Morphology midterm 1

morpheme

smallest unit of sound and function

e.g. un-

monomorphemic

a word made of a single morpheme

e.g. dog, run

“the arbitrariness of the sign”

the link between sound and meaning is conventional not natural

e.g. nothing about the sound /kæt/ means ‘cat’

affix

bound morpheme attached to a root/stem

e.g.

prefix before: un-happy

suffix after: happi-ness

infix inside: rare in English: abso-fucking-lutely

morphonology

interaction of morphology and phonology; how combining morphemes changes sounds

e.g. plural /-s/ pronounced as [s] in ‘cats’ but [z] in ‘dogs’

ablaut

vowel change marking grammatical info

e.g. sing —> sang, drive —> drove

position class chart

diagram showing where different affix types occur in a complex word (order of slots)

synchronic vs diachronic analysis

synchronic: language as it is now

diachronic: language change through time

content word vs function word

Content: nouns, verbs, adjectives (open class, carry meaning)

Function: articles, prepositions, pronouns (closed class, grammatical)

open class vs closed class

open class can add new members (selfie, blog); closed classes rarely add (the, and)

paradigm

set of forms a lexeme takes to express grammatical categories

e.g. run, runs, ran, running

root

core meaning unit

e.g. happy

Stem

What an inflectional affix attach to

E.g. unhappy in unhappiness

Base

General term for what an affix attaches to

Bound morpheme vs free morpheme

Morpheme that can stand alone vs can’t

E.g. book vs -s

Circumfix

Discontinuous morpheme that surrounds a base

E.g. German ge-lieb-t

Non-concatenative morphology

Morphology not built by simple stringing of morphemes; often internal change (root and pattern languages like Arabic k-t-b —> kataba, kituba

Concatenative = linear affixation

Subtractive morphology

Marking a grammatical distinction by deleting material

E.g. French nous aimons ~ aim-ons vs imperative aime (no ons)

Iconicity

Form reflects meaning (non-arbitrary)

E.g. teeny-weeny (small sound for smallness)

Metathesis

Switching of sounds within a form ask vs. aks

Compound

Word made of two or more roots

E.g. blackbird

Hapax Legomenon

A word attested only once in a corpus (a one-off coinage)

E.g. sassigassity meaning audacity

Diminutive

Morpheme indicating smallness or affection

E.g. -ito

Polysemy

One form with related meanings

(Head of a person/table/department)

Homophony

the phenomenon where two or more words have identical pronunciations but different meanings

American Structuralism

Focus on descriptive analysis of language

Emphasized disc