linguistics phemes

morpheme

a combination of sounds that have a meaning. A morpheme does not necessarily have to be a word. Example: the word cats has two morphemes. Cat is a morpheme, and s is a morpheme. Every morpheme is either a base or an affix

affix

a morpheme that comes at the beginning (prefix) or the ending (suffix) of a base morpheme. Note: An affix usually is a morpheme that cannot stand alone. Examples: -ful, -ly, -ity, -ness. A few exceptions are able, like, and less.

base

a morpheme that gives a word its meaning. The base morpheme cat gives the word cats its meaning: a particular type of animal.

prefix

an affix that comes before a base morpheme. The in in the word inspect is a prefix.

suffix

an affix that comes after a base morpheme. The s in cats is a suffix.

free morpheme

a morpheme that can stand alone as a word without another morpheme. It does not need anything attached to it to make a word. Cat is a free morpheme.

bound morpheme

a sound or a combination of sounds that cannot stand alone as a word. The s in cats is a bound morpheme, and it does not have any meaning without the free morpheme cat.

inflectional morpheme

this morpheme can only be a suffix. The s in cats is an inflectional morpheme. An inflectional morpheme creates a change in the function of the word. Example: the d in invited indicates past tense. English has only seven inflectional morphemes: -s (plural) and -s (possessive) are noun inflections; -s ( 3rd-person singular), -ed ( past tense), -en (past participle), and -ing ( present participle) are verb inflections; -er (comparative) and -est (superlative) are adjective and adverb inflections

derivational morpheme

this type of morpheme changes the meaning of the word or the part of speech or both. Derivational morphemes often create new words. Example: the prefix and derivational morpheme un added to invited changes the meaning of the word.

allomorphs

different phonetic forms or variations of a morpheme. Example: The final morphemes in the following words are pronounced differently, but they all indicate plurality: dogs, cats, and horses.

homonyms

morphemes that are spelled the same but have different meanings. Examples: bear (an animal) and bear (to carry), plain (simple) and plain ( a level area of land).

lexical categories

which are also sometimes called parts of speech. Lexical categories are classes of words that differ in how other words can be constructed out of them.Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are also called open lexical categories because new words added to the language usually belong to these categories. In contrast, closed lexical categories rarely acquire new members. Closed lexical categories include pronouns (e.g. we, she, they), determiners (e.g. a, the, this, your), prepositions (e.g. on, of, under, for), and conjunctions

infliction

Inflection uses the same sorts of pieces, such

as stems and affixes, that derivation does, but the important difference is the linguistic

entity that inflection creates-forms of words, rather than entirely new words

compounding

forms new words, not through affixes but through independent words

Blackbird, girlfriend

reduplication

forming new words by doubling either an entire free morpheme or part of it very few cases,

Like-like

green-green

alternations

sounds in a particular word pair or larger word set, these alternaions mark morphological distinctions

man to men

foot to feet

ring rang rung

suppletion

a root will have one or more inflected forms phonetically

is to was ex; good to better to best

analytic languages

made up of a sequence of free morphemes each word has one

isolating - purely analytic languages, do not use affixes to compose words

Mandarin Chinese highly analytic structure

-s

-ed

-ing

In synthetic languages

Hungarian- ound morphemes are attached to other morphemes, so a word may be made up of several meaningful elements. The bound morphemes may add another element of meaning to the stem (derivation) or indicate the grammatical function of the stem in a sentence (inflection) -sees

agglutinating languages

a language that allows a great number of morphemes per word and has highly regular rules for combining morphemes.

Fusional languages

Languages in which words are formed by adding morphemes to stems, just as in agglutinating languages, but in these languages, the affixes may not be easy to seperate from the stem (e.g. Spanish - [hablo] I am speaking, [habla] S/he is speaking, [hable] I spoke, (and there is no free morpheme "habl"; such a form never appears in isolation in Spanish))