Ch 4 Vocab Flashcards
(47 cards)
Morphology
The study of how words are constructed from morphemes
Lexicon
A mental repository of information about a given language
Form
The structure or shape of any linguistic item
Lexical Category
Any class of words grouped together based on morphological properties
Open Lexical Category
A lexical category to which new members are often introduced
Closed Lexical Category
A lexical category to which new members are rarely introduced
Determiner
A lexical category that consists of words such as “a, the, this, your” etc.
Conjunction
A lexical category that consists of words such as “and, or, but” etc.
Preposition
A lexical category that consists of words such as “on, under, behind” etc.
Root
The base of a word, to which other affixes can attach
Derivation
A morphological process that changes a word’s lexical category or its meaning in some predictable way
Affix
A bound morpheme that attaches to a stem
Stem
The base, consisting of one or more morphemes, to which the affix is added
Inflection
A morphological process whereby the form of a word is modified to indicate some grammatically relevant information, such as number, tense, gender, etc
Morpheme
The smallest linguistic unit with a meaning or grammatical function
Suffix
An affix that follows a stem
Prefix
An affix that precedes a stem
Homophone
An affix that sounds alike but that can have different meanings or functions
Free Morpheme
A morpheme that can be used as a linguistic unit on its own
Bound Morpheme
A morpheme that must be attached to another morpheme to have meaning
Bound Root
A morpheme that has some meaning on its own but cannot stand alone as a word
Productive
A morpheme or rule that can be used to produce novel grammatical forms
Content Morpheme
Morpheme that carries semantic content
Function Morpheme
Morpheme that provides information about grammatical relationships between the words in a sentence