Morphology Terms

Question 1

Morphology

Answer 1

The study of language that is concerned with words and word formation.

Question 2

Mental Lexicon

Answer 2

The mental dictionary in which a speaker’s words are permanently stored.

Question 3

Word

Answer 3

The smallest free form in a language.

Question 4

Free form

Answer 4

an element that can occur in isolation and whose position is not fixed.

Question 5

Morpheme

Answer 5

the smallest unit of meaning or function. Can be free or bound.

Question 6

Simple words

Answer 6

monomorphemic - one morpheme

Question 7

Complex words

Answer 7

multimorphemic - more than one morpheme

Question 8

Free morpheme

Answer 8

a morpheme that can be a word by itself.

Question 9

Bound morpheme

Answer 9

a morpheme that cannot be a word by itself.

Question 10

Allomorphs

Answer 10

the variant forms of a morpheme (a and an)

Question 11

Root

Answer 11

the core of a word - the portion of the word that carries its meaning.

Question 12

Affixes

Answer 12

A type of bound morpheme that includes prefixes, suffixes, and infixes.

Question 13

Infix

Answer 13

a type of affix that occurs within a morpheme (does not occur in English)

Question 14

Base

Answer 14

Any form onto which an affix is added. Can be a root or can be larger than the root.

Question 15

(Morphological) Derivation

Answer 15

a process of affixation

Question 16

Affixation

Answer 16

a process that adds affixes to words.

Question 17

Derivtional affixes

Answer 17

affixes that build a word that has a different (though usually related) meaning to that of its base.

Question 18

Compounding

Answer 18

a process used to build words that involves the combination of two or more already existing words into a new word.

Question 19

Inflection

Answer 19

A process that involves modifying the form of a word to indicate grammatical information such as plural or past tense.

Question 20

conversion

Answer 20

A derivational process that assigns an existing word to a different lexical category.

Question 21

Clipping

Answer 21

A process that shortens a word by removing one or more syllables eg. condo

Question 22

Blend

Answer 22

a process that creates a new word by combining non-morphemic portions of two existing words e.g. smog

Question 23

Backformations

Answer 23

a process that creates a word by removing real or supposed affix from an existing word in the language e.g. enthusiasm –> enthuse

Question 24

Acronyms

Answer 24

a process that creates a new word from an acronym e.g. scuba, UNICEF

Question 25

Onomatopoeia

Answer 25

a process that creates new words that sound like the thing they name e.g. buzz, hiss

Question 26

Coinage

Answer 26

a process in which an entirely new word is creates e.g. google

Question 27

Morphophonetics

Answer 27

The interaction between morphology and phonology n which different allomorphs occur in different environments.