LING 2005: Final Exam

Linguistic Analysis final exam review

Word classes

Word classes

Categories of words that share similar grammatical functions, such as nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs.

Verbs

Express actions or states of being, essential for conveying actions or states in a sentence.

Nouns

Typically represent people, places, things, ideas, or concepts.

Inflection

Modification of a word's form to convey grammatical information, such as tense, number, or gender.

Morphology

The study of the structure and formation of words, examining how words are created, modified, and broken down into meaningful units called morphemes.

Affixes

Bound morphemes that attach to roots or stems to modify their meaning or grammatical function, classified into prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and circumfixes.

Root

The core of a word that carries the fundamental lexical meaning, a simple morpheme that cannot be further broken down.

Infinitive

The base form of a verb, often preceded by 'to' in English.

Free morpheme

A morpheme that can stand alone as a word and convey meaning.

Bound morpheme

A morpheme that cannot stand alone as a word and must be attached to a root or stem to have meaning.

Allomorph

A variant form of a morpheme that can have different pronunciations or spellings depending on their surrounding context.

Reduplication

A morphological process involving copying or repeating part or all of a root, can be partial or full.

Suppletion

A process where an inflected form of a word is formed by completely replacing the root with a different form.

Perfective

Refers to verb tenses or markers indicating completed actions or a specific point in time.

Imperfective

Refers to verb tenses or markers indicating ongoing, repeated, or habitual actions.

Definite

refers to a specific, identifiable entity or group, often marked by the determiner 'the'.

Indefinite

refers to a non-specific or unidentified entity or group, often marked by the indefinite article 'a' or 'an'.

Number

A grammatical category that expresses count distinctions, typically 'one,' 'two,' or 'three or more'.

Conversion

A morphological process that changes an existing word to a different syntactic category without any alteration in its form.

Derivation

A morphological process that alters an existing word's form to create a new word with a different meaning and/or syntactic category.

Grammar

The set of rules and principles that govern the structure and use of language.

Phonology

The branch of linguistics that studies the sound systems of languages.

Phoneme

The smallest unit of sound in a language that can distinguish meaning.

Morpheme

The smallest unit of language that carries meaning.

Allophone

A phonetic variant of a phoneme, pronounced differently depending on the phonetic environment.

Vowel Harmony

A phonological process where vowels within a word or phrase adjust their features to become more similar.

Epenthesis

The insertion of a sound into a word to facilitate pronunciation or to conform to phonological rules.

Elision

the omission of a sound or syllable in speech.

Metathesis

involves the transposition or reversal of sounds or syllables within a word.

Alternation

refers to the variation in the pronunciation or spelling of a morpheme depending on its phonetic or morphological context.

Predicate

In syntax, a verb phrase that forms a central part of a clause, usually accompanied by one or more nouns serving as subject, object, or indirect object.

Quantifier

words that express the quantity or amount of a noun, providing information about how many or how much of something is being referred to.

Complementizer

a word that introduces a complement clause, which serves as the subject or object of a verb.

Structure

refers to the arrangement and organization of linguistic units, such as words, phrases, and clauses, to form meaningful utterances.

Relativizer

a word or morpheme that introduces a relative clause, which modifies a noun or pronoun in the main clause.

Relative Clause

provide additional information about the noun they modify and are often introduced by relative pronouns like 'who,' 'whom,' 'whose,' 'which,' or 'that.'

Agreement

a grammatical phenomenon where the form of one word in a sentence is influenced by the grammatical features of another word, typically involving categories like gender, number, person, or case.

Deixis

the use of certain words to specify time, place or person whose denigration changes with context (tomorrow, there, etc.)

Case

a grammatical category that marks the function of a noun or pronoun in a sentence, indicating its relationship to other elements in the sentence, such as the verb or other nouns.

Nominative Case

• marks the subject of a verb

• 'woman' as the subject in the sentence: 'The woman (NOM) read the book (ACC).'

Accusative Case

• marks the direct object of a verb

• 'book' as the object in the sentence: 'The woman (NOM) read the book (ACC).'

Phrase

a syntactic unit comprising one or more words that functions as a building block within larger syntactic structures, such as clauses and sentences.

Clause

consists of one or more phrases and contains a subject and a predicate, expressing a proposition or a complete thought.

Sentence

the largest unit of syntactic structure and comprises one or more clauses, expressing a complete thought and can stand alone.

Subordinate Clause (dependent clause)

a clause that cannot stand alone as a complete sentence and relies on a main clause to convey its full meaning.

Embedded Clause

a specific type of subordinate clause that is positioned within the main clause, often interrupting its flow to provide additional information.

Complement Clause

a subordinate clause that functions as either the subject or the object of a verb, completing the meaning of the verb and the sentence.

Content Words

the 'meaty' words that carry the main meaning of a sentence, including nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.

Function Words

serve a grammatical purpose rather than carrying specific content, including prepositions, conjunctions, articles, pronouns, and auxiliary verbs.

Contrastive Distribution

This is when two sounds can appear in the same phonetic environment and change the meaning of the word, considered different phonemes.

Complementary Distribution

This is when two sounds never appear in the same environment, meaning they are predictable based on the phonetic context.

Nominative/Accusative Languages

type of language where subjects of both intransitive and transitive verbs are treated the same.

Ergative/Absolutive Languages

type of language where the subject of an intransitive verb is treated like the object of a transitive verb.

Ergative case

• marks the subject of a transitive verb.

• “The woman (ERG) read the book (ABS)," the woman is the subject in the ergative case, and the book is the object in the absolutive case.

• However, in the sentence "The woman (ABS) laughed," the woman is the subject in the absolutive case, just like the book is the object in the previous sentence.

Absolutive case

• marks the object of a transitive verb and the subject of an intransitive verb.

• "The woman (ERG) read the book (ABS)," the woman is the subject in the ergative case, and the book is the object in the absolutive case.

• However, in the sentence "The woman (ABS) laughed," the woman is the subject in the absolutive case, just like the book is the object in the previous sentence.

Intransitive verbs

• used without an object

• Examples: sleep, fall, smile, laugh, walk

Transitive verbs

• used with an object

• Examples: buy, steal, say, watch, take, send