Linguistics: Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the key terms, categories, and frameworks across Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics.

Morphology

The study of words, their internal structure, their meaning, and the rules governing how they appear in context.

Inflectional morphology

A process where a word changes form to fit its grammatical context while remaining the same part of speech (e.g., dog to dogs, walk to walked).

Concatenative inflection

A morphological process that forms words by adding affixes to a base (e.g., cat + -s, walk + -ed).

Ablaut

A non-concatenative inflectional process that marks grammatical distinctions through a vowel change in the root (e.g., man/men, sing/sang, eat/ate).

Suppletion

A non-concatenative inflectional process where a whole root is replaced by an entirely different phonological form (e.g., good/better/best, am/was/is).

Derivational morphology

A morphological process that builds a new word or "new dictionary entry" by altering the meaning and/or the part of speech of a root (e.g., popular to popularize).

Morpheme

The smallest piece of a word that carries some meaning or grammatical function.

Free morpheme

A morpheme that can stand alone as an independent word (e.g., car, tall, I).

Bound morpheme

A morpheme that cannot stand alone as an independent word and must attach to another morpheme (e.g., -ing, un-, -s, -ed, re-).

Content words

Open-class words—including nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs—that carry substantive meaning, are relatively easy to paraphrase, and constantly add new members.

Function words

Closed-class words—including pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, prepositions, and modal auxiliaries—that signal grammatical relationships, are very hard to paraphrase, and rarely admit new members.

Zipf's Frequency Law

A principle stating that word frequencies follow a power-law distribution, where a small number of words are extremely frequent while a vast majority are rare.

Zipf's Brevity Law

The linguistic observation that more frequent words tend to be shorter in length to optimize communication efficiency.

Isolating language

A morphological language type characterized by having about one morpheme per word and very little inflection (e.g., Yoruba).

Agglutinating language

A language type where multiple morphemes are stacked linearly onto a root, with each morpheme expressing one distinct grammatical meaning (e.g., Turkish).

Polysynthetic language

A language type featuring highly complex, long words in which an entire sentence can be expressed within a single word (e.g., Yupik).

Fusional (synthetic) language

A language type where a single affix fuses several grammatical meanings together (e.g., French était marking 3rd person, singular, and imperfective).

Reduplication

A morphological process of repeating a root or part of a root to alter meaning, such as indicating plurality, intensity, or repetition.

Syntax

The study of the rules governing which word combinations are grammatical versus ungrammatical, allowing a finite vocabulary to express an infinite number of sentences.

Constituent

A structural chunk or group of words that functions as a coherent unit within a hierarchical syntactic tree.

Phrase structure grammar

A generative framework introduced by Noam Chomsky that models hierarchical sentence structures, word order, and grammaticality via phrase-level expansion rules.

Dependency grammar

A syntactic framework based on Lucien Tesnière that analyzes sentences via binary, asymmetric, typed relations between words (head to dependent) rather than phrasal nodes.

Semantics

The study of linguistic meaning and inferences derived from morphemes, words, and sentences.

Truth conditions

The specific state of affairs that must hold in the world for a sentence to be considered true.

Entailment

A semantic relation where the truth of one proposition strictly guarantees the truth of another (e.g., "Alice has a cat" guarantees "Alice has a pet").

Homonyms

Words that share the same sound or spelling but have completely unrelated, accidental meanings (e.g., river bank vs. financial bank).

Polysemy

A linguistic phenomenon where a single word form expresses multiple distinct, related, and systematic meanings (e.g., head of the body vs. head of the school).

Relational noun

A noun that inherently requires an associated argument or "relatum" to fully specify its meaning (e.g., sister).

Sortal noun

An autonomous noun that classifies entities directly without requiring an inherent relatum (e.g., sheep).

Mass noun

A noun denoting an undifferentiated substance or collection that does not typically pluralize, cannot be counted directly, and takes the quantifier "much" (e.g., water, furniture).

Count noun

A noun denoting individual entities that can be directly counted and pluralized, taking the quantifier "many" (e.g., books).

Telic verb

A verb or predicate indicating an event that possesses an inherent, natural endpoint, verified by the "in [time]" test (e.g., ate the pizza in ten minutes).

Atelic verb

A verb or predicate denoting an activity or state without an inherent endpoint, verified by the "for [time]" test (e.g., ate pizza for ten minutes).

Intersective adjective

An adjective whose meaning forms an intersection of two independent sets, such that both properties hold separately (e.g., Swedish musician).

Subsective adjective

An adjective that identifies a subset relative to the noun category, where the adjective must be evaluated against the standard of that noun (e.g., skillful musician).

Privative adjective

An adjective that negates set membership, moving the referent outside the denotation of the noun (e.g., former musician).

Deixis

The use of linguistic expressions whose meaning depends entirely on the context of the utterance, such as the speaker, time, or location (e.g., I, here, now).

Conceptual metaphor

A cognitive structuring mechanism where an abstract conceptual domain is understood and experienced in terms of a more concrete domain (e.g., TIME IS MONEY, ARGUMENTS ARE WAR).

Pragmatics

Inferences drawn from utterances of sentences by people in context

Speech acts

some utterances are not true or false, but rather make themselves true by being uttered by the right person in the right context

Presupposition

information that is assumed to be already part of the Common Ground

Grice's Maxims

communication is quite efficient, we draw inferences above and beyond what we say

Maxims

Quality, Quantity, Manner, Relevance

Adjacency pairs

scripted responses to prior discourse moves