Morphology Vocabulary

Question 1

Affix

Answer 1

word element that can be attached to a base or root to form a new word or new form of the word.

Question 2

Affixation

Answer 2

morphological process where a bound morpheme is attached to a morphological base.

Question 3

Agglutinating language

Answer 3

type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination.

Question 4

Allomorph

Answer 4

one of a set of forms that a morpheme may take in different contexts.

Question 5

Alternation

Answer 5

variation in the form or sound of a word or word part.

Question 6

Ambiguity

Answer 6

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

Question 7

Analytic language

Answer 7

any language that uses specific grammatical words rather than inflection to express syntactic relations within sentences.

Question 8

Bound morpheme

Answer 8

word element that cannot stand alone as a word, including both prefixes and suffixes.

Question 9

Bound root

Answer 9

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

Question 10

Closed lexical category

Answer 10

includes conjunctions, determiners, pronouns and prepositions.

Question 11

Compounding

Answer 11

composition or nominal composition is the process of word formation that creates compound lexemes.

Question 12

Conjunction

Answer 12

linguistic elements that link two or more words, phrases, clauses, or sentences within a larger unit.

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 such as nouns, most verbs, adjectives, and adverbs that refer to some object, action, or other non-linguistic meaning.

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

word or affix that belongs to a class of noun modifiers that expresses the reference of a noun.

Question 17

Form

Answer 17

a meaningful unit of language.

Question 18

Free morpheme

Answer 18

a word element that can stand alone.

Question 19

Function morpheme

Answer 19

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

Question 20

Function word

Answer 20

words that exist to explain or create grammatical or structural relationships into which the content words may fit.

Question 21

Fusional language

Answer 21

a language in which one form of a morpheme can simultaneously encode several meanings.

Question 22

Hierarchical structure

Answer 22

This can be demonstrated at every level of linguistic analysis: phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and also at the level of discourse.

Question 23

Homophony

Answer 23

when a set of words are pronounced identically, but have different meanings.

Question 24

Incorporation

Answer 24

a process in word formation by which a compound is created by affixing or infixing a noun to a verb.

Question 25

Infix

Answer 25

a word element that can be inserted within the base form of a word.

Question 26

Inflection

Answer 26

a process of word formation in which items are added to the base form of a word to express grammatical meanings.

Question 27

Input

Answer 27

refers to the processible language the learners are exposed to while listening or reading.

Question 28

Lexical category

Answer 28

a syntactic category for elements that are part of the lexicon of a language.

Question 29

Lexicon

Answer 29

the total stock of words and word elements that carry meaning.

Question 30

Morpheme

Answer 30

the smallest syntactical and meaningful linguistic unit that contains a word, or an element of the word.

Question 31

Morphology

Answer 31

the study of the internal structure of words.

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.

Question 33

Output

Answer 33

is the language the learners produce, either in speaking or writing.

Question 34

Partial reduplication

Answer 34

a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word, or only part of it, is repeated.

Question 35

Polysynthetic language

Answer 35

a language in which words tend to consist of several morphemes.

Question 36

Prefix

Answer 36

an affix that is joined before a root or stem.

Question 37

Preposition

Answer 37

a function word that typically combines with a noun phrase to form a phrase which usually expresses a modification.

Question 38

Productive

Answer 38

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

Question 39

Pronoun

Answer 39

a word that substitutes for a noun or noun phrase.

Question 40

Reduplicant

Answer 40

The reduplicated segment in a word resulting from a reduplication process.

Question 41

Reduplication

Answer 41

a word-formation process in which meaning is expressed by repeating all or part of a word.

Question 42

Root

Answer 42

the form of a word after all affixes are removed.

Question 43

Simultaneous affix

Answer 43

is articulated at the same time as some other affix or affixes in a word's stem.

Question 44

Stem

Answer 44

the root or roots of a word, together with any derivational affixes, to which inflectional affixes are added.

Question 45

Suffix

Answer 45

morphemes that are added onto the end of root words to change their meaning.

Question 46

Suppletion

Answer 46

the use of two or more phonetically distinct roots for different forms of the same word.