Ling20 Ch.4 Morphology

Morphology

The study of how words are structured, created, and the underlying principles for which they’re structured

Morpheme

The smallest meaningful part of a word

Allomorph

Two or more representations of a morpheme; a phonetic variant of a morpheme (i.e English plural suffix includes /s/, /z/, /əz/)

Derivational

Morphological process that creates new lexemes; can change word class of a word but not always (i.e. Govern/government)

Inflectional

morphological processes that do not create new lexemes, but add grammatical meanings (i.e. tense, number, case); does not change word class

Affixation

the linguistic process of adding a morpheme to a root word to create a new word/modify its meaning/change its grammatical function

Reduplication

the morphological process in which all or part of a morpheme is repeated to signal a certain meaning

Compound

words that have more than one root (i.e. football, breakthrough)

Function shift/conversion

a word formation process in which an existing word is used as a different part of speech without any change to its form (i.e. comb → combed)

Semantic shift

the change of a word’s meaning over time

Blending

the linguistic process in which two or more words merge to form a new, singular word (i.e. smoke + fog = smog)

Clipping

the process of shortening a word by removing a part of it, while keeping the meaning the same (i.e. examination → exam, science fiction → sci-fi)

Acronym

formed as a type of word formation; new words are created from the initials or syllables of a phrase and then pronounced as a single word (i.e. NASA, laser)

Back formation

a word formation process based on analogy; the structural interpretation of one word is applied to a different word; frequently involves applying/removing a morpheme to a word that did not originally have one (editor → edit, donation → donate)

Invention

the use of morphological analysis to generate new, novel ideas or words

Proper names

a word or phrase that designates a unique entity, person, place, or institution

Morpheme-internal change

the linguistic process in which a word’s internal vowel/consonant sounds are altered to show a grammatical distinction (i.e. foot → feet, sing → sang → sung)

Suppletion

a morphological process in which different, unrelated forms are used for different grammatical forms of the same word 

Borrowing

the word process formation in which morphemes and patterns are transferred from one language to another through language contact

Compositionality

the idea that the meaning of a complex expression should be a regular function of the meaning of its parts; the way the meanings of individual words combine to form the meaning of larger expressions through phrases/sentences

Free morpheme

morphemes that can stand alone as words (i.e. believe, weight, thought)

Bound morpheme

morphemes that can never occur on their own (i.e. un-, -s)

Affix

morphemes that attach to roots to modify their meanings

Prefix

a type of affix that appears before the root

Infix

a type of affix that appears inside a root (but within a single morpheme)

Suffix

a type of affix that appears after the root

Circumfix

a type of affix that wraps around the root (before and after)

Lexeme

the basic lexical unit of a language; the word we’ll find in a dictionary (i.e. play instead of plays, played, or playing)

Lexicalization

the process by which new words/phrases/expressions are recognized and established into the vocabulary of the language (mental lexicon) if used enough

Isolating/analytic structure

a morphological structure in which each word has very few or one morpheme

Polysynthetic structure

a morphological structure where words tend to be made of many morphemes put together

Agglutinating

a morphological structure in which the boundaries between morphemes are sharp and clear-cut (i.e. Japanese, Korean)

Fusional

a morphological structure in which the boundaries between morphemes are not so clear (i.e. Spanish, French, Russian)

word formation processes

function shift/conversion, semantic shift, blending, clipping, acronyms, back formation, borrowing, invention, affixation

suppletive

highly irregular allomorphic variation where two or more morphological forms of a single root are phonemically unrelated (i.e. go → went, am → is → was → were → be, I → me)