Morphology Vocabulary Flashcards
Affix
An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form.
Affixation
The process of adding a morpheme to a word to create either a different form of that word or a new word altogether.
Agglutinatiing language
An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination (a grammatical process in which words are composed of a sequence of morphemes each of which represents not more than a single grammatical category.)
Allomorph
Any of two or more actual representations of a morpheme.
Alternation
The occurrence of different allomorphs or allophones.
Ambiguity
An idea or situation that can be understood in more than one way. This extends from ambiguous sentences (which could mean one thing or another) up to ambiguous storylines and ambiguous arguments.
Analytic language
In linguistic typology, an analytic language is a language that primarily conveys relationships between words in sentences by way of helper words and word order, as opposed to using inflections.
Bound morpheme
A bound morpheme is a morpheme that can appear only as part of a larger expression
Bound root
A bound root is a root which cannot occur as a separate word apart from any other morpheme.
Closed lexical category
Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are open lexical categories. In contrast, closed lexical categories rarely acquire new members.
Compounding
Compounding, composition or nominal composition is the process of word formation that creates compound lexemes.
Conjunction
Conjunctions are linguistic elements that link two or more words, phrases, clauses, or sentences within a larger unit, in such a way that a specific semantic relation is established between them.
Content word
Content words, in linguistics, are words that possess semantic content and contribute to the meaning of the sentence in which they occur.
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 determiner is a word or affix that belongs to a class of noun modifiers that expresses the reference, including quantity, of a noun. Kinds: Article. Demonstrative.
Form
Form in linguistics and language refers to the symbols used to represent meaning.
Free morpheme
A free morpheme is a morpheme that can stand alone as a word.
Function morpheme
Functional morphemes, also sometimes referred to as functors, are building blocks for language acquisition.
Function word
A word whose purpose is more to signal grammatical relationship than the lexical meaning of a sentence,
Fusional language
A language that forms words by the fusion (rather than the agglutination) of morphemes, so that the constituent elements of a word are not kept distinct.
Hierarchical structure
Also called syntactic hierarchy or morpho-syntactic hierarchy. The hierarchy of units (from smallest to largest) is conventionally identified as follows: Phoneme Morpheme Word Phrase Clause Sentence Text
Homophony
Homophony is when a set of words are pronounced identically, but have different meanings
Incorporation
Incorporation 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.
Infix
An infix is an affix inserted inside a word stem
Inflection
The change in the form of a word (in English, usually the addition of endings) to mark such distinctions as tense, person, number, gender, mood, voice, and case.
Input
Input refers to the exposure learners have to authentic language in use.
Lexical Category
A lexical category is a syntactic category for elements that are part of the lexicon of a language.
Lexicon
A lexicon is the knowledge that a native speaker has about a language
Morpheme
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a language
Morphology
The study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language.
Open lexical category
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
Output
Output means language production which can be either speaking or writing.
Partial Reduplication
Reduplication is a widespread linguistic process in which a part or an exact copy of a word is repeated, often for morphological or syntactic reasons (but not always).
Polysynthetic language
A polysynthetic language is a language where words are made with lexical morphemes (substantive, verb, adjective, etc) as if parts of sentences were bound together to constitute one word, which can sometimes be very long.
Prefix
An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form.
Preposition
A word governing, and usually preceding, a noun or pronoun and expressing a relation to another word or element in the clause,
Productive
In linguistics, productivity is the degree to which native speakers use a particular grammatical process, especially in word formation.
Pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated PRO) is a word that substitutes for a noun or noun phrase.
Reduplication
Reduplication is a word-formation process in which meaning is expressed by repeating all or part of a word.
Reduplicant
Used to refer to the repeated portion of a word in reduplication
Root
A morphologically simple unit which can be left bare or to which a prefix or a suffix can attach.
Simultaneous affix
An affix articulated at the same time as some other affix or affixes in a word’s stem; exists only in visual gestural languages
Stem
A stem is the root or roots of a word, together with any derivational affixes, to which inflectional affixes are added.
Suffix
A suffix (sometimes termed postfix) is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word.
Suppletion
Suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate.
