Morphology Vocabulary

Question 1

affix

Answer 1

a morpheme, or word part, that is added to a word stem to form a new word or word form

Question 2

affixation

Answer 2

the process of attaching a bound morpheme, or affix, to a word or morphological base to create a new word or change the meaning of an existing word

Question 3

agglutinating language

Answer 3

languages that form words by combining morphemes, or meaningful word elements, to express complex ideas

Question 4

allomorph

Answer 4

a variant phonetic form of a morpheme, which is a unit of meaning in a language

Question 5

alternation

Answer 5

when a morpheme’s phonological realization varies, and each variation is called an alternant

Question 6

ambiguity

Answer 6

a characteristic of language that allows for multiple interpretations of a word, phrase, or sentence

Question 7

analytical language

Answer 7

a natural language that uses grammatical words and particles to express syntactic relations in sentences, rather than inflection

Question 8

bound morpheme

Answer 8

a word element that cannot stand alone as a word, and must be attached to another morpheme to create a word

Question 9

bound root

Answer 9

a bound morpheme that cannot stand alone as a word

Question 10

closed lexical category

Answer 10

a word class that has a limited number of words and rarely adds new members

Question 11

compounding

Answer 11

the process of combining two or more words or signs to create a new word or sign

Question 12

conjunction

Answer 12

a word that joins words, phrases, clauses, or sentences together

Question 13

content morpheme

Answer 13

morphemes that convey a concrete meaning or content in a sentence

Question 14

root

Answer 14

the core of a word that cannot be broken down into smaller meaningful parts

Question 15

form

Answer 15

the structure of language and the rules for interpreting speech and sentences

Question 16

free morpheme

Answer 16

a word part, or morpheme, that can stand alone as a word and has meaning on its own

Question 17

function morpheme

Answer 17

a word that modifies the meaning of another word or provides grammatical information

Question 18

fusional language

Answer 18

a type of synthetic language where a single morpheme can express multiple grammatical or syntactic features

Question 19

determiner

Answer 19

a word that modifies, describes, or introduces a noun

Question 20

homophony

Answer 20

when words have the same pronunciation but different meanings

Question 21

infix

Answer 21

a letter or group of letters that are inserted into the middle of a word to create a new word

Question 22

inflection

Answer 22

the process of changing the form of a word to indicate grammatical features, such as tense, person, number, and case

Question 23

input

Answer 23

the language that a learner is exposed to

Question 24

hierarchical structure

Answer 24

the idea that language elements are organized in a systematic and structured way, with higher-level constituents built from lower-level constituents

Question 25

lexicon

Answer 25

the collection of words and word elements that make up a language, along with the knowledge that speakers and listeners have about those words

Question 26

lexical category

Answer 26

a class of words that are grouped together based on their grammatical properties and how they are used in sentences

Question 27

open lexical category

Answer 27

a part of speech, or word class, that can easily accept new members

Question 28

output

Answer 28

the production of a target language through speaking or writing

Question 29

partial reduplication

Answer 29

a linguistic process that involves repeating part of a word, rather than the whole word

Question 30

polysynthetic language

Answer 30

a language where words are made up of many morphemes, or word parts, that have meaning