Vocab and Terms Chapter 4

Question 1

affix

Answer 1

bound morphemes that attaches to a stem.

Question 2

affixation

Answer 2

process of forming words by adding affixes to morphemes.

Question 3

agglutinating language

Answer 3

a type of synthetic language in which the relationships between words in a sentence are indicated primarily by bound morphemes. In agglutinating languages, morphemes are joined together loosely so that it is easy to determine where the boundaries between morphemes are.

Question 4

allomorph

Answer 4

one of a set of nondistinctive realizations of the same morpheme that have the same function and are phonetically similar.

Question 5

alternation

Answer 5

The morphological process that uses morpheme-internal modifications to make new words or morphological distinctions.

Question 6

ambiguity

Answer 6

the phenomenon by which a single linguistc form (a word or string of words) can be the form of more than one distinct linguistic expression. The form that is shared by more than one expression is said to be ambiguous.

Question 7

analytic language

Answer 7

type of language in which most words consist of one morpheme and sentences are composed of sequences of these free morphemes. Grammatical relationships are often indicated by word order. (Ex: Chinese and Vietnamese)

Question 8

bound morpheme

Answer 8

Morphemes that always attached to other morphemes, never existing as a word itself.

Question 9

bound root

Answer 9

morphemes that has some associated basic meaning but that is unable to stand alone as a word in its own right.

Question 10

closed lexical category

Answer 10

lexicial category in which the members are fairly rigidly established and additions are made very rarely and only over long periods of time.

Question 11

compounding

Answer 11

process of forming words by combining 2 or more independent words.

Question 12

content morpheme

Answer 12

morpheme that carries semantic content (as opposed to merely performing a grammatical function)

Question 13

content word

Answer 13

a word whose primary purpose is to contribute semantic content to the phrase in which it occurs. All free content morphemes are content words.

Question 14

derivation

Answer 14

a morphological process that changes a word’s lexical category or its meaning in some predictable way.

Question 15

determiner (Det.)

Answer 15

the name of a lexical category and a syntactic category that consists of expressions such as the, a, this, all, etc. Syntactically, consists of those expressions that when combined with an expression of category noun to their right results in an expression of category noun phrase.

Question 16

form

Answer 16

the structure or shape of any particular linguistic item, from individual segments to strings or words.

Question 17

free morpheme

Answer 17

a morpheme that can stand alone as a word.

Question 18

function morpheme

Answer 18

morpheme that provides information about the grammatical relationship between words in a sentence.

Question 19

function word

Answer 19

a word that has little semantic content and whose primary purpose is to indicate grammatical relationships between other words within a phrase.

Question 20

fusional language

Answer 20

a type of synthetic language in which the relationship between the words in a sentence are indicated by bound morphemes that are difficult to separate from the stem.

Question 21

hierarchical structure

Answer 21

the dominance relationship among morphemes in a word or among constituents in a phrase.

Question 22

homophony

Answer 22

the phenomenon by which 2 or more distinct morphemes or nonphrasal linguistic expressions happen to have the same form.

Question 23

incorporation

Answer 23

morphological process by which several distinct semantic components are combines into a single word in a polysynthetic language.

Question 24

infix

Answer 24

a type of bound morpheme that is inserted into the middle of the stem.

Question 25

inflection

Answer 25

a morphological process whereby the form of a word is modified to indicate some grammatically relevant information, such as person, number, tense, gender etc.

Question 26

input

Answer 26

the linguistic form before the application of a rule or set of rules.

Question 27

lexical category

Answer 27

class of words grouped together based on morphological properties. Traditionally known as part of speech.

Question 28

lexicon

Answer 28

a mental respository of linguistic information about words and other lexical expressions, including their form and meaning and their morphological and syntactic properties. As a part of descriptive, not mental, grammar, the lexicon is the representation of the mental lexicon, consisting of lexical entries that capture the relevant properties of lexical expressions.

Question 29

morpheme

Answer 29

smallest linguistic unit that has a meaning or grammatical function.

Question 30

morphology

Answer 30

the study of how words are constructed out of morphemes.

Question 31

open lexical category

Answer 31

lexical category into which new members are often introduced.

Question 32

output

Answer 32

the linguistic form obtained after an application of a rule or set of rules.

Question 33

partial reduplication

Answer 33

morphological reduplication in which only part of a morpheme is reduplicated.

Question 34

polysynthetic language

Answer 34

a type of language that attaches several affixes to a stem to indicate grammatical relationships.

Question 35

prefix

Answer 35

affix that attaches to the beginning of a stem.

Question 36

preposition (P)

Answer 36

the name of a lexical category and a syntactic category that consists of expressions such as of, in, for, with, etc. Syntactically, this category consists of those expressions that when combined with an expression of category noun phrase to their right results in an expression of category prepositional phrase.

Question 37

productive

Answer 37

describes a morpheme or rule (such as a morphological rule stating under what circumstances an affix may be added to a stem) that can be used to produce model grammatical forms.

Question 38

pronoun

Answer 38

the name of a lexical category that consists or words such as I, she, us, etc. Syntactically, pronouns belong to the category noun phrase.

Question 39

reduplicant

Answer 39

the morpheme or part of a morpheme that is repeated in reduplication.

Question 40

reduplication

Answer 40

process of forming new words by doubling either an entire word (total reduplication) or part of a word (partial reduplication).

Question 41

root

Answer 41

the free morpheme or bound root in a word that contributes most semantic content to the word, and to which affixes can attach.

Question 42

simultaneous affix

Answer 42

an affix that is articulated at the same time as some other affix or affixes in a word’s stem; exists only in visual gestural languages.

Question 43

stem

Answer 43

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 44

suffix

Answer 44

affix that attaches to the end of a stem.

Question 45

suppletion

Answer 45

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

Question 46

conjunction (Conj.)

Answer 46

a lexical category that consists of function words such as and, but, however, etc.