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Some Questions about Morphology

Some Questions about Morphology. What is a morpheme?. The smallest linguistic unit of meaning Can not be analyzed further ept, mit, luke, ceive are problematic examples yet they are morphemes . What is a derivational morpheme?.

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Some Questions about Morphology

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  1. Some Questions about Morphology

  2. What is a morpheme? • The smallest linguistic unit of meaning • Can not be analyzed further • ept, mit, luke, ceive are problematic examples yet they are morphemes

  3. What is a derivational morpheme? • Adding a morpheme to a root to give a new word…often results in change in syntactic category

  4. What is an inflectional morpheme? • Bound grammatical morphemes that are affixed to a word

  5. Can you write down the eight inflectional morphemes in English • -s, -ed, -ing, -en, -s, ’s, -er, -est • This makes English a very poorly inflected language but highly analytic language • Historical reason was the shift in word stress

  6. What is a free morpheme? • Constitute words themselves; can stand on their own

  7. Which is a more productive morpheme…un or able • able is more productive because it can be added to any verb but un has limitations • Often there is a lexical gap: • Unsad and ept

  8. What is an infix? • An affix inserted in the middle of the word.

  9. Word Formation

  10. What is a compound • Joining two or more words to form a new word • Meaning may not always be inferred from the two morphemes and must be stored separately in the brain • flatfoot, egghead

  11. What is a back-formation? • words that came into existence from elimination of some affix…often this is done by mistake • editor, hawker, stoker, hawker are all examples of back formations • My daughter’s example of razor • Some examples such as donation just show a normal morphological process

  12. What is an acronym? • Words derived from initials • Question: when do you use an article? • FBI, CIA, CDC • NAFTA, AIDS, OPEC • But…UGA, KSU, IBM, NBC

  13. What is the OED? • Oxford English Dictionary

  14. Who was Dr. Samuel Johnson? • Lexicographer; published Dictionary of the English Language in 1755

  15. Two additional concepts • Idioms • Metaphors

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