Morphology Vocabulary

Question 1

Affix

Answer 1

is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form.

Question 2

Affixation

Answer 2

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

Question 3

Agglutinating Language

Answer 3

is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination.

Question 4

Allomorph

Answer 4

any of two or more actual representations of a morpheme

Question 5

Alternation

Answer 5

is the phenomenon of a morpheme exhibiting variation in its phonological realization.

Question 6

Ambiguity

Answer 6

is a type of meaning in which a phrase, statement or resolution is not explicitly defined, making several interpretations plausible.

Question 7

Analytic Language

Answer 7

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).

Question 8

Bound Morpheme

Answer 8

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.

Question 9

Bound Root

Answer 9

is a root which cannot occur as a separate word apart from any other morpheme.

Question 10

Closed Lexical Category

Answer 10

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).

Question 11

Compounding

Answer 11

is a word formation process based on the combination of lexical elements (words or stems).

Question 12

Conjunction

Answer 12

words that connect two parts of a sentence.

Question 13

Content Morpheme

Answer 13

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

Question 14

Content Word

Answer 14

are lexical morphemes that have a semantic content; i.e. they have a particular meaning on its own.

Question 15

Derivation

Answer 15

is the process of creating a new word out of an old word, usually by adding a prefix or a suffix.

Question 16

Determiner

Answer 16

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.

Question 17

Form

Answer 17

describes the physical structure of the material: a perfect crystal is one type of morphological structure, a porous fibrous bundle is another.

Question 18

Free Morpheme

Answer 18

is a morpheme (or word element) that can stand alone as a word.

Question 19

Function Morpheme

Answer 19

is a morpheme which simply modifies the meaning of a word, rather than supplying the root meaning.

Question 20

Function Word

Answer 20

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.

Question 21

Fusional Language

Answer 21

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.

Question 22

Hierarchical Structure

Answer 22

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.

Question 23

Homophony

Answer 23

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

Question 24

Incorporation

Answer 24

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.

Question 25

Infix

Answer 25

is an affix inserted inside a word stem (an existing word or the core of a family of words).

Question 26

Inflection

Answer 26

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.

Question 27

Input

Answer 27

a structure or analysis of a word.

Question 28

Lexical Category

Answer 28

are 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

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).

Question 30

Morpheme

Answer 30

is the smallest meaningful lexical item in a language.

Question 31

Morphology

Answer 31

is 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

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.

Question 33

Output

Answer 33

the word’s stem(s) and features expressed by other morphemes.

Question 34

Partial Reduplication

Answer 34

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.

Question 35

Polysynthetic Language

Answer 35

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).

Question 36

Prefix

Answer 36

are morphemes that attach to the front of a root/base word.

Question 37

Preposition

Answer 37

is a word that shows how two words are related.

Question 38

Productive

Answer 38

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

Question 39

Pronoun

Answer 39

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

Question 40

Reduplicant

Answer 40

reduplicated element.

Question 41

Reduplication

Answer 41

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.

Question 42

Root

Answer 42

is a morphologically simple unit which can be left bare or to which a prefix or a suffix can attach.

Question 43

Simultaneous Affix

Answer 43

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

Question 44

Stem

Answer 44

is a morphological constituent to which affixes may be attached or to which morphological operations may be applied.

Question 45

Suffix

Answer 45

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

Question 46

Suppletion

Answer 46

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