire free morpheme or part of it
english reduplication
no systemic reduplication, but does contain lexical reduplication (bye bye, used for intensity like-like)
alternation
make a new word via internal modifications (woman to women, goose to geese)
alternation is usually inflectional, but can be derivational
strive (n) and strive (v), teeth (n) and teethe (v), breath (n) and breathe (v)
suppletion
replacement of root by morphologically unrelated root - same core meaning, different context (is to was, go to went)
ablaut
form of alternation, vowel change (swim swam swum, ring rang rung)
conversion
no change in stress or vowel of word, but different lexical category (mother noun and mother verb)
stress shift
change in stress of word to indicate different lexical category (import noun and import verb)
when compounding, what element determines syntactic form
second element
-ity
forms a noun that requires an adjective to attach to
-less
forms an adjective that requires noun to attach to
-able
forms an adjective that needs intransitive verb to attach to
backformation
shortening of word to make new word of new syntactic form (editor came before edit; burglar came before burgle
clippings
shortening of word but doesnt change syntactic form (fridge)
acronym
using first letter(s) of words of a phrase to make a word (SCUBA, NATO)
blend
taking pieces of words to form a new word (mobile hotel to motel, smoke and fog to smog)
what affixes are added first: derivational or inflectional
derivational
derivational affixes
may change word class, restricted to subclasses, have semantic drift
inflectional affixes
don’t change word class, unrestricted, no semantic drift
two forms of inflectional affixes
tense and aspect
isolating language
do not use affixes, have separate words; each word consists of separate morpheme
synthetic language
bound morphemes attached to other morphemes
agglutinating languages
type of synthetic language in which morphemes joined loosely - easy to determine where boundaries between morphemes are, and each morpheme carries one meaning
fusional languages
type of synthetic language in which bound morphemes are added to stems, not as easy to determine separate morphemes, and morphemes can carry several meanings
8 inflectional morphemes in english
-s, -s, -ed, -en, -ing, -s, -er, -est
noun forms of -s
plural and possessive
verb form of -s
3rd person, singular, present
-ing
progressive, verb
-en
perfect, verb
-ed
past perfect, verb
-er
comparative, adjective
-est
superlative, adjective
