Morphology Flashcards
(17 cards)
Backformation
A word is formed from another word by taking off what looks like an affix in that language.
Ex: liason -> liase
Borrowing
A word taken from another language.
Ex: Croissant
Clipping
Shortening a word but keeping the same meaning.
Ex: advertisement -> ad
Blending
Combining smaller parts of two words to form a new word.
Ex: Motor + hotel -> motel
Acronym
Words formed from the initials of many words.
Ex: Corona Virus Disease 2019 -> COVID19
Compounding
Two or more words combined to form a new word.
Ex: wind + mill -> windmill
Affixation
Adding an affix to change the meaning of the word.
Ex: reliable -> unreliable
reliable -> reliability
Coinage
A completely new word is made up from scratch. Often made by companies for their products. Neologisms.
Ex: kleenex
Word formation processes in English
Backformation Borrowing Clipping Blending Acronym Compounding Affixation Coinage
Morphology
The study of the morpheme, and the study of how words are formed in a given language.
Morpheme
The smallest unit of meaning or grammatical function in a language.
Free morpheme
A morpheme which can stand alone.
Ex: dog
Bound morpheme
A morpheme that requires the presence of another morpheme to make up a word. They cannot occur independently.
Derivational morpheme
Bound morphemes which change the syntactical category or meaning of a word.
Ex: molest (verb) + -er -> molester (noun)
Inflectional morpheme
A bound morpheme which is a grammatical marker and indicates grammatical information of the word.
plural possesuve compartivie superlative conjugatins
Lexical morpheme
A free morpheme which has content and meaning.
Functional morpheme
Free morphemes which do not have meaning on their own and have a functional role between words. Prepositions, conjuctions, pronouns.
