Chapter 4 Morphology

Question 1

affix

Answer 1

a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form.

Question 2

affixation

Answer 2

a morphological process whereby a bound morpheme, an affix, is attached to a morphological base, root or stem

Question 3

agglutinating language

Answer 3

a language in which words are made up of a linear sequence of distinct morphemes and each component of meaning is represented by its own morpheme.

Question 4

allomorph

Answer 4

a variant form of a morpheme, that is, when a unit of meaning varies in sound without changing the meaning

Question 5

alternation

Answer 5

a variation in the form and/or sound of a word or word part.

Question 6

ambiguity

Answer 6

a 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 (particles, prepositions, etc.) and word order, as opposed to utilizing inflections (changing the form of a word to convey its role in the sentence)

Question 8

bound morpheme

Answer 8

a grammatical unit that never occurs by itself, but is always attached to some other morpheme. The plural morpheme -s in dogs.

Question 9

bound root

Answer 9

a root that cannot occur as a separate word apart from any other morpheme.

Question 10

closed lexical category

Answer 10

the category of function words—that is, parts of speech (or word classes)—that don’t readily accept new members. English include pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, and prepositions.

Question 11

open lexical category

Answer 11

include nouns, lexical verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.

Question 12

compounding

Answer 12

the process of combining two words (free morphemes) to create a new word (commonly a noun, verb, or adjective)

Question 13

conjunction

Answer 13

a word that: syntactically links words or larger constituents, and. expresses a semantic relationship between them.

Question 14

content morpheme

Answer 14

a root that forms the semantic core of a major class word. They have lexical denotations that are not dependent on the context or on other morphemes.

Question 15

content word

Answer 15

words that have meaning. They can be compared to grammatical words, which are structural. Nouns, main verbs, adjectives and adverbs

Question 16

derivation

Answer 16

the formation of a new word or inflectable stem from another word or stem. It typically occurs by the addition of an affix

Question 17

determiner

Answer 17

a word or affix that belongs to a class of noun modifiers that expresses the reference, including quantity, of a noun.

Question 18

form

Answer 18

a meaningful unit of speech (such as a morpheme, word, or sentence)

Question 19

free morpheme

Answer 19

a morpheme (or word element) that can stand alone as a word. It is also called an unbound morpheme

Question 20

function morpheme

Answer 20

a morpheme which simply modifies the meaning of a word, rather than supplying the root meaning.

Question 21

function word

Answer 21

a word whose purpose is more to signal a grammatical relationship than the lexical meaning of a sentence, e.g., do in do you live here?.

Question 22

fusional language

Answer 22

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

Question 23

hierarchical structure

Answer 23

In grammar, hierarchy refers to any ordering of units or levels on a scale of size, abstraction, or subordination. Adjective: hierarchical. Also called syntactic hierarchy or morpho-syntactic hierarchy.

Question 24

homophony

Answer 24

when a set of words are pronounced identically but have different meanings.

Question 25

incorporation

Answer 25

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 26

infix

Answer 26

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 27

inflection

Answer 27

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 28

input

Answer 28

the exposure learners have to authentic language in use. This can be from various sources, including the teacher, other learners, and the environment around the learners

Question 29

lexical category

Answer 29

A linguistic category of words generally defined by the syntactic or morphological behavior of the lexical item in question, such as noun or verb.

Question 30

lexicon

Answer 30

the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge.

Question 31

morpheme

Answer 31

a meaningful morphological unit of a language that cannot be further divided (e.g. in, come, -ing, forming incoming ).

Question 32

morphology

Answer 32

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

Question 33

output

Answer 33

the language a person produces, either in speaking or writing

Question 34

partial reduplication

Answer 34

occurs only with bases(root words) which begin with a consonant. It involves placing before the base a syllable consisting of the first consonant of the base followed by ‘e’.

Question 35

polysynthetic language

Answer 35

highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able to stand alone).

Question 36

prefix

Answer 36

an affix that is placed before the stem of a word. Adding it to the beginning of one word changes it into another word.

Question 37

preposition

Answer 37

a word that indicates the relationship between a noun and the other words of a sentence.

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 substitutes for a noun or noun phrase.

Question 40

reduplicant

Answer 40

The reduplicated segment in a word resulting from a reduplication process.

Question 41

reduplication

Answer 41

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 42

root

Answer 42

either a base word or a part of a word to which affixes are added or it is the part left after affixes have been taken away. Technically, it is the smallest unit that carries meaning: it cannot be reduced into smaller units.

Question 43

simultaneous affix

Answer 43

An affix 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

the root or roots of a word, together with any derivational affixes, to which inflectional affixes are added

Question 45

suffix

Answer 45

an affix that is placed after the stem of a word.

Question 46

suppletion

Answer 46

the replacement of one stem with another, resulting in an allomorph of a morpheme which has no phonological similarity to the other allomorphs.