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.