Morphology

Question 1

affix

Answer 1

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.

Question 2

affixation

Answer 2

the process of adding a morpheme to a word to create either a different form of that word or a new word altogether

Question 3

agglutinating language

Answer 3

a linguistic process pertaining to derivational morphology in which complex words are formed by stringing together morphemes without changing them in spelling or phonetics

Question 4

allomorph

Answer 4

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

Question 5

alternation

Answer 5

the phenomenon of a morpheme exhibiting variation in its phonological realization

Question 6

ambiguity

Answer 6

a quality of language that makes speech or written text open to multiple interpretations

Question 7

analytic language

Answer 7

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)

Question 8

bound morpheme

Answer 8

cannot occur on their own, e.g. de- in detoxify, -tion in creation, -s in dogs, cran- in cranberry

Question 9

bound root

Answer 9

a root which cannot occur as a separate word apart from any other morpheme

Question 10

closed lexical category

Answer 10

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)

Question 11

compounding

Answer 11

the process of word formation that creates compound lexemes

Question 12

conjunction

Answer 12

a word used to connect clauses or sentences or to coordinate words in the same clause (e.g. and, but, if )

Question 13

content morpheme

Answer 13

also often called open-class morphemes, because they belong to categories that are open to the invention of arbitrary new items

Question 14

content word

Answer 14

words that possess semantic content and contribute to the meaning of the sentence in which they occur.

Question 15

derivation

Answer 15

the set of stages that link the abstract underlying structure of an expression to its surface form

Question 16

determiner

Answer 16

a modifying word that determines the kind of reference a noun or noun group has, for example a, the, every

Question 17

form

Answer 17

a meaningful unit of speech (such as a morpheme, word, or sentence)

Question 18

free morpheme

Answer 18

function independently as words (e.g. town, dog) and can appear within lexemes (e.g. town hall, doghouse)

Question 19

function morpheme

Answer 19

a morpheme which simply modifies the meaning of a word, rather than supplying the root meaning

Question 20

function word

Answer 20

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?

Question 21

fusional language

Answer 21

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

Question 22

hierarchical structure

Answer 22

sometimes called a tree structure, it is a way to organize constituent morphemes into branching paths

Question 23

homophony

Answer 23

when a set of words are pronounced identically, but have different meanings

Question 24

incorporation

Answer 24

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

Question 25

infix

Answer 25

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

Question 26

inflection

Answer 26

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

Question 27

input

Answer 27

the processible language the learners are exposed to while listening or reading (i.e. The receptive skills)

Question 28

lexical category

Answer 28

a syntactic category for elements that are part of the lexicon of a language

Question 29

lexicon

Answer 29

the complete set of meaningful units in a language

Question 30

morpheme

Answer 30

a meaningful morphological unit of a language that cannot be further divided (e.g. in, come, -ing, forming incoming )

Question 31

morphology

Answer 31

the study of the forms of words

Question 32

open lexical category

Answer 32

the new word and the original word belong to the same category. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are open lexical categories

Question 33

output

Answer 33

speaking and writing

Question 34

partial reduplication

Answer 34

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

Question 35

polysynthetic language

Answer 35

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)

Question 36

prefix

Answer 36

an affix which is placed before the stem of a word

Question 37

preposition

Answer 37

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 ?

Question 38

productive

Answer 38

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

Question 39

pronoun

Answer 39

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 )

Question 40

reduplicant

Answer 40

A word formed by or containing a reduplicated element

Question 41

reduplication

Answer 41

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

Question 42

root

Answer 42

is the core of a word that is irreducible into more meaningful elements

Question 43

simultaneous affix

Answer 43

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

Question 44

stem

Answer 44

a part of a word responsible for its lexical meaning

Question 45

suffix

Answer 45

a morpheme added at the end of a word to form a derivative, e.g., -ation, -fy, -ing, -itis.

Question 46

suppletion

Answer 46

the occurrence of an unrelated form to fill a gap in a conjugation (e.g. went as the past tense of go )