The nature of words and word formation Flashcards
What is a word?
Generally considered the basic elements of language.
What is the phonological criteria for showing the ‘independence’ of words?
They may be preceded and followed by pauses.
What is the orthographic criteria for showing the ‘independence’ of words?
They are separated in writing with spaces and punctuation marks.
What is the syntactic criteria for showing the ‘independence’ of words?
They may be used alone as a single utterance.
What is the semantic criteria for showing the ‘independence’ of words?
They can be assigned ‘meanings’
What is a lexeme?
An abstract unit consisting of one or more word forms.
What are the three main families of words?
- Lexical words
- Function words
- inserts
Lexical words can be divided into how many word classes?
What are these word classes?
4
Nouns, lexical verbs, adjectives and adverbs.
What are two key features of lexical words?
Most numerous and their numbers are constantly growing.
What are lexical words?
Main carriers on meaning in a text.
What are function words?
Provide the mortar which binds the text together. (Unusually indicate meaning relations)
What is the difference between lexical and function words?
Function words have no lexical meaning.
How can function words be identified?
- prepositions
- auxiliary verbs
- pronouns
What are inserts?
New category of words, carry emotion and typically used in spoken text.
What is a morpheme?
The smallest linguistic unit of meaning of function.
What is a free morpheme?
Can occur as separate words.
What is a bound morpheme?
Mainly affixes, canning occur as separate words.
What is derivation?
The process uses the morphological resources to derive new words.
What are conversions?
The base form of a word is converted to a different class without t he addition of an affix.
What is compounding?
Two words combined to make a new one.
What are initialises and acronyms?
Words derived from the initial letters of a phrase.
What is backformation?
A process in which words are reanalysed
What is blending?
Elements of two or more words that are combined to produce a new word.
What is clipping?
Part of a longer word is removed to produce a shorter one.
What is hypocorism?
A vowel suffix is added to a word or a clipped for of a word.
What is root creation?
A rare process of word formation involving the creation of an entirely new root.
What is eponym?
A name derived from the name of a place/person?
