Introduction to Linguistics Practice Flashcards

A collection of vocabulary flashcards covering the fundamental concepts of Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics as presented in the lecture notes, including key theories, researchers, and linguistic processes.

Morphology

The branch of linguistics that studies the internal structure of words, how they are built, and their smallest meaningful units.

Morpheme

The smallest unit of language that carries meaning or grammatical function; described as the 'atom of meaning'.

Free morpheme

A morpheme that can stand alone as an independent word, such as 'book', 'run', or 'happy'.

Bound morpheme

A morpheme that must attach to another form to function, such as '-ness', 'un-', '-ed', or '-ing'.

Infix

A bound morpheme inserted inside the root of a word, exemplified by the Filipino word 'sumulat' (wrote).

Circumfix

A bound morpheme placed around a root, such as the German example 'ge-lob-t' (praised).

Suprafix

A morphological process involving a change in tone or stress, such as distinguishing the noun 'ˈrecord' from the verb 'reˈcord'.

Compounding

The morphological process of joining two free morphemes together, such as 'black+board' or 'sun+flower'.

Conversion (zero-derivation)

Changing the word class of a term without adding an affix, such as turning the noun 'Google' into the verb 'to Google'.

Suppletion

A morphological challenge where the same morpheme takes radically different phonological forms, such as 'go' and 'went'.

Portmanteau morpheme

One phonological form that carries two or more meanings, such as the French 'du' representing 'de + le'.

Cranberry morphemes

Unique, non-recurring morphemes that occur in only one word and are opaque to analysis, such as 'cran-' in 'cranberry'.

Derivational morphemes

Morphemes that create new words or meanings and often change the word class, such as '-ness' or '-tion'.

Inflectional morphemes

Morphemes that mark grammatical categories (like tense or number) without changing the word class, such as '-s' or '-ed'.

Affix Ordering Principle

The rule that inflectional affixes always appear outside (further from the root than) derivational affixes.

Allomorph

One of several phonological variants of the same morpheme, such as the English plural sounds $/-s/$, $/-z/$, and $/-ɪz/$.

Syntax

The branch of linguistics that studies how words combine into larger units like phrases, clauses, and sentences.

Constituency

The insight that sentences are built from nested units called constituents rather than just flat sequences of words.

Phrase marker

The formal representation of a sentence's hierarchical structure, expressed as labeled bracketing or a tree diagram.

Immediate Constituent Analysis (ICA)

The method of breaking a sentence down into its immediate parts step by step until individual morphemes are reached.

Phrase Structure Rules (PSRs)

A finite set of rewrite rules, such as $S \rightarrow NP\,VP$, that generate grammatical sentences.

Binary Branching

The claim in modern generative syntax that every mother node in a tree diagram has exactly two daughters.

Structural Ambiguity

A phenomenon where a single string of words can be assigned two different phrase markers, resulting in two different meanings.

Morphosyntax

The interface domain where morphological structure and syntactic structure mutually constrain each other, such as in agreement or case.

Semantics

The branch of linguistics that studies stable, conventional meanings encoded in words, sentences, and utterances.

Referential Theory

The perspective that the meaning of a word is the actual thing or set of things it refers to in the world (its referent).

Ideational Theory

The perspective that meaning is the mental concept or idea evoked in the mind of the speaker or hearer.

Behaviorist Theory

The perspective associated with Bloomfield and Wittgenstein that meaning is grounded in the observable use of a word and behavioral responses.

Syntagmatic relations

The horizontal axis of language describing relationships between linguistic units that appear alongside each other in a linear sequence.

Paradigmatic relations

The vertical axis of language describing relationships between a unit and others that could substitute for it in the same position.

Semantic Roles (Thematic Roles)

Abstract conceptual functions that noun phrases play in events, such as Agent, Patient, Experiencer, or Instrument.

Agent

The semantic role of the volitional initiator of an action, such as 'Maria' in 'Maria broke the vase'.

Patient / Theme

The semantic role of the entity affected by or undergoing an action, such as 'the vase' in 'Maria broke the vase'.

Hyponymy

A sense relation of inclusion where one word is a 'kind of' another, such as 'rose' being a hyponym of 'flower'.

Meronymy

A sense relation of part-to-whole inclusion, such as 'finger' being a meronym of 'hand'.

Polysemy

A situation where a single word form has multiple related meanings, such as 'bank' referring to a riverbank or a financial institution.

Homonymy

A situation where one word form has multiple historically unrelated meanings, such as 'bat' (the animal) versus 'bat' (sports equipment).