Morphology Vocabulary Flashcards
affix
a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form
affixation
a morphological process whereby a bound morpheme, an affix, is attached to a morphological base
agglutinating language
a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination
allomorph
a variant phonetic form of a morpheme, or, a unit of meaning that varies in sound and spelling without changing the meaning
alternation
the phenomenon of a morpheme exhibiting variation in its phonological realization. Each of the various realizations is called an alternant.
ambiguity
a quality of language that makes speech or written text open to multiple interpretations
analytic language
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 morpheme that can appear only as part of a larger expression
bound root
a root which cannot occur as a separate word apart from any other morpheme
closed lexical category
The closed classes in English include pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, and prepositions
compounding
a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem. Compounding, composition or nominal composition is the process of word formation that creates compound lexemes
conjunction
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 morpheme
a root that forms the semantic core of a major class word. Content morphemes have lexical denotations that are not dependent on the context or on other morphemes.
content word
words that possess semantic content and contribute to the meaning of the sentence in which they occur
derivation
the formation of a word by changing the form of the base or by adding affixes to it (e.g., “hope” to “hopeful”). It is a major source of new words in a language.
determiner
a word or affix that belongs to a class of noun modifiers that expresses the reference, including quantity, of a noun
form
any meaningful unit of speech, as a sentence, phrase, word, morpheme, or suffix
free morpheme
considered to be base words in linguistics. Base words that can stand alone (such as “book”)
function morpheme
sometimes referred to as functors, are building blocks for language acquisition. A functional morpheme (as opposed to a content morpheme) is a morpheme which simply modifies the meaning of a word, rather than supplying the root meaning
function word
words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker
fusional language
a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features
hierarchical structure
The hierarchy of units (from smallest to largest) is conventionally identified as follows:
Phoneme Morpheme Word Phrase Clause Sentence Text
homophony
when a set of words are pronounced identically, but have different meanings
incorporation
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
a word element (a type of affix) that can be inserted within the base form of a word—rather than at its beginning or end—to create a new word or intensify meaning
inflection
a process of word formation, in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness.
input
refers to the exposure learners have to authentic language in use
lexical category
a syntactic category for elements that are part of the lexicon of a language
lexicon
the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge
morpheme
a meaningful morphological unit of a language that cannot be further divided
morphology
the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words, such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes
open lexical category
Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs
output
the language a learner produces, either in speaking or writing
partial reduplication
a reduplication of only part of the word
polysynthetic language
highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes. They are very highly inflected languages.
prefix
an affix that is joined before a root or stem
preposition
a word governing, and usually preceding, a noun or pronoun and expressing a relation to another word or element in the clause, as in “the man on the platform,” “she arrived after dinner,” “what did you do it for ?”
productive
the degree to which native speakers use a particular grammatical process, especially in word formation. It compares grammatical processes that are in frequent use to less frequently used ones that tend towards lexicalization.
pronoun
a word that can function by itself as a noun phrase and that refers either to the participants in the discourse (e.g., I, you ) or to someone or something mentioned elsewhere in the discourse (e.g., she, it, this ).
reduplicant
The reduplicated segment in a word resulting from a reduplication process, i.e. “bye-bye”
reduplication
The act of, or an instance of, reduplicating. To repeat (a word or part of a word) in order to form a new word or phrase, possibly with modification of one of the repetitions
root
the core of a word that is irreducible into more meaningful elements. In morphology, a root is a morphologically simple unit which can be left bare or to which a prefix or a suffix can attach.
simultaneous affix
An affix is articulated at the same time as some other affix or affixes in a word’s stem; exists only in visual-gestural languages (ASL).
stem
The base, consisting of one or more morphemes, to which some affix is added. The stem always includes the root and may also include one or more affixes.
suffix
Affixes that follow a stem are called suffixes.
suppletion
A morphological process between forms of a word wherein one form cannot be phonologically or morphologically derived from the other.
