Morphology and Lexicology Flashcards
What is a morpheme?
A morpheme is the smallest written unit that still has meaning as a whole.
What is a noun?
Words that typically name things
What is a verb?
Words that typically describe an action or something we do, have or are.
What is an Auxilary verb?
Auxiliary (or Helping) verbs are used together with a main verb to show the verb’s tense or to form a negative or question. The most common auxiliary verbs are have, be, and do.
What is a modal verb?
Helping’ or auxiliary verbs that express the attitude of the speaker/writer and express probability, possibility, doubt etc. eg: May, will, must, should.
What is an adverb?
Words that modify or give more information about verbs, adjectives or adverbs, usually about time, manner or place. Examples - time: 'soon', 'later' frequency: 'always', 'never' place: 'around', 'everyewhere' degree: 'completely', 'totally', 'very'
What is a common noun?
Commons nouns can be concrete or abstract.
Concrete nouns include words such as ‘table’, ‘skeleton’, ‘kangaroo’, ‘jump’.
Abstract nouns include words such as ‘truth’, ‘bravery’, ‘justice’.
What is a proper noun?
Proper nouns are always capitalised and name specific things such as ‘Melbourne’, ‘Flinders Street Station’, ‘Imogene’
What is a collective noun?
Collective nouns include the names for groups of animals people and things.
Examples are - ‘swarm’ (group of bees), ‘family’ (group of related members), ‘people’ (group of humans)
What is a plural noun?
Nouns that have plurals. Nouns can be made plural. The most common way is through the addition of -s, or -es. Also -en words (children, oxen)(irregular). Also ‘geese’ and ‘feet’.
What is an inflectional morpheme?
They do not change the meaning or word class; they provide additional grammatical information.
Inflectional morphemes are always suffixes - they attach to the end of words.
What is a derivational morpheme?
Derivational morphemes change the meaning of the words, create new words and can either be prefixes or suffixes.
Examples - The verb ‘swim’ becomes ‘swimmer’
What is a root morpheme?
This is the semantic base or centre of a word. It is the morpheme that gives the word its main meaning.
What is an affix?
An addition to the base form or stem of a word in order to modify its meaning or create a new word.
Types of adverbs:
time frequency manner place degree
What are determiners?
Determiners introduce noun phrases and function as modifiers.
Example: ‘‘That’ book is worth reading.’
‘That’ is a determiner, modifying the noun ‘book’
Example: ‘‘That’ is worth reading’
Here, ‘that is a demonstrative pronoun, replacing ‘the book’
What is a pronoun?
They are short words that can replace nouns in a sentence.
Types of pronouns:
Subject pronouns: I, we, you, she, he, it
Object pronouns: me, us, you, her, him, it
Possessive pronouns: mine, ours, theirs, yours, hers
Relative pronouns: that, who, whoever, whom, which
Demonstrative pronouns: this, that, these, those
What are prepositions?
Prepositions are function words that show the relationship between nouns (or pronouns) and other words in a sentence. They position things in space (where they are) or in time (when something takes place) or describe the manner in which an action is performed.
Example: Where is the dog? ‘UNDER’ the desk, ‘BEHIND’ the couch, ‘IN’ its kennel.
What is an interjection?
Interjections are words (or phrases) that express a sudden or strong emotion or feeling, such as ‘Ouch!’, ‘Sorry!’. They can stand alone or be placed before or after a sentence.
What are conjunctions?
“Joining” words that link clauses or parts of clauses together eg: “but” and “and”.
What are the coordinating conjunctions?
There are seven conjunctions and they can be remembered with the mnemonic FANBOYS: ‘for’, ‘and’, ‘nor’, ‘but’, ‘or’, ‘yet’, and ‘so’. These conjunctions join things that are equal in value.
What are the subordinating conjunctions?
Subordinating conjunctions can only join clauses together; they introduce subordinating clauses and link the subordinate clause to a main clause.
Example: ‘because’, ‘since’, ‘if … then’, ‘unless’
What are function words?
Function words are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning, but instead serve to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker.
What are content words?
Words that have independent, real-world meaning that might occur in a dictionary.
What is a bound morpheme?
Morphemes that cannot stand independently. Morphemes that need to be affixed to other morphemes to make meaning.
What is affixation?
A morphological process that involves the addition of bound morphemes (or affixes) to a word stem.
What is a prefix?
An affix that precedes the root word.
What is a suffix?
An affix that follows the root word.
What is an infix?
An affix that occurs inside the root word.
What is Neologism?
Neologism is the term given to a new coined word, expression or usage.
E.g - ‘fake news’
What is a Blend?
Blends are words produced by using parts of two words to create a new one.
E.g - ‘brunch’ - breakfast/lunch
‘spork’ - spoon/fork
What is Initialism?
Initialisms are made up of the beginning letters in a sequence of words, but continue to be said as a series of letters.
E.g - RSPCA, RSVP
They can’t be said as a words
What are Shortenings?
Shortenings are referred to as ‘reduction’. This process involves dropping the ending (and sometimes the beginning) from a word to create a shorter word.
E.g - ‘Frigde’ - shortening for ‘refrigirator’,
‘gym’ - shortening for ‘gymnasium’.
What is Compounding?
Compounding is the process of creating new words by putting two free morphemes together, as in ‘blueberry’, or ‘Facebook’
What is Conversion?
Conversion is the process of converting words from one-word class to another class without adding suffixes to the word. E.g - 'email', 'bottled', 'breakfasted'
What is a Contraction?
Contraction is a very common process in English. They are common in spoken and informal written language.
E.g - ‘isn’t’, ‘they’re’, ‘I’ll’, ‘wont’t’
What are Collocations?
Collocations are words within phrases so closely associated with one another that when we hear one we almost automatically provide the other.
E.g - ‘pay attention’, ‘fast food’, ‘powerful engine’
What is Borrowing?
Words that have been borrowed from other languages.
E.g - ‘cafe’, ‘algebra’
What is Commonisation?
The process of commonisation involves the development of common, everyday words from words that began life as a proper noun.
E.g - ‘esky’ (cool box), ‘thermos’ (vacuum flask)
What is Archaism?
Archaism are words that are no longer used in everyday life.
E.g - ‘thou’, ‘thee’, ‘thine’
What are lexemes?
Lexemes are the fundamental units of a language.
