Intro to Linguistics Unit 3

mental lexicon

all the information about words stored in our brain

grammatical category (syntactic class)

includes information such as a noun, pronoun, verb, adjective

meaning

what the word refers to or represents

orthography

how the word is spelled or written

pronunciation

phonetics

linguistic mandate

God’s human creatures have a linguistic will to make new words

arbitrariness

no natural connection between a word’s sound and meaning

onomatopoeic words

words sound like what they mean

sound/meaning

for most words, sound doesn’t inherently determine meaning; it is socially learned

content words

carry meaning of a sentence

open class

new words can easily be added

closed class

mainly serves grammatical purposes

morphemes

the smallest unit of language that carries meaning

morphology

the study of how words are formed and structured from morphemes

linguistic sign

a combination of form and meaning that represents an idea or object

monomorphemic word

a word made of a single morpheme (ex: book, dog, chair)

discreteness

morphemes are separate, identifiable units that combine to create meaning

free morphemes

can stand alone as words (ex: dog, run, book)

affixes

bound morphemes attached to a base word to modify meaning (ex: -ed, -ness)

prefixes

added to beginning of a word

suffixes

added to end of words

infixes

affixes inserted inside a word, often not in English

circumfixes

made of 2 parts that attach to both the beginning and end of a base word

discontinuous morphemes

a morpheme that appears in separate pieces around a word rather than as one continuous movement

root

core part of a word that carries its main meaning and cannot be broken down further

stem

a root plus any affixes that have been added; the form to which additional affixes can attach (ex: national is the stem for -ize)

base

any form that an affix is added to (ex: nation is the base of national)

bound roots (huckles and ceives)

roots that cannot stand alone as words and only appear with affixes (ex: ceive)

derivational morphemes

bound morphemes (-ify, -cation, -arian) when added to base, a new word with new meaning is created

derived word

the form that results from the addition of a derivational morpheme (ex: happy - unhappy, teach - teacher)

blocked

when a new word enters the lexicon by the application of morphological rules, other complex derivations may be blocked (ex: good is not gooder, it’s better)

inflectional morphemes

a bound morpheme that assigns grammatical properties such as tense, number, possession, comparison (ex: -ed, -s, -er)

productive

all inflectional morphemes: apply freely to nearly every appropriate base (ex: -s is productive (dogs, books, etc) but -en is less so (dogen, booken)

case

grammatical relation of a noun in a sentence (ex: Latin, pronouns)

case morphology

when case is marked by inflectional morphemes (ex: -’s, the dog’s tail")

reduplication

inflecting a word through the repetition of part or all of the word

exceptions

must be stored in the lexicon, irregular but related

suppletions

irregular and must be memorized, don’t fit into regular rules

accidental gaps/lexical gaps

“words” that conform to the rules of word formation but are not truly part of the vocabulary (ex: fun - funness)

back-formations

a new word may enter the language because of an incorrect morphological analysis (ex: editor —> edit)

compounds

two or more words joined to form new, compound words

head

the rightmost word in a compound word/phrase that determines broad meaning and grammatical category

malapropism

confusion of a word through misinterpretation of its morphemes (ex: he is the pineapple of success)

eponyms

word, place, or concept derived from the proper name of a real, fictional, or mythological person (ex: Calvinism)

blends

parts of two or more words are combined to create a new term, merging meaning or sounds (ex: Spanglish)

clipping

creating a new, shorter word by removing one or more syllables from an existing word

acronyms

abbreviation formed by the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word

allomorph

variant of a morpheme (ex: negative prefix meaning “not” can be in, im, il, ir)

minimal pairs

2 words with different meanings that are identical except for one sound segment that occurs in the same place in each word (ex: cab and cad, cat and mat)

morphophonemic rules

the particular phonological rules that determine the phonetic form of the plural morpheme and other morphemes

homorganic nasal rule

the rule that changes the pronunciation of nasal consonants (ex: negative prefix)