ALIN 220 exam #1 morphology

What is a morpheme?

the smallest units of meaning (or function) that cannot be broken down further and remain meaningful (or functional);

ex: looked; look-ed with look being meaningful and -ed being functional

Derivational morpheme

an affix that either clearly changes the meaning of the root OR changes it’s lexical category

Inflectional morpheme

an affix that adds a gramatical function that is required for a sentence to make sense

ALL of them in English:
pluralizing suffix - dog-s
possessive suffix - Mary-'s
3rd person singular present tense - love-s
past tense suffix - love-d
past participle - eat-en or walk-ed
progressive participle - eat-ing
comparative - bigg-er
superlative - bigg-est

Acronym

a morphological process; words that are formed by the first letters of a string of words and are pronounced as a word would

ex: NASA (from National Aeronautics and Space Administration), scuba (from Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus)

Alphabetic initialism

a morphological process; words that are formed by the first letters of a string of words in which each letter is pronounced

ex: ER (from Emergency Room), CD (from Compact Disk)

Back formation

a morphological process; forming of new words by removing a part of a word that is homophonous with an affix, but isn’t actually part of the word

ex: burgle (from burglar), donate (from donation)

Blending

a morphological process; a word that is formed by taking shortened portions of two words and putting them together

ex: brunch (from breakfast and lunch), Spanglish (from Spanish and English)

Clipping

a morphological process; deleting a section of a word to form a shorter word

ex: phone (from telephone), bro (from brother), ad (from advertisement), photo op (from photographic opportunity)

Compounding

a morphological process; a word made up of two or more full roots; not necessisarily hyphenated; to test if its a true compund, use the stress test (leftmost word takes the stress) or affixiation

ex: White House vs white house, highchair can’t be higherchair

Trade names

a morphological process; words that are formed based on a brand’s name

ex: q-tip (referring to any cotton swap), google (referring to any search engine)