Intro to Linguistics (Morphology and Syntax)

Lexicon

a mental dictionary of words in a language

Morphology

analysis of word structure

Morpheme

the smallest meaningful unit in a language

Root

in a complex word, it is the “last morpheme left standing” after all affixes are removed

Stem

the base to which a morphological process is applied (i.e, stem + affix)

Free morpheme

can make a word on their own

Bound morphemes

cannot make a word on their own

Inflectional affixes

-add grammatical information to the word

*tense, aspect, number agreement (verbs: walk-ed, walk-ing, walk-s)

*plural (nouns: cat-s)

*comparative, superlative (adjectives: small-er, small-est)

Derivational affixes

-are added to an existing word to create another word

*The new word either has a new meaning and/or has a different part-of-speech

Lexical categories

(aka part-of-speech): Noun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb, Pronoun, Determiner

Open lexical categories

*New words can be added

*Carry semantic content: content words

*Noun, verb, adjective, adverb

Closed lexical categories

*Rarely acquire new items

*Mostly carry grammatical functions: function words

*Pronoun, determiner, preposition, conjunction

Affixation

morphological process that adds an affix to the stem

Prefixes

before the stem

Suffixes

after the stem

Infixes

within the stem

Compounding

formation of new words by combining two or more independent words (== free morphemes)

Reduplication

a morphological process by which the root or stem of a word is repeated

*Total reduplication: doubling of entire free morpheme

*Partial reduplication: part of free morpheme is doubled

Alterations (weak suppletion)

morphemes can undergo internal modifications

(Strong) Suppletion

when the root is replaced by another, phonologically unrelated root

Allomorphs

a single morpheme (with a single meaning) realized in multiple phonetic forms

Syntax

is the study of the principles and rules for combining words into sentences

Word order

the arrangement of words in a sentence, which can significantly affect meaning and grammatical structure acroos different languages

Co-occurrence

the frequency with which two or more words or phrases appear together in a given context

Agreement

certain words need to have a particular property (usually morphologically marked) in order to syntactically combine with another word

*Number agreement

*Person agreement

*Gender agreement

Intransitive verb

not taking on a direct object

Transitive verb

a verb that requires a direct object to complete its meaning, indicating who or what receives the action of the verb

Ditransitive verb

a type of verb that requires both a direct object and an indirect object to complete its meaning

Adjunct

a word phrase, or clause that can be removed from a sentence without making it grammatically incorrect, though some details may be lost (optional)

Arguments

an expression that helps complete the meaning of a predicate, which refers to the main verb and its auxiliaries (required)

Constituents

are groups of linguistics expressions (word/phrases) that form a syntactic unit

*Not all groups of expressions are constituents!!

Phrase structure

Sentences are not flat. They have an internal hierarchical structure.

Sentential complement verb

To a verb that requires a clause as its complement

Syntactic categories

defined by distribution (does not equal lexical categories)

Lexicon

assigns lexical expressions (words) to syntactic categories

Rules

model how to combine expression

Phase structure rules

specify how to construct categories out of other categories

Building a Phrase Structure Tree

1. Use a bottom-up approach

2. First, assign each word to its syntactic category

3. Then combine using phrase structure rules

Determiner

a word that appears before a noun to provide context about the noun’s reference, quantity, or possession