Morphology Vocabulary

Question 1

affix

Answer 1

a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form

Question 2

affixation

Answer 2

a morphological process whereby a bound morpheme, an affix, is attached to a morphological base

Question 3

agglutinating language

Answer 3

a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination

Question 4

allomorph

Answer 4

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

Question 5

alternation

Answer 5

the phenomenon of a morpheme exhibiting variation in its phonological realization. Each of the various realizations is called an alternant.

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 language that primarily conveys relationships between words in sentences by way of helper words and word order, as opposed to using inflections

Question 8

bound morpheme

Answer 8

a morpheme that can appear only as part of a larger expression

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

The closed classes in English include pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, and prepositions

Question 11

compounding

Answer 11

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

Question 12

conjunction

Answer 12

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

Question 13

content morpheme

Answer 13

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.

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 (e.g., “hope” to “hopeful”). It is a major source of new words in a language.

Question 16

determiner

Answer 16

a word or affix that belongs to a class of noun modifiers that expresses the reference, including quantity, of a noun

Question 17

form

Answer 17

any meaningful unit of speech, as a sentence, phrase, word, morpheme, or suffix

Question 18

free morpheme

Answer 18

considered to be base words in linguistics. Base words that can stand alone (such as “book”)

Question 19

function morpheme

Answer 19

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

Question 20

function word

Answer 20

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

Question 21

fusional language

Answer 21

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

Question 22

hierarchical structure

Answer 22

The hierarchy of units (from smallest to largest) is conventionally identified as follows:

Phoneme
Morpheme
Word
Phrase
Clause
Sentence
Text

Question 23

homophony

Answer 23

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

Question 24

incorporation

Answer 24

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

Question 25

infix

Answer 25

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

Question 26

inflection

Answer 26

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.

Question 27

input

Answer 27

refers to the exposure learners have to authentic language in use

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 vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge

Question 30

morpheme

Answer 30

a meaningful morphological unit of a language that cannot be further divided

Question 31

morphology

Answer 31

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

Question 32

open lexical category

Answer 32

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs

Question 33

output

Answer 33

the language a learner produces, either in speaking or writing

Question 34

partial reduplication

Answer 34

a reduplication of only part of the word

Question 35

polysynthetic language

Answer 35

highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes. They are very highly inflected languages.

Question 36

prefix

Answer 36

an affix that is joined before a root or stem

Question 37

preposition

Answer 37

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 ?”

Question 38

productive

Answer 38

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.

Question 39

pronoun

Answer 39

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 ).

Question 40

reduplicant

Answer 40

The reduplicated segment in a word resulting from a reduplication process, i.e. “bye-bye”

Question 41

reduplication

Answer 41

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

Question 42

root

Answer 42

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.

Question 43

simultaneous affix

Answer 43

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).

Question 44

stem

Answer 44

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.

Question 45

suffix

Answer 45

Affixes that follow a stem are called suffixes.

Question 46

suppletion

Answer 46

A morphological process between forms of a word wherein one form cannot be phonologically or morphologically derived from the other.