Morphology Flashcards
affix
an additional element placed at the beginning or end of a root, stem, or word, or in the body of a word, to modify its meaning.
affixation
the process of adding a morpheme to a word to create either a different form of that word or a new word altogether
agglutinating language
a linguistic process pertaining to derivational morphology in which complex words are formed by stringing together morphemes without changing them in spelling or phonetics
allomorph
Nondistinctive realizations of a particular morpheme that have the same function and are phonetically similar. For example, the English plural morpheme can appear as [s] as in cats, [z] as in dogs, or [‘z] as in churches. Each of these three pronunciations is said to be an allomorph of the same morpheme
alternation
the phenomenon of a morpheme exhibiting variation in its phonological realization
ambiguity
a quality of language that makes speech or written text open to multiple interpretations
analytic language
a language that primarily conveys relationships between words in sentences by way of helper words (particles, prepositions, etc.) and word order, as opposed to using inflections (changing the form of a word to convey its role in the sentence)
bound morpheme
cannot occur on their own, e.g. de- in detoxify, -tion in creation, -s in dogs, cran- in cranberry
bound root
a root which cannot occur as a separate word apart from any other morpheme
closed lexical category
rarely acquire new members. They include conjunctions (e.g., and, or, but), determiners (e.g., a, the), pronouns (e.g., he, she, they), and prepositions (e.g., of, on, under)
compounding
the process of word formation that creates compound lexemes
conjunction
a word used to connect clauses or sentences or to coordinate words in the same clause (e.g. and, but, if )
content morpheme
also often called open-class morphemes, because they belong to categories that are open to the invention of arbitrary new items
content word
words that possess semantic content and contribute to the meaning of the sentence in which they occur.
derivation
the set of stages that link the abstract underlying structure of an expression to its surface form
determiner
a modifying word that determines the kind of reference a noun or noun group has, for example a, the, every
form
a meaningful unit of speech (such as a morpheme, word, or sentence)
free morpheme
function independently as words (e.g. town, dog) and can appear within lexemes (e.g. town hall, doghouse)
function morpheme
a morpheme which simply modifies the meaning of a word, rather than supplying the root meaning
function word
a word whose purpose is more to signal grammatical relationship than the lexical meaning of a sentence, e.g., do in do you live here?
fusional language
type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features
hierarchical structure
sometimes called a tree structure, it is a way to organize constituent morphemes into branching paths
homophony
when a set of words are pronounced identically, but have different meanings
incorporation
a phenomenon by which a grammatical category, such as a verb, forms a compound with its direct object (object incorporation) or adverbial modifier, while retaining its original syntactic function
infix
nserted within another form. English doesn’t really have any infixes, except perhaps for certain expletives in expressions like un-effing-believable or Kalama-effing-zoo
inflection
the change in the form of a word (in English, usually the addition of endings) to mark such distinctions as tense, person, number, gender, mood, voice, and case
input
the processible language the learners are exposed to while listening or reading (i.e. The receptive skills)
lexical category
a syntactic category for elements that are part of the lexicon of a language
lexicon
the complete set of meaningful units in a language
morpheme
a meaningful morphological unit of a language that cannot be further divided (e.g. in, come, -ing, forming incoming )
morphology
the study of the forms of words
open lexical category
the new word and the original word belong to the same category. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are open lexical categories
output
speaking and writing
partial reduplication
reduplication of only part of the word. For example, Marshallese forms words meaning ‘to wear X’ by reduplicating the last consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) sequence of a base, i.e. base+CVC
polysynthetic language
highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able to stand alone)
prefix
an affix which is placed before the stem of a word
preposition
a word governing, and usually preceding, a noun or pronoun and expressing a relation to another word or element in the clause, as in “the man on the platform,” “she arrived after dinner,” “what did you do it for ?
productive
the degree to which native speakers use a particular grammatical process, especially in word formation. It compares grammatical processes that are in frequent use to less frequently used ones that tend towards lexicalization
pronoun
a word that can function by itself as a noun phrase and that refers either to the participants in the discourse (e.g., I, you ) or to someone or something mentioned elsewhere in the discourse (e.g., she, it, this )
reduplicant
A word formed by or containing a reduplicated element
reduplication
a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change
root
is the core of a word that is irreducible into more meaningful elements
simultaneous affix
An affix is articulated at the same time as some other affix or affixes in a word’s stem; exists only in visual-gestural languages
stem
a part of a word responsible for its lexical meaning
suffix
a morpheme added at the end of a word to form a derivative, e.g., -ation, -fy, -ing, -itis.
suppletion
the occurrence of an unrelated form to fill a gap in a conjugation (e.g. went as the past tense of go )
