What are open and closed words?
open: content words, frequently adopt new members (nouns, adjectives, full verbs, adverbs)
closed: function words, do not easily adopt new members (prepositions, pronouns, determiners, conjunctions)
What are morphemes?
= smallest meaning-bearing units of language
all occurences of a morpheme should roughly express the same meaning
words consist of at least one morpheme
What types of morphemes are there?
content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) = free lexical
function words (articles, prepositions) = free grammatical
derivational morphemes (suffixes, prefixes) = bound lexical
inflectional morphemes (-ing, -s, -ed) = bound grammatical
What parts of a word are there?
What are unique morphemes?
-> only occur in one combination in a language
e.g. {rasp-} in raspberry
What is a portmanteau morph?
represents multiple different morphemes that have “melted” into one
e.g. “I put it there yesterday” : content word put & past form are the same
What is a Zero-Allomorph?
-> no added “visible” morpheme
e.g. plural of sheep: sheep
What is suppletion?
-> morpheme is replaced with completely different one to mark grammatical contrast
e.g. go - went
What is a bound root?
= roots that only exist in combination with affixes added to them and not independently
e.g. {ident} - bound root that affixes like {-ity}, {-ical}, … can be added to
What are combining forms?
= borrowed to be combined with another combining form
e.g. bio-, demo-, -logy, -cracy
What is an allomorph?
= realisational variant of a morpheme
(same function, but different forms)
Last changed5 months ago
