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
allomoprh
one set of nondistinctive realizations of a particular morpheme that have the same function and are phonetically similar
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 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 re composed of sequences of these free morphemes. Grammatical relationships are often indicated by word order. Examples are Chinese and Vietnamese
bound moprheme
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
– a lexical category that consists of function words such as and, but, however, etc
content morpheme
morpheme that carries semantic content
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 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 a 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