Morphology and Lexicology

Question 1

What is a morpheme?

Answer 1

A morpheme is the smallest written unit that still has meaning as a whole.

Question 2

What is a noun?

Answer 2

Words that typically name things

Question 3

What is a verb?

Answer 3

Words that typically describe an action or something we do, have or are.

Question 4

What is an Auxilary verb?

Answer 4

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.

Question 5

What is a modal verb?

Answer 5

Helping’ or auxiliary verbs that express the attitude of the speaker/writer and express probability, possibility, doubt etc. eg: May, will, must, should.

Question 6

What is an adverb?

Answer 6

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'

Question 7

What is a common noun?

Answer 7

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’.

Question 8

What is a proper noun?

Answer 8

Proper nouns are always capitalised and name specific things such as ‘Melbourne’, ‘Flinders Street Station’, ‘Imogene’

Question 9

What is a collective noun?

Answer 9

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)

Question 10

What is a plural noun?

Answer 10

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’.

Question 11

What is an inflectional morpheme?

Answer 11

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.

Question 12

What is a derivational morpheme?

Answer 12

Derivational morphemes change the meaning of the words, create new words and can either be prefixes or suffixes.
Examples - The verb ‘swim’ becomes ‘swimmer’

Question 13

What is a root morpheme?

Answer 13

This is the semantic base or centre of a word. It is the morpheme that gives the word its main meaning.

Question 14

What is an affix?

Answer 14

An addition to the base form or stem of a word in order to modify its meaning or create a new word.

Question 15

Types of adverbs:

Answer 15

time
frequency
manner
place
degree

Question 16

What are determiners?

Answer 16

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’

Question 17

What is a pronoun?

Answer 17

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

Question 18

What are prepositions?

Answer 18

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.

Question 19

What is an interjection?

Answer 19

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.

Question 20

What are conjunctions?

Answer 20

“Joining” words that link clauses or parts of clauses together eg: “but” and “and”.

Question 21

What are the coordinating conjunctions?

Answer 21

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.

Question 22

What are the subordinating conjunctions?

Answer 22

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’

Question 23

What are function words?

Answer 23

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.

Question 24

What are content words?

Answer 24

Words that have independent, real-world meaning that might occur in a dictionary.

Question 25

What is a bound morpheme?

Answer 25

Morphemes that cannot stand independently. Morphemes that need to be affixed to other morphemes to make meaning.

Question 26

What is affixation?

Answer 26

A morphological process that involves the addition of bound morphemes (or affixes) to a word stem.

Question 27

What is a prefix?

Answer 27

An affix that precedes the root word.

Question 28

What is a suffix?

Answer 28

An affix that follows the root word.

Question 29

What is an infix?

Answer 29

An affix that occurs inside the root word.

Question 30

What is Neologism?

Answer 30

Neologism is the term given to a new coined word, expression or usage.
E.g - ‘fake news’

Question 31

What is a Blend?

Answer 31

Blends are words produced by using parts of two words to create a new one.
E.g - ‘brunch’ - breakfast/lunch
‘spork’ - spoon/fork

Question 32

What is Initialism?

Answer 32

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

Question 33

What are Shortenings?

Answer 33

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’.

Question 34

What is Compounding?

Answer 34

Compounding is the process of creating new words by putting two free morphemes together, as in ‘blueberry’, or ‘Facebook’

Question 35

What is Conversion?

Answer 35

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'

Question 36

What is a Contraction?

Answer 36

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’

Question 37

What are Collocations?

Answer 37

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’

Question 38

What is Borrowing?

Answer 38

Words that have been borrowed from other languages.

E.g - ‘cafe’, ‘algebra’

Question 39

What is Commonisation?

Answer 39

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)

Question 40

What is Archaism?

Answer 40

Archaism are words that are no longer used in everyday life.

E.g - ‘thou’, ‘thee’, ‘thine’

Question 41

What are lexemes?

Answer 41

Lexemes are the fundamental units of a language.