Morphology Test Guide
an example of the following compound forms: p. 62
(VN) playtime (NN) mosquito net (AN) blackboard (PN) overcoat
Exocentric compound (headless)
(of a compound or derived word) - lacking a head. For example, the noun sell-out is exocentric because it contains no component that determines its word class (sell being a verb and out being an adverb)
French influenced the English language in which areas? (P. 100)
Areas of law, administration. For a long period after 1066, England was ruled by a monarch whose native language was French. Although the ruling group eventually switched to English for everyday purposes, French remained as a language of law and administration and even longer as a language that every educated person was expected to learn. This is why the English language contains many borrowed words from French. French is a romance language which descends from Latin.
how new compounds are interpreted? p. 95
Interpretation of a new compounds relies in practice less on strictly linguistic regularities than on contact and general knowledge. With newly formed compounds, the context in which the compound is used is crucial to understand its meaning.
Combining form
a word or group of letters that is added to the beginning or end of words to change or add meaning. It is bound morpheme, more root-like than affix-like, usually of Greek or Latin origin, that occurs only in compounds, usually with other combining forms. Examples are poly- and -gamy in polygamy
inflectional morphology
area of morphology concerned with changes in word shape (e.g. through affixation) that are determined by, or potentially affect, the grammatical context in which a word appears. The changes in meaning that these morphemes bring are minimal
derivational morphemes
area of morphology concerned with the way in which lexemes are related to one another (or in which one lexeme is derived from another) through processes such as affixation. For example, the verb lexeme PERFORM is derivationally related to the nouns PERFORMANCE and PERFORMER. They are used to derive new words. Derivational morphemes may be prefixes or suffixes.
Head
element within a compound or derived word that determines the syntactic status, or word class, of the whole word. Semantically, also, a compound noun whose head is X usually denotes a type of X. For example, house is the head of the compound greenhouse. Many linguists would also analyse some derivational affixes as heads, e.g. -er as the head of the noun teacher.
case
grammatical category expressing the relationship of a noun phrase to the verb in its clause.
what was said about the main influence of Greek on English. (p. 100+)
influence of classical Greek on English has been largely indirect, through Latin and French, and largely lexical and conceptual
lexicon
inventory of lexical items, seen as part of a native speaker's knowledge of his or her language
allomorph
is a variant form of a morpheme, when a unit of meaning varies in sound without changing meaning. One of the variant pronunciations of a morpheme, among which the choice is determined by context (phonological, grammatical or lexical). There are 3 of these to the plural suffix. For example, [z], [ez] and [s] are phonologically determined allomorphs of the plural suffix, occurring respectively in cats, dogs and horses. A morpheme with only one pronunciation is sometimes said to have only one allomorph.
phrasal word
item that has the structure of a phrase but functions syntactically like a word.
lexical item
linguistic item whose meaning is unpredictable and which therefore needs to be listed in the lexicon or in dictionaries.
morpheme
minimal unit of grammatical structure/minimal meaningful unit of language
free morpheme/free allomorphy
morpheme or allomorph that can stand on its own as a word. A morpheme may have both free and bound allomorphs, e.g. wife is free but wive- is bound because it appears only in the plural word form wives.
bound morpheme/bound allomorphy
morpheme or allomorph that cannot stand on its own as a word. A bound morpheme is one whose allomorphs are all bound. {s} in plays {re} in replay {ly} in cheaply {er} in cheaper {un} in unable{en} in brighten. bound morphemes" are never words but always parts of words.
neologism
newly coined word.
argument
noun phrase or prepositional phrase that is a required or expected concomitant of a verb. For example, sleep normally has one argument (The boy slept) while kick has two (The boy kicked the ball) and introduce has three (The boy introduced his sister to the visitors).
cognate
of words, derived from the same historical source. For example, the English word father and the French word père are cognates, both being descended (through Proto-Germanic and Latin respectively) from the same Proto-Indo-European word.
Word class
one of the classes to which words (more precisely, lexemes) are allocated on the basis of their grammatical behaviour, including noun (e.g. cat, disappointment), verb (e.g. perform, come), adjective (e.g. green, sensitive), adverb (e.g. happily, well), preposition (e.g. on, without), pronoun (e.g. she, us), determiner (e.g. this, our, the), article (e.g. a, an, the), conjunction (e.g. and, if, because).
Give at least two examples using a suffix of nouns derived from verbs p.50
performANCE , ignorANCE, announceMENT, paintING, denunciatION, refusAL, paintER
suppletion
phenomenon whereby one lexeme is represented by two or more different roots, depending on the context; for example, the verb is represented by wen(t) in the past tense and go elsewhere.
periphrastic form
phrase that expresses a grammatical word when no appropriate word form exists, e.g. more interesting for 'comparative of INTERESTING'.
Affix
prefix or suffix. A linguistic element added to a word or root to produce a derived or inflected form
Affixation
process of adding an affix.
Give at least two examples using a suffix of nouns derived from adjectives p. 50
purITY, goodNESS, radicalISM
Derivational complexity
refers to the number and types of changes that have been made in the base word or root when it is combined with other morphemes.
3 kinds of morphemes
root, affix and combining forms Free morpheme, Bound morpheme
root
the primary lexical unit of a word, root is then called base word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. Within a non-compound word, the morpheme that makes the most precise and concrete contribution to the word's meaning, and is either the sole morpheme or else the only one that is not a prefix or a suffix. In English,especially in its inherited Germanic vocabulary, most roots are free. For example, the roots of unhelpfulness, cat and vision are respectively help, cat and vis- (which recurs in visible). See also stem, base.
What do tree diagrams represent? Mention 3. Give one example? (p. 73-4)
the structure of a sentence. Its nodes are labeled with phrase-(e.g. noun phrase) and world-class (e.g. adjective) category names, and the descending branches indicate relationships among these categories.
Morphology
the study of speech sounds and their patterns. Area of grammar concerned with the structure of words and with relationships between words that involve the morphemes that compose them.
words that belong to 'open classes. examples and what is meant by this p. 38
word class to which new members can be added, i.e. noun, verb, adjective or adverb, but not preposition, pronoun, determiner or conjunction
Base
word or part of a word viewed as an input to a derivational or inflectional process, in particular affixation.
lexeme
word seen as an abstract grammatical entity, represented concretely by one or more different inflected word forms according to the grammatical context. Where the distinction is important, lexemes are conventionally represented in small capitals while word forms are in italics. For example, the verb lexeme PERFORM has four inflected word forms: perform, performs, performing and performed. The adjective lexeme good has the word forms good, better, and best.
