top hat chapter 2

Vocabulary - Morphology

Vocabulary - Morphology

The study of the system of rules underlying our knowledge of word structures.

Morphemes

The smallest meaningful part of a word.

Free Morpheme

A morpheme that can stand alone as a word.

Bound Morpheme

A morpheme that cannot stand alone and must be attached to another morpheme.

Nonce Words

Made-up words used for specific purposes.

Syntactic Category

A category of words that share grammatical characteristics.

Allomorphs

Variations of a morpheme that occur in different contexts.

Content Words

Words that have lexical meanings and can be looked up in a dictionary.

Function Words

Words that have grammatical or functional meanings but lack lexical meanings.

Affixation

The process of attaching affixes to morphemes.

Derivational Affixes

Affixes that change the meaning or syntactic category of a word.

Inflectional Affixes

Affixes that add grammatical information without changing the meaning or syntactic category.

Root

The core meaning of a word that cannot be broken down further.

Base

A unit of one or more morphemes that affixes can attach to.

Lexicon

A mental dictionary that stores information and rules about words.

Iconic Signs

Signs that have an obvious relationship between their form and meaning.

Arbitrary Signs

Signs where the relationship between form and meaning is non-iconic.

Complex Words

Words made up of two or more morphemes.

Simple Words

Words that consist of only one morpheme.

Expletive Infixation

The insertion of an affix into a word for emphasis, often seen in English.