morphology

what are lexical words/ content words (open sets)

• Nouns

• Adjectives

• Main verbs

• Adverbs 

• More are added all the time particularly with a constant flow of technology 

• Reference a thing or and action

what are Grammatical/ function words (closed sets)

• Pronouns

• Prepositions

• Conjunctions

• Articles

• Auxiliary verbs

• We never add to these sets 

• Hold it all together and express relations (grammatical) between words 

what is a morpheme

The minimal units of meaning 

what are the 2 types of morphemes

Free morphemes can stand alone as words (lexical and grammatical)

Bound morphemes must be fixed to other morphemes to form words (inflectional and derivational)

what are inflectional and derivational bound morphemes

inflectional:

• added to words to change the form or usage of the word

• (grammatical function)

• only suffixes

• eg. -s, -es, -ed, -ing, -er, -est,

• house → houses, shout → shouted

derivational:

• added to words to form new words with new meaning

• can be prefixes or suffixes,

• eg. -ness, re-, -ly, -pre, -less, un-,

• correct → incorrect, friend → friendly

what are neologisms

Newly coined terms or expressions

• eponyms (coined from proper nouns – e.g. ‘hoover’ for ‘vacuum’)

• compounds (the joining of 2 or more words – e.g. ‘download’),

• back-formations (e.g. ‘edit’ wrongly assumed to be the ‘root’ for ‘editor’),

• blends (‘smog’ from ‘smoke’ and ‘fog’).

• clipping (‘ad’ for ‘advertisement’)

• acronyms (words derived from ‘sayable’ sets of initials – e.g. ‘RAM’ from ‘random access memory’)