Morpholohy Flashcards
What is the smallest unit of meaning in a word?
The root.
Example: In ‘breaking’, ‘break’ is the root morpheme.
What remains when different morphemes are taken away from a word?
The stem.
What are free morphemes?
Morphemes that can stand alone as a word.
What are bound morphemes?
Morphemes that cannot stand alone and must be attached to a root or stem.
What is a prefix?
A bound morpheme added to the beginning of the root/stem.
What is a suffix?
A bound morpheme added to the end of the root/stem.
What is an infix?
An affix added into a word, not common in English.
What do inflectional morphemes do?
They add grammatical information to a word such as tense, possession, or plural.
What do derivational morphemes do?
They change or add to the meaning of a word, often creating a new word with its own definition.
What is abbreviation?
Writing or pronouncing shorter forms of words or strings of words.
What is an acronym?
Words made up of the initials of other words that form a new word.
What is an initialism?
Letters pronounced as letters instead of the word they represent.
What is shortening?
Taking off a part of the word.
What is compounding?
Adding words which exist on their own (free morphemes) to change the meaning.
What are blends?
Words formed by combining parts of other words, where something falls off.
What is a contraction?
Formed by removing letters and adding an apostrophe.
What is backformation?
New words formed by removing an affix wrongly thought to be part of an old word.
What is affixation?
Adding only bound morphemes (prefixes, suffixes) to a root or stem.
What is conversion of word class?
Changing how we use a word without adding an affix.
