Compounding and Morphemes Review

Vocabulary flashcards covering compound words, their types, formation, properties, and basic morpheme definitions, along with language sampling techniques.

Compounding

The process of combining two free morphemes to create a new word that has its own distinct meaning separate from its parts.

Functions of English compounds

Compound words can function as nouns (smartphone), verbs (breakfast), adjectives (heartbreaking), pronouns (nobody), adverbs (nowadays), prepositions (into), and conjunctions (whenever).

Formation of Compound Words

Compound words can be formed by combining different parts of speech, such as noun + noun (starfish), verb + noun (postman), preposition + verb (output), adjective + noun (superhero), gerund + noun (washing machine), and preposition + noun (background).

Closed compounds

Compound words written without spaces between the words, e.g., skateboard, firefighter, webpage.

Open compounds

Compound words written with spaces between the words, e.g., ice cream, cell phone, peanut butter.

Hyphenated compounds

Compound words written with a hyphen between the words, e.g., merry-go-round, clean-cut, well-being.

Headness (of a compound)

The property where the head morpheme determines the lexical category of the compound. Most English words are right-headed.

Endocentric compounds

Compound words where the head, which determines the lexical category, is typically the last (right) member of the compound, e.g., blackboard (N).

Exocentric compounds

Compound words where none of its components act as a formal head, and the meaning often cannot be transparently guessed from its constituent parts, e.g., redhead, redneck.

Tense/Plural markers in compounds

Tense/plural markers are added to the English compound as a whole, not to the first member (e.g., sabretooths, drop-kicked, policemen).

Stress patterns in English compounds

Stress is more prominent on the first member of a compound regardless of its spelling (one word, two words, or hyphenated), e.g., GREENhouse versus green HOUSE.

Free morpheme

A morpheme that can stand on its own as a word.

Bound morpheme

A morpheme that must be attached to another element and cannot be a word by itself.

Allomorphs

A variant form of a morpheme, such as 'a' and 'an' for indefiniteness, or the different pronunciations of the plural morpheme '-s' (e.g., cats, dogs).

Language Sampling

A method used in language analysis involving obtaining 50-100 utterances in a naturalistic setting, recording and transcribing them (including errors), and then analyzing them phonetically, phonologically, morphologically, syntactically, and pragmatically.