Morphology Deck

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

a morphological process whereby a bound morpheme, an affix, is attached to a morphological base.

Question 3

agglutinating language

Answer 3

a form of synthetic language in which each affix typically represents one unit of meaning (such as “diminutive,” “past tense,” “plural,” etc.), and bound morphemes are expressed by affixes (and not by internal changes of the root of the word, or changes in stress or tone).

Question 4

allomorph

Answer 4

any of two or more actual representations of a 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 conveys relationships between words in sentences primarily 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

a morpheme (or word element), usually a prefix or suffix, that cannot stand alone as a word

Question 9

bound root

Answer 9

They cannot stand alone to function as words because they are no longer used in Modern English.

Question 10

closed lexical category

Answer 10

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are open lexical categories.

Question 11

compounding

Answer 11

occurs when two or more words or signs are joined to make a longer word or sign.

Question 12

conjunction

Answer 12

a word that is used to connect words, phrases, and clauses. There are many conjunctions in the English language, but some common ones include and, or, but, because, for, if, and when.

Question 13

content morpheme

Answer 13

a root that forms the semantic core of a major class word.

Question 14

content word

Answer 14

a word with an independent lexical meaning, that is, one that can be defined with reference to the physical world or abstract concepts and without reference to any sentence in which the word may appear. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and many adverbs are considered to be content words.

Question 15

derivation

Answer 15

the formation of a word by changing the form of the base or by adding affixes to it

Question 16

determiner

Answer 16

a word, phrase, or affix that occurs together with a noun or noun phrase and generally serves to express the reference of that noun or noun phrase in the context.

Question 17

form

Answer 17

a meaningful unit of speech (such as a morpheme, word, or sentence) — called also speech form.

Question 18

free morpheme

Answer 18

morpheme that can stand alone, as a word in its own right.

Question 19

function morpheme

Answer 19

building blocks for language acquisition.

Question 20

function word

Answer 20

words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker.

Question 21

fusional language

Answer 21

a language that forms words by the fusion (rather than the agglutination) of morphemes, so that the constituent elements of a word are not kept distinct.

Question 22

hierarchical structure

Answer 22

the format of linguistic representations.

Question 23

homophony

Answer 23

the linguistic phenomenon whereby words of different origins become identical in pronunciation.

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

an affix inserted inside a word stem (an existing word or the core of a family of words). It contrasts with adfix, a rare term for an affix attached to the outside of a stem, such as a prefix or suffix.

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

Question 28

lexical category

Answer 28

classes of words (e.g., noun, verb, preposition), which differ in how other words can be constructed out of them.

Question 29

lexicon

Answer 29

the total stock of words and word elements that carry meaning.

Question 30

morpheme

Answer 30

the smallest grammatical unit of speech;

Question 31

morphology

Answer 31

the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language.

Question 32

open lexical category

Answer 32

if the new word and the original word belong to the same category.

Question 33

output

Answer 33

the language they produce, either in speaking or writing

Question 34

partial reduplication

Answer 34

a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly

Question 35

polysynthetic language

Answer 35

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 that is joined before a root or stem

Question 37

preposition

Answer 37

a word that shows how two words are related. Generally a preposition connects a noun or pronoun with another noun or pronoun.

Question 38

productive

Answer 38

the degree to which speakers of a language use a particular grammatical process, especially in word formation.

Question 39

pronoun

Answer 39

a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.

Question 40

reduplicant

Answer 40

a widespread linguistic process in which a part or an exact copy of a word is repeated, often for morphological or syntactic reasons (but not always).

Question 41

reduplication

Answer 41

a widespread linguistic process in which a part or an exact copy of a word is repeated, often for morphological or syntactic reasons (but not always).

Question 42

root

Answer 42

The root word is the primary lexical unit of a word, and of a word family

Question 43

simultaneous affix

Answer 43

an affix that takes place at the same time as its base.

Question 44

stem

Answer 44

a part of a word responsible for its lexical meaning

Question 45

suffix

Answer 45

an affix which is placed after the stem of a word.

Question 46

suppletion

Answer 46

the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate.