LING 101: Chapter 5, section 1.1 & Chapter 4, Section 1

what are syntactic categories/parts of speech

classes words can be grouped into

5 syntactic categories

1. noun

2. verb

3. adjective

4. preposition

5. adverb

what is another name for syntactic categories

lexical categories

what are 4 non lexical categories

1. determiners

2. auxiliary verbs

3. conjunctions

4. degree words

what is another name for non lexical categories and how do they differ from lexical

functional categories

• they have meanings that are harder to define

3 methods for determining word’s category

1. meaning

2. inflection

3. distribution (most reliable method)

how does distribution determine a word’s category

which elements it can occur with

what are words

smallest free form of language

define free form

doesn’t have to occur in a fixed position, and often occurs in isolation (but not always ex: “is”)

what is a morpheme

the most important component of a word structure

• the smallest unit that carries info

what are simple words

consist of 1 morpheme

what are complex words

2 or more morphemes

what are free morphemes

can be a word by itself (free morphemes in English are not always free in other languages )

bound morphemes

must be attached to another element

what are allomorphs

variant pronunciations of a morpheme

• ex: an & a

what is another name for allomorphs

allomorphic variation

what does allomorphic variation depend on

depends on phonological facts

what are root morphemes

the core of a word/major component of meaning

• they belong to a lexical category (noun, verb, etc)

what are affixes

bound morphemes that don’t belong to a lexical category

what do complex words consist of

typically of a root and 1 or more affixes

labeled bracketing example

[ A [ AF - un ] [ A - kind ] ]

what is a base

the form to which an affix is added

• often the root but can be larger than the root

what is a prefix

an affix attached to the front of the base

what is a suffix

an affix attached to the end of its base

what are infixes

affixes occurring inside other morphemes

• NOT just a suffix before another suffix

• less common

free morphemes categories

can be lexical or functional

bound morphemes categories

derivational or inflectional

what are tiers

the levels of structure to which roots and affixes are assigned

what is nonconcatenative morphology

grammatical meaning showed by changing the internal structure of a word

• languages such as Arabic

word-based morphology

most complex words built from roots that are free morphemes

• English is word-based morphology