Week 7: Morphology and Syntax Flashcards
What is morphology?
The field of linguistics that examines the internal structure of words and the rules that govern processes of word formation
What are the two types of free morpheme?
- lexical/content
- functional
What are content words? What do they include?
- Words that denote concepts such as objects, actions, attributes and ideas
- Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs
Why are content words open class?
Words can be added regularly to this class (hence open)
What are function words? What do they include?
- Words that have no clear lexical meaning, or do not associate to an obvious concept
- conjunctions, prepositions, articles, pronouns and auxiliary verbs
Why are function words closed class?
We almost never add words to this class
What is neologism? What else is it known as?
The creation and acceptance of a new word in the language (also known as coinages)
What is borrowing?
The taking of words from other languages
What is a calque?
- A direct translation of the elements of a word
- Superman comes from german Übermensch (literally superman)
What is compounding?
The combination of two words of a grammatical category (e.g two nouns or two adjectives) to make a new word (e.g wallpaper, good-looking)
What is blending?
- A combination of two words where part of each has been deleted and then they’ve been combined to make a new word (e.g smog, brunch)
What is clipping?
Reducing a word to one syllable (ad = advertisement, fan = fanatic, pub = public house)
What is hypocorism?
- When a word is changed to become more familiar by added an e sounding ending (telly, bickie, hankie)
What is backformation?
When a verb is created from a noun (donation - donate, liaison - liaise, option - opt)
What is conversion?
When a noun or adjective is also used as a verb and vice versa (to bottle, to chair, a printout, a takeover, to dirty, to empty)
What is the most common word-formation process in English? How does it work?
- Derivation
- Makes use of affixes and combines them to other (fully-fledged) words (e.g mis-understanding)
Affixes that are combined at the beginning of a word are called what?
Prefixes (e.g un-, mis-. pre-)
Affixes that are combined at the end of a word are called what?
Suffixes (e.g -ful, -less, -ish, -ism, -ness, ly)
Some languages also have affixes called infixes. What are these?
- An affix that is placed inside the word
What is a circumfix?
- An affix that has two parts (a prefix and a suffix) that appear at the beginning and at the end of the word
What is a morpheme?
The minimal linguistic sign that is the smallest component of a word which has some meaning and which contributes to the meaning of the word
(the smallest functioning unit in the composition of words)
Word with two morphemes or more are called what?
- Polymorphemic words
What is a lexeme?
- An abstract notion or meaning of a word (what you have in your mind when a word is mentioned) - cat and dog are different lexemes but cat and cats are the same lexeme
What are the two characteristics of a morpheme?
- A morpheme must be identifiable from one word to another in a consistent pattern AND
- A morpheme must also contribute in some way to the meaning of the word
What is a free morpheme?
- A morpheme that can stand as a word on its own
What is a bound morpheme?
- A morpheme that needs to be joined to another morpheme
What are the two types of bound morphemes?
- Derivational morphemes
- Inflectional morphemes
What are derivational morphemes?
- affixes that create new words or are used to change the grammatical category of a word
What are inflectional morphemes?
- Used to indicate aspects of the grammatical function of a word (e.g plural or singular, past tense, progressive or perfect aspect, comparative and possessive form)
What do morphologically complex words consist of?
- A morpheme (the root) and one or more affixes
Does a root stand alone?
Yes and no (can be either free or bound) PAINT-er vs re-CEIVE
What is formed when a root morpheme is combined with an affix?
- A stem (also base)
What are the two ways to represent morphemes?
- By dividing it up with hyphens or plus signs
- By using a tree diagram
