Morphology Flashcards
morphemes
Smallest unit of linguistic meaning or function, e.g., sheepdogs contains three morphemes, sheep, dog, and the function morpheme for plural, s.
form
The phonological or gestural representation of a morpheme or word.
meaning
The conceptual or semantic aspect of a sign or utterance that permits us to comprehend the message being conveyed. Expressions in language generally have both form—pronunciation or gesture—and meaning. See extension, intension, sense, reference.
arbitrary
Describes the property of language, including sign language, whereby there is no natural or intrinsic relationship between the way a word is pronounced (or signed) and its meaning.
linguistic sign
Sounds or gestures, typically morphemes in spoken languages and signs in sign languages, that have a form bound to a meaning in a single unit, e.g., dog is a linguistic sign whose form is its pronunciation [dag] and whose meaning is Canis familiaris (or however we define “dog”).
free morphemes
A single morpheme that constitutes a word, e.g., dog.
open class / content words
The class of lexical content words; a category of words that commonly adds new words, e.g., nouns, verbs.
closed class / function words
A category, generally a functional category, that rarely has new words added to it, e.g., prepositions, conjunctions. See open class.
bound morphemes
A morpheme that must be attached to other morphemes, e.g., -ly, -ed,
non-. Bound morphemes are prefixes, suffixes, infixes, circumfixes, and some roots such as cran in cranberry. See free morpheme.
affixes
A bound morpheme attached to a stem or root. See prefix, suffix, infix, circumfix, stem, root.
prefixes
An affix that is attached to the beginning of a morpheme or stem, e.g., in- in inoperable.
suffixes
An affix that is attached to the end of a morpheme or stem, e.g., -er in Lew is taller than Bill.
circumfixes
A bound morpheme, parts of which occur in a word both before and after the root, e.g., ge—t in German geliebt, “loved,” from the root lieb.
infixes
A bound morpheme that is inserted in the middle of another morpheme, e.g., Tagalog sulat “writing” but sumulat “to write” after insertion of the infix um.
derivational affixes / morpheme
A morpheme added to a stem or root to form a new stem or word, possibly, but not necessarily, resulting in a change in syntactic category, e.g., -er added to a verb like kick to give the noun kicker.
inflexional affixes / morpheme
A bound grammatical morpheme that is affixed to a word
according to rules of syntax, e.g., third-person singular verbal suffix -s.
root
The morpheme that remains when all affixes are stripped from a complex word, e.g., system from un + system + atic + ally.
stems
The base to which an affix is attached to create a more complex form that may be another stem or a word. See root, affix.
productive
Refers to morphological rules that can be used freely and apply to all forms to create new words, e.g., the addition to an adjective of -ish meaning “having somewhat of the quality,” such as newish, tallish, incredible-ish.
suppletive forms
A term used to refer to inflected morphemes in which the regular rules do not apply, e.g., went as the past tense of go.
compounds
A word composed of two or more words, which may be written as a single word or as words separated by spaces or hyphens, e.g., dogcatcher, dog biscuit, dog-tired.
head (of a compound)
The rightmost word, e.g., house in doghouse. It generally indicates the category and general meaning of the compound.
back-formations
Creation of a new word by removing an affix from an old word, e.g., donate from donation; or by removing what is mistakenly considered an affix, e.g., edit from editor.