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.
