Morphology Vocabulary

Question 1

affix

Answer 1

a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form (prefix, infix, suffix)

Question 2

affixation

Answer 2

a morphological process whereby a group of letters (the affix) is attached to a base or root word to form a new word

Question 3

agglutinating language

Answer 3

a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination; a morphological process in which words are formed by stringent to gather morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature

Question 4

allomorph

Answer 4

a variant phonetic form of a morpheme; a unit of meaning that varies in sound and spelling without changing the meaning

Question 5

alternation

Answer 5

a variation in the form and/or sound of a word or word part

Question 6

ambiguity

Answer 6

a quality of language that makes speech or written text open to multiple interpretations

Question 7

analytic language

Answer 7

a type of natural language in which a series of root/stem words is accompanied by prepositions, postpositions, particles and modifiers

Question 8

bound morpheme

Answer 8

these are affixes (prefix, infix, suffix) that must be attached to the word; have two categories, inflectional and derivational morphemes

Question 9

bound root

Answer 9

these are root morphemes which cannot appear on its own

Question 10

closed lexical category

Answer 10

new members of these classes (pronouns, modal verbs, determiners, prepositions, conjunctions) are not added to the language very often.

Question 11

compounding

Answer 11

when two or more words or sings are joined to make a longer word or sign; the act of combining two lexemes to make a new word

Question 12

conjunction

Answer 12

parts of speech that connect words, phrases, clauses, or sentences

Question 13

content morpheme

Answer 13

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

Question 14

content word

Answer 14

words that possess semantic content and contribute to the meaning of the sentence in which they occur

Question 15

derivation

Answer 15

the formation of a word by changing the form of the base or by adding affixes to it

Question 16

determiner

Answer 16

a word used before a noun that modifies, describes, or introduces it

Question 17

form

Answer 17

the constituent structure in language, involving phonological and syntactic rules for interpreting speech and sentences

Question 18

free morpheme

Answer 18

the type of morpheme that can stand alone as words by themselves

Question 19

function morpheme

Answer 19

words that do not have clear meaning but has grammatical functions; these are conjunctions, prepositions, articles, auxiliaries and pronouns; referred also as closed class because it cannot be added to other morphemes

Question 20

function word

Answer 20

a word that expresses a grammatical or structural relationship with other words in a sentence

Question 21

fusional language

Answer 21

a type of language in which a single morpheme can express multiple grammatical categories by combining them into one form

Question 22

hierarchical structure

Answer 22

the arrangement of morphemes in a fixed order by categories and levels; the format of linguistic representations

Question 23

homophony

Answer 23

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

Question 24

incorporation

Answer 24

the compounding of a word (typically a verb or preposition) with another element (typically a noun, pronoun, or adverb).

Question 25

infix

Answer 25

an affix inserted inside a word stem

Question 26

inflection

Answer 26

the change in the form of a word to mark such distinctions as tense, person, number, gender, mood, voice, and case

Question 27

input

Answer 27

everything a language learner is exposed to either orally or visually in the target language

Question 28

lexical category

Answer 28

a syntactic category for elements that are part of the lexicon of a language such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs

Question 29

lexicon

Answer 29

the complete set of meaningful units in a language

Question 30

morpheme

Answer 30

the smallest meaningful unit in the grammar of a language

Question 31

morphology

Answer 31

the study of structure of the words and word formation

Question 32

open lexical category

Answer 32

parts of speech (or word classes) that can add morphemes to words such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives; parts of speech (or word classes) that readily accept new members.

Question 33

output

Answer 33

what is produced in the target language through speaking or writing

Question 34

partial reduplication

Answer 34

reduplication of only part of a word; repeats only a part of the base word

Question 35

polysynthetic language

Answer 35

a unique type of language where words are formed by combining several morphemes into a single unit

Question 36

prefix

Answer 36

an affix which is placed before the stem of a word

Question 37

preposition

Answer 37

a word that indicates the relationship of a noun, pronoun, or noun phrase to another word or phrase in a sentence

Question 38

productive

Answer 38

the ability of an affix or word formation rule to coin new words; the degree to which speakers of a language use a particular grammatical process, especially in word formation

Question 39

pronoun

Answer 39

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

Question 40

reduplicant

Answer 40

the base word (or part of the word) that is copied; the reduplicated element in reduplication

Question 41

reduplication

Answer 41

a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change

Question 42

root

Answer 42

the basic part of a word that carries meaning

Question 43

simultaneous affix

Answer 43

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

Question 44

stem

Answer 44

when a root morpheme is combined with affix morpheme

Question 45

suffix

Answer 45

an affix which is placed after the stem of a word

Question 46

suppletion

Answer 46

the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate