Morphology Flashcards
Classes of Words
Open (Can be changed or added to in time)
Content words, lexical items. Nouns, verbs.
Classes of Words
Closed (cannot change)
Function words, grammatical items. Pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions.
Morphology
The study of the internal structure of words.
A system of adjustments in teh shapes of words that contribute to adjustments in the way speakers intend to be understood.
Morpheme
The smalles meaningful unit in the grammar of a language.
The meaning of a morpheme may vary depending on its immediate environment.
They can be bound: a grammatical unit that never occurs by itself but is always attached to another, like -s in dogs.
or free: a unit that can occur by itself like ‘dog’ in ‘dogs’
Allomorph
One of two or more complementary morphs which manifest a morhpeme in its different phonological or morphological environments.
the plural morpheme -s has three allomorphs:
[-s] as in ‘hats’
[-z] as in ‘dogs’
[<<z] as in ‘boxes’
Root
The portion of a word that is common to a set of derived or inflected forms, is not further divideable and carries the principle portion of meaning of the words in which it funcitons.
A bound morpheme as it cannot exist by itself
Stem
Is the root or roots of a word, together with any derivational affixes. Inflectional ones are added to make it a real word
The verbs ‘tie’ and ‘untie’ are stems
Affix
A bound morpheme that joins a root or stem
Can be derivational: changes the category of a word, is always close to the root of a word.
Joy –> joyful
Inflectional: does not change the word class of the stem. Typically located farther from the root.
dog –> dogs
Infix
an affix inserted into the root
bili: buy
bumili: bought
- um- is infix
Prefix
Affix joined before a root or stem
Suffix
Affix attached to the end of a root
Circumfix
an affix made up of two parts which surround and attach to a root
Analytic Language
One that conveys grammatical relationships syntactically, via the use of unbound morphemes.
Also referred to as an ‘isolating’ language
Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese
Agglutinative Language
Most words are formed by joining morphemes.
Each affix represents one unit of meaning and do not become fused with others
Swahili, Quechua
Fusional Languages (Western European)
A fusional language is everything mixed together while an agglutinative is neater and more purposeful.
A language in which one form of a morpheme can simultaneously encode several meanings
Spanish, German
