Morphology Flashcards
What is a lexical morpheme?
A morpheme that is contentful.
What is a free morpheme?
A morpheme that can stand on its own.
What is a bound morpheme?
A morpheme that must be affixed to another to make sense.
What are open class content words?
Words that can be looked up in a dictionary and have new words added to them.
What are closed class function words?
Words like conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns, as new ones haven’t been added to the English language recently.
What is a morpheme?
The smallest meaningful unit of a word.
What is a derivational morpheme?
A morpheme which changes the meaning of a word or its word class.
What is an inflectional morpheme?
A word that adds grammatical info - like plurality or past tense - without changing the meaning or word class.
What is English’s word order?
SVO. Subject, verb, object.
Name 5 syntactic categories.
Determiner, adjective, adverb, noun, verb.
What are the 8 inflectional morphemes in the English language?
Plural ‘s’
Possessive ‘s’ – the boy’s book
Present tense – ‘s’ I walk, you walk, he/she/it walks.
Progressive ‘ing’ – I was walking.
Past tense ‘ed’ – I walked.
Past participle – I have eaten.
Comparative ‘-er’ – Big and bigger.
Superlative ‘-est’ – Big, bigger, biggest.
What is the root of a word?
A morphologically simple unit that can be left blank or with which a prefix or suffix can be attached (affix).
What is an affix?
An addition to the base or stem form of a word to change its meaning or create a new word.
Are lovelier and singer the same morpheme?
No, as the meaning of a morpheme must remain constant. Loveli-er means ‘more’, sing-er means ‘one who does.’
Where is grammar?
In the mind.
