Morphololgy Flashcards
affix
an additional element placed at the beginning or end of a root, stem, word, or in the body of a word, to modify its meaning
affixation
morphological process whereby an affix is attached to a root or stem
agglutinating language
type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination: words contain different morphemes to determine their meaning, but each of these morphemes remains in every aspect unchanged after their union, resulting in generally easier deducible word meanings if compared to fusional languages, which allow modifications in either or both the phonetics or spelling of one or more morphemes within a word, generally for shortening the word on behalf of an easier pronunciation.
allomorph
variant of a morpheme
alternation
phenomenon of a phoneme or morpheme exhibiting variation in its phonological realization
ambiguity
two or more words that sound the same but have different meanings
analytic language
a language that conveys grammatical relationships without using inflectional morphemes
prefix
affix placed before the root of a word
root
core meaning in a word
compounding
creating a new word by combining two or more existing words
conjuntion
word used to connect clauses or sentences or to coordinate words in the same clause
content morpheme
unctional morpheme (as opposed to a content morpheme) is a morpheme which simply modifies the meaning of the word, rather than supplying the root meaning of the word
infix
morpheme inserted inside of a word, ex. “that’s fan-FREAKING-tastic”
derivation
word-formation process by which a new word is built from a stem - usually through the addition of an affix - that changes the word class and/or basic meaning of the word (from teach (verb) to teach -er (noun
determiner
modifying word that determines the kind of reference a noun or noun group has, for example a, the, every
form
underlying representation (UR) or underlying form (UF) of a word or morpheme is the abstract form that a word or morpheme is postulated to have before any phonological rules have applied to it
function morpheme
orpheme which simply modifies the meaning of the word, rather than supplying the root meaning of the word
fusional language
a language in which one form of a morpheme can simultaneously encode several meanings
hierarchical structure
Describes a series of increasingly smaller regions of a phonological utterance, each nested within the next highest region
homophony
The linguistic phenomenon whereby words of different origins become identical in pronunciation
incorporation
The inclusion of the object or object reference within the inflected verb form, a type of word-formation frequent in American Indian languages
morphology
system of categories and rules involved in word formation and interpretation
output
produce and send out
partial reduplication
Occurs only with bases (root words) which begin with a consonant
inflection
the change of form that words undergo to mark such distinctions as those of case, gender, number, tense, person, mood, or voice
input
contribution of information, ideas, opinions, or the like
preposition
a word governing, and usually preceding, a noun or pronoun and expressing a relation to another word or element in the clause
productive
the degree to which native speakers use a particular grammatical process, especially in word formation
pronoun
a word that takes the place of a noun
reduplicant
the element that is added to the base as a result of a reduplication operation
reduplication
the element that is added to the base as a result of a reduplication operation
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
stem
long and thin supportive or main section of something
suppletion
occurrence of an unrelated form to fill a gap in a conjugation
bound root
a root which cannot occur as a separate word apart from any other morpheme
closed lexical category
a linguistic category of words (or more precisely lexical items), which is generally defined by the syntactic or morphological behaviour of the lexical item in question
content word
words that have meaning. They can be compared to grammatical words, which are structural. Nouns, main verbs, adjectives and adverbs are usually content words
free morpheme
morpheme that can be a word by itself
function word
word whose purpose is more to signal grammatical relationship than the lexical meaning of a sentence
lexical category
a syntactic category for elements that are part of the lexicon of a languag
lexicon
peaker’s mental dictionary, which contains information about the syntactic properties, meaning, and phonological representation of a language’s words
morpheme
the smallest unit of language that carries information about meaning or function
open lexical category
constantly acquire new members, and closed word classes, which acquire new members infrequently if at all
polysynthetic language
highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able to stand alone)
suffix
morpheme added at the end of a word to form a derivative
bound morpheme
morpheme that must be attached to another element
