Morphology I: Words and Morphemes

Flashcards covering key terminology and concepts in morphology.

Morphology

The study of the form and structure of words and morphemes in a language.

Morpheme

The smallest meaningful unit of language, which can be free (standalone) or bound (attached to a root).

Lexical item

A single entry in the mental lexicon, representing a distinct word or phrase.

Lexeme

A basic unit of meaning or a 'word' in the abstract sense, encompassing all forms of a word.

Allomorph

Different phonological variants of a single morpheme.

Affix

A morpheme that is attached to a root word to modify its meaning or grammatical function.

Root

The base part of a word to which affixes can be added; it carries the primary meaning.

Compound

A word that is made up of two or more independent words combined to create a new meaning.

Clitic

A morpheme that behaves like a syntactic word but is phonologically dependent on another word.

Free morpheme

A morpheme that can stand alone as a word.

Bound morpheme

A morpheme that cannot stand alone and must attach to a root or another morpheme.

Zero derivation

A process by which a word changes its grammatical category without any change in form.

Complex word

A word that consists of more than one morpheme.

Syntactic word

The smallest unit in a sentence that can stand independently when combined with other units.

Phonological word

A unit of pronunciation that contains at least one vowel and typically one stressed syllable.

Inflectional morpheme

A bound morpheme that modifies a word to express grammatical features such as tense, mood, number, and case.

Derivational morpheme

An affix that is added to a root word to create a new word with a new meaning.

Ablaut

A process of vowel change in the root of a word, used in the formation of inflected forms.

Umlaut

A type of vowel change occurring in certain phonological environments, often used in plural formation.

Suppletion

The phenomenon where an irregular morphological form is used instead of a regular inflection.

Template morphology

A morphological structure where vowels are inserted into consonant roots to form words, prevalent in Semitic languages.

Analytic language

A language characterized by a low ratio of morphemes per word, often relying on word order.

Synthetic language

A language that has a high ratio of morphemes per word, often using affixation for grammatical relationships.

Cliticization

The process through which clitics attach to host words, influencing their phonological structure.

Phrase

A group of words that function as a single unit within a sentence.