Morphology vocabulary Flashcards
Affixation
A linguistic process that involves attaching a morpheme, or affix, to a word to create a new word or form
Affix
A grammatical element that is added to a word to change it’s meaning or inflection
Agglutinating language
Languages in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes while maintaining their individual meanings and functions
Allomorph
A varient form of a morpheme, which is a meaning that can change in sound or spelling without changing it’s meaning
Alternation
A variation in the form and/or sound of a word or word part
Ambiguity
A language quality that makes written or spoken text open to multiple interpretations
Analytic language
A langauge in which the vast majority of morphemes to words, and by the use of word order to indicate grammatical relations
Bound morpheme
A word element that cannot stand alone as a word and must be attached to another morpheme to create a word
Bound Root
A root which cannot stand alone as a word and must be attached to another morpheme to create a word
Closed lexical category
A category of words in a language that has a limited number of members and is not typically open to new additions or changes
Compounding
A word that is made up of more than one root or derived word
Conjunction
A type of function word that indicates relationships within a language
Content morpheme
A word or part of a word that has a clear meaning or expresses a concrete content
Content Word
A word that has meaning and contributes to the meaning of a sentence
Derivation
The process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix, such as un-or-ness
Determiner
A word that modifies, describes, or introduces a noun
Form
Describes the physical structure of the material
Free Morpheme
A morpheme that can stand alone as a word and has meaning on it’s own
Function Morpheme
A morpheme that modifies the meaning of a word by providing grammatical information or relating words in a sentence to each other
Function word
Woeds that don’t refer to any meaning but must be there to make a grammatical sentence
Fusional language
A morphological system where multiple grammatical functions are conveyed by a single inflectional morpheme
Hierarchical structure
It shows how morphemes are grouped together in a specific order to form a word
Homophony
When words sound the same but have different meanings
Incorporation
A word-formation process that combines a word with another element to create a compound word
