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. In agglutinating languages, morphemes are joined together loosely so that it is easy to determine where the boundaries between morphemes are.
Allomorph
One of a set of nondistinctive ways of writing a particular grapheme; the distribution of allographs.
Alternation
The morphological process that uses morpheme-internal modifications to make new words or morphological distinctions
Ambiguity
The phenomenon by which a single linguistic form (e.g. a word or a string of words) 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. Examples are Chinese and Vietnamese.
Bound Morpheme
Morpheme that always attaches to other morphemes, never existing as a word itself.
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
Lexical category in which the members are fairly rigidly established and additions are made very rarely and only over long periods of time.
Compounding
Process of forming words by combining two or more independent words.
Conjunction
Process of forming words by combining two or more independent words.
Conjunction
A lexical category that consists of function words such as and, but, however, etc.
content morpheme
Morpheme that carries semantic content (as opposed to merely performing a grammatical function.)
content word
A word whose primary purpose is to contribute semantic content to the phrase in which it occurs.
Derivation
A morphological process that changes a word’s lexical category or its meaning in some predictable way.
Determiner
The name of a lexical category and a syntactic category that consists of expressions such as the, a, this, all, etc. Syntactically, consists of those expressions that when combined with an expression of category noun to their right result in an expression of category noun phrase.
Form
The structure or shape of any particular linguistic item, from individual segments to strings of words.
free morpheme
A morpheme that can stand alone as a word.
function morpheme
Morpheme that provides information about the grammatical relationships between words in a sentence.
function word
A word that has little semantic content and whose primary purpose is to indicate grammatical relationships between other words within a phrase.
fusional language
A type of synthetic language in which relationships between the words in a sentence are indicated by bound morphemes that are difficult to separate from the stem.
hierarchical structure
The dominance relationship among morphemes in a a word or among constituents in a phrase.
Homophony
The phenomenon by which two or more distinct morphemes or nonphrasal linguistic expression happen to have the same form, i.e., sound the same.
