Morphology Vocabulary Flashcards
Affix
is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form.
Affixation
is a morphological process whereby a bound morpheme, an affix, is attached to a morphological base.
Agglutinating Language
is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination.
Allomorph
any of two or more actual representations of a morpheme
Alternation
is the phenomenon of a morpheme exhibiting variation in its phonological realization.
Ambiguity
is a type of meaning in which a phrase, statement or resolution is not explicitly defined, making several interpretations plausible.
Analytic Language
is 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).
Bound Morpheme
is a morpheme (the elementary unit of morphosyntax) that can appear only as part of a larger expression; a free morpheme (or unbound morpheme) is one that can stand alone.
Bound Root
is a root which cannot occur as a separate word apart from any other morpheme.
Closed Lexical Category
rarely acquire new members. They include conjunctions (e.g., and, or, but), determiners (e.g., a, the), pronouns (e.g., he, she, they), and prepositions (e.g., of, on, under).
Compounding
is a word formation process based on the combination of lexical elements (words or stems).
Conjunction
words that connect two parts of a sentence.
Content Morpheme
is a root that forms the semantic core of a major class word.
Content Word
are lexical morphemes that have a semantic content; i.e. they have a particular meaning on its own.
Derivation
is the process of creating a new word out of an old word, usually by adding a prefix or a suffix.
Determiner
is 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.
Form
describes the physical structure of the material: a perfect crystal is one type of morphological structure, a porous fibrous bundle is another.
Free Morpheme
is a morpheme (or word element) that can stand alone as a word.
Function Morpheme
is a morpheme which simply modifies the meaning of a word, rather than supplying the root meaning.
Function Word
are 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.
Fusional Language
are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features.
Hierarchical Structure
suggests the division of compound and derived words into their basic constituents. The hierarchical structure is obvious in compound words more than in derived words.
Homophony
the linguistic phenomenon whereby words of different origins become identical in pronunciation.
Incorporation
is 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.
Infix
is an affix inserted inside a word stem (an existing word or the core of a family of words).
Inflection
is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness.
Input
a structure or analysis of a word.
Lexical Category
are classes of words (e.g., noun, verb, preposition), which differ in how other words can be constructed out of them.
Lexicon
is the component of a linguistic system which can be regarded as a list or network of words or lexical entries (also lexical items, lexemes).
Morpheme
is the smallest meaningful lexical item in a language.
Morphology
is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language.
Open Lexical Category
A lexical category is open if the new word and the original word belong to the same category. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are open lexical categories.
Output
the word’s stem(s) and features expressed by other morphemes.
Partial Reduplication
involves consonant ablaut or vowel alternation (e.g. / i-æ/ as in rip rap and /i-o/ as in ping pong). There are three types of partial reduplications namely vowel alternations, onset alternations and rhyming words.
Polysynthetic Language
are highly synthetic languages, i.e. 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).
Prefix
are morphemes that attach to the front of a root/base word.
Preposition
is a word that shows how two words are related.
Productive
is the degree to which speakers of a language use a particular grammatical process, especially in word formation.
Pronoun
is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Reduplicant
reduplicated element.
Reduplication
is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change.
Root
is a morphologically simple unit which can be left bare or to which a prefix or a suffix can attach.
Simultaneous Affix
is an affix that takes place at the same time as its base.
Stem
is a morphological constituent to which affixes may be attached or to which morphological operations may be applied.
Suffix
is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word.
Suppletion
is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate.
