Morphology Vocabulary

Question 1

Affix

Answer 1

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

Question 2

Affixation

Answer 2

The process of adding a morpheme to a word to create either a different form of that word or a new word altogether.

Question 3

Agglutinatiing language

Answer 3

An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination (a grammatical process in which words are composed of a sequence of morphemes each of which represents not more than a single grammatical category.)

Question 4

Allomorph

Answer 4

Any of two or more actual representations of a morpheme.

Question 5

Alternation

Answer 5

The occurrence of different allomorphs or allophones.

Question 6

Ambiguity

Answer 6

An idea or situation that can be understood in more than one way. This extends from ambiguous sentences (which could mean one thing or another) up to ambiguous storylines and ambiguous arguments.

Question 7

Analytic language

Answer 7

In linguistic typology, an analytic language is a language that primarily conveys relationships between words in sentences by way of helper words and word order, as opposed to using inflections.

Question 8

Bound morpheme

Answer 8

A bound morpheme is a morpheme that can appear only as part of a larger expression

Question 9

Bound root

Answer 9

A bound root is a root which cannot occur as a separate word apart from any other morpheme.

Question 10

Closed lexical category

Answer 10

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are open lexical categories. In contrast, closed lexical categories rarely acquire new members.

Question 11

Compounding

Answer 11

Compounding, composition or nominal composition is the process of word formation that creates compound lexemes.

Question 12

Conjunction

Answer 12

Conjunctions are linguistic elements that link two or more words, phrases, clauses, or sentences within a larger unit, in such a way that a specific semantic relation is established between them.

Question 13

Content word

Answer 13

Content words, in linguistics, are words that possess semantic content and contribute to the meaning of the sentence in which they occur.

Question 14

Derivation

Answer 14

The process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix, such as un- or -ness.

Question 15

Determiner

Answer 15

A determiner is a word or affix that belongs to a class of noun modifiers that expresses the reference, including quantity, of a noun. Kinds: Article. Demonstrative.

Question 16

Form

Answer 16

Form in linguistics and language refers to the symbols used to represent meaning.

Question 17

Free morpheme

Answer 17

A free morpheme is a morpheme that can stand alone as a word.

Question 18

Function morpheme

Answer 18

Functional morphemes, also sometimes referred to as functors, are building blocks for language acquisition.

Question 19

Function word

Answer 19

A word whose purpose is more to signal grammatical relationship than the lexical meaning of a sentence,

Question 20

Fusional language

Answer 20

A language that forms words by the fusion (rather than the agglutination) of morphemes, so that the constituent elements of a word are not kept distinct.

Question 21

Hierarchical structure

Answer 21

Also called syntactic hierarchy or morpho-syntactic hierarchy. The hierarchy of units (from smallest to largest) is conventionally identified as follows:
Phoneme
Morpheme
Word
Phrase
Clause
Sentence
Text

Question 22

Homophony

Answer 22

Homophony is when a set of words are pronounced identically, but have different meanings

Question 23

Incorporation

Answer 23

Incorporation is 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 24

Infix

Answer 24

An infix is an affix inserted inside a word stem

Question 25

Inflection

Answer 25

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 26

Input

Answer 26

Input refers to the exposure learners have to authentic language in use.

Question 27

Lexical Category

Answer 27

A lexical category is a syntactic category for elements that are part of the lexicon of a language.

Question 28

Lexicon

Answer 28

A lexicon is the knowledge that a native speaker has about a language

Question 29

Morpheme

Answer 29

A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a language

Question 30

Morphology

Answer 30

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

Question 31

Open lexical category

Answer 31

A lexical category is open if the new word and the original word belong to the same category. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are open lexical categories

Question 32

Output

Answer 32

Output means language production which can be either speaking or writing.

Question 33

Partial Reduplication

Answer 33

Reduplication is a widespread linguistic process in which a part or an exact copy of a word is repeated, often for morphological or syntactic reasons (but not always).

Question 34

Polysynthetic language

Answer 34

A polysynthetic language is a language where words are made with lexical morphemes (substantive, verb, adjective, etc) as if parts of sentences were bound together to constitute one word, which can sometimes be very long.

Question 35

Prefix

Answer 35

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

Question 36

Preposition

Answer 36

A word governing, and usually preceding, a noun or pronoun and expressing a relation to another word or element in the clause,

Question 37

Productive

Answer 37

In linguistics, productivity is the degree to which native speakers use a particular grammatical process, especially in word formation.

Question 38

Pronoun

Answer 38

In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated PRO) is a word that substitutes for a noun or noun phrase.

Question 39

Reduplication

Answer 39

Reduplication is a word-formation process in which meaning is expressed by repeating all or part of a word.

Question 40

Reduplicant

Answer 40

Used to refer to the repeated portion of a word in reduplication

Question 41

Root

Answer 41

A morphologically simple unit which can be left bare or to which a prefix or a suffix can attach.

Question 42

Simultaneous affix

Answer 42

An affix articulated at the same time as some other affix or affixes in a word's stem; exists only in visual gestural languages

Question 43

Stem

Answer 43

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

Question 44

Suffix

Answer 44

A suffix (sometimes termed postfix) is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word.

Question 45

Suppletion

Answer 45

Suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate.