Complete List of Terms and Definitions for Linguistics for Everyone MORPHOLOGY

Terms Definitions
Auxiliary verbs helping verbs
Have
Be
Do
Auxiliary Be Be + [-ing]
progressive
suffix attaches at the end
Circumfix Affixes which surround another morpheme. Not widely used in English. Possible example is em---en as in embolden, enlighten
Lexicon Our mental dictionary; information about words and the lexical rules we use to build them.
tense particular form of a verb
free grammatical morphemes Prepositions, Articles, Conjunctions
at, the, and
Auxiliary Have Have + [-ed/-en]
perfect
Case Expresses grammatical function of a noun phrase as a subject (nominative), object (accusative), indirect object (dative) or possessor (genitive)
Can auxiliary verbs be main verbs? yes
Morphology Study of the system of rules underlying our knowledge of word structure.
Content words Words with lexical meaning. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. These words are 'open class' which means that the class accepts new meanings (e.g. text message, blog)
Name the derivational affixes in English -able
-ity
-ment
-ness
-ize
-ly
Note that these affixes can determine the syntactic category of a word.
Inflectional affix An affix that adds grammatical information (about case, tense, aspect, number, person) but does not change the word's syntactic category or lexical meaning
Abbreviation from first letters, just pronounce the letters
FBI
productive the more combinations a morpheme can occur in, the more productive it is
Infix An affix that attaches within a word root. In English, expletive infixation to add emphasis is the only type seen. E.g. Eliza Doolittle's 'absobloominlutely'
Derivational affix: -ity Adjective + -ity = Noun

seren(e)-ity, divin(e)-ity
Derivational affix: -ment Verb + -ment = Noun

discern-ment, conceal-ment
Participle Form of the verb that follows an auxiliary verb (have or be)
What are the modal verbs? can/could, shall/should, will/would, may/might/must
Acronym from first letters, say it as a word
NASA
Root Creation new word based on no pre-existing morphemes
Root morpheme A morpheme to which an affix can attach.
Derivational affix: - ness Adjective + -ness = Noun

dark-ness, thankful-ness
Category Extension A word can be in two syntactic categories.
Love (V) Love (N)
Syntactic category A set of words that share a signifcant number of grammatical characteristics (nouns, verbs, etc). Synonomous with 'part of speech'
word coinage when a word is created that applies to the rules for advertising or something
also called root creation
inflectional morphemes (grammatical bound) morphemes that do not alter words but only refine and give extra grammatical information about the word's existing meaning
swim+s=swims, smart+er=smarter
How does English indicate number? Usually by -s, but may also be a Latin plural (media), a mutated vowel (goose/ geese), a zero affix (deer/deer, fish/fish), or -en (brother/brethren, child/children)