Vocab List - 10/4/20

Question 1

affix

Answer 1

a grammatical element that is combined with a word, stem, or phrase to produce derived or inflected forms.

Question 2

affixation

Answer 2

the process of adding a morpheme—or affix—to a word to create either a different form of that word or a new word with a different meaning

Question 3

agglutinating language

Answer 3

a language which has a morphological system in which words as a rule are polymorphemic and where each morpheme corresponds to a single lexical meaning

Question 4

allomorph

Answer 4

nondistinctive realizations of a particular morpheme that have the same function and are phonetically similar

Question 5

alternation

Answer 5

the phenomenon of a morpheme exhibiting variation in its phonological realization

Question 6

ambiguity

Answer 6

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 utilizing inflections

Question 8

bound morpheme

Answer 8

morphemes that cannot occur on their own

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 category of function words—parts of speech—that don’t readily accept new members. The closed classes in English include pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, and prepositions

Question 11

compounding

Answer 11

a word formation process based on the combination of lexical elements (words or stems)

Question 12

conjunction

Answer 12

function morpheme that serve to either tie elements together grammatically or express obligatory features

Question 13

content morpheme

Answer 13

a root that forms the semantic core of a major class word with 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

process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix, such as un- or -ness

Question 16

determiner

Answer 16

nominal syntactic category distinct both from adjectives and nouns, despite the close affinity among them

Question 17

form

Answer 17

a meaningful unit of speech

Question 18

free morpheme

Answer 18

morphemes that can occur as separate words

Question 19

functional morpheme

Answer 19

also sometimes referred to as functors, are building blocks for language acquisition

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

language in which one form of a morpheme can simultaneously encode several meanings

Question 22

hierarchical structure

Answer 22

combinations of the individual elements of human language organized in a hierarchical manner

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

the change in the form of a word (in English, usually the addition of endings) to mark such distinctions as tense, person, number, gender, mood, voice, and case.

Question 27

input

Answer 27

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

a language’s inventory of lexemes

Question 30

morpheme

Answer 30

the smallest meaningful unit in a language

Question 31

morphology

Answer 31

the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language

Question 32

open lexical category

Answer 32

a open category of syntactics where the new word and the original word belong to the same category. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs belong to this category

Question 33

output

Answer 33

language that is produced, 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

language that is highly synthetic , i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes- these are highly inflected languages

Question 36

prefix

Answer 36

an affix which is placed before the stem of a word

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

Question 38

productive

Answer 38

the degree to which native speakers use a particular grammatical process, especially in word formation

Question 39

pronoun

Answer 39

a word that takes the place of a noun

Question 40

reduplication

Answer 40

a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change.

Question 41

reduplicant

Answer 41

reduplicated segment in a word resulting from a reduplication process

Question 42

root

Answer 42

a word that does not have a prefix in front of the word or a suffix at the end of the word

Question 43

simultaneous affix

Answer 43

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 44

stem

Answer 44

a part of a word used with slightly different meanings and would depend on the morphology of the language in question

Question 45

suffix

Answer 45

an affix which is placed after the stem of a word

Question 46

suppletion

Answer 46

the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate