Morphology

Question 1

What is morphology?

Answer 1

The study of the internal structure of complex words of this type is known, in linguistics, as morphology.

Question 2

What is a morpheme?

Answer 2

A string of one or more phonemes which conveys a particular meaning is known as a morpheme. Morphemes are the smallest units which carry meaning.

Question 3

What is a free morpheme?

Answer 3

Morphemes that can stand alone to function as words are called free morphemes. They comprise simple words (i.e. words made up of one free morpheme) and compound words (i.e. words made up of two free morphemes).
Examples:
Simple words: the, run, on, well
Compound words: keyboard, greenhouse, bloodshed, smartphone

Question 4

What is a bound morpheme?

Answer 4

Morphemes that can only be attached to another part of a word (cannot stand alone) are called bound morphemes.
Examples:
pre-, dis-, in-, un-, -ful, -able, -ment, -ly, -ise
pretest, discontent, intolerable, receive

Question 5

What are phonemes?

Answer 5

Any of the perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another, for example p, b, d, and t in the English words pad, pat, bad, and bat. Phonemes, on the other hand, are the smallest units which signal a difference in meaning but are not meaningful in and of themselves (they are just sounds).

Question 6

What are affix, infix, prefix, and suffixes?

Answer 6

An additional element placed at the beginning or end of a root, stem, or word, or in the body of a word, to modify its meaning. See also infix, prefix, suffix.

Question 7

What are Allomorphs?

Answer 7

any of the versions of a morpheme, such as the plural endings |s| (as in bats) |, z| (as in bugs), and |iz| (as in buses) for the plural morpheme.

Question 8

What are allophones?

Answer 8

any of the speech sounds that represent a single phoneme, such as the aspirated k in kit and the unaspirated k in skit, which are allophones of the phoneme k.

Question 9

What are productive and unproductive morphemes?

Answer 9

A productive morpheme can be freely used with ‘new’ lexical items, such as the word ‘slorg’ which we invented in the previous section. We can contrast this with an unproductive morpheme such as the suffix in ‘warmth’, which clearly consists of ‘warm,’ meaning something like ‘warm,’ and /-θ/, meaning ‘the property designated by the adjective to which I am suffixed.’ Thus ‘warmth’ means ‘the property designated by the adjective ‘warm’.’

Question 10

What is lexical ambiguity?

Answer 10

Lexical ambiguity is the presence of two or more possible meanings within a single word. Also called semantic ambiguity or homonymy. Compare to syntactic ambiguity.

Question 11

What is structural ambiguity?

Answer 11

In English grammar, syntactic ambiguity is the presence of two or more possible meanings within a single sentence or sequence of words. Also called structural ambiguity or grammatical ambiguity. Compare with lexical ambiguity (the presence of two or more possible meanings within a single word).

The intended meaning of a syntactically ambiguous sentence can often (but not always) be determined by context.