Morphology Terms Flashcards
Morphology
The study of language that is concerned with words and word formation.
Mental Lexicon
The mental dictionary in which a speaker’s words are permanently stored.
Word
The smallest free form in a language.
Free form
an element that can occur in isolation and whose position is not fixed.
Morpheme
the smallest unit of meaning or function. Can be free or bound.
Simple words
monomorphemic - one morpheme
Complex words
multimorphemic - more than one morpheme
Free morpheme
a morpheme that can be a word by itself.
Bound morpheme
a morpheme that cannot be a word by itself.
Allomorphs
the variant forms of a morpheme (a and an)
Root
the core of a word - the portion of the word that carries its meaning.
Affixes
A type of bound morpheme that includes prefixes, suffixes, and infixes.
Infix
a type of affix that occurs within a morpheme (does not occur in English)
Base
Any form onto which an affix is added. Can be a root or can be larger than the root.
(Morphological) Derivation
a process of affixation
Affixation
a process that adds affixes to words.
Derivtional affixes
affixes that build a word that has a different (though usually related) meaning to that of its base.
Compounding
a process used to build words that involves the combination of two or more already existing words into a new word.
Inflection
A process that involves modifying the form of a word to indicate grammatical information such as plural or past tense.
conversion
A derivational process that assigns an existing word to a different lexical category.
Clipping
A process that shortens a word by removing one or more syllables eg. condo
Blend
a process that creates a new word by combining non-morphemic portions of two existing words e.g. smog
Backformations
a process that creates a word by removing real or supposed affix from an existing word in the language e.g. enthusiasm –> enthuse
Acronyms
a process that creates a new word from an acronym e.g. scuba, UNICEF
Onomatopoeia
a process that creates new words that sound like the thing they name e.g. buzz, hiss
Coinage
a process in which an entirely new word is creates e.g. google
Morphophonetics
The interaction between morphology and phonology n which different allomorphs occur in different environments.
