LING 101 Final Exam Topics Fall 2018
Morphology
– explain the terms:
o morphology – internal structure of words
o Morpheme – minimal unit of meaning or of grammatical function
of a language
▪ Re–, -ing, un-, car, etc
o allomorph – a member of a set of noncontrastive realizations of a
particular morpheme; there realizations have the same function or
meaning
▪ Dogs = z cats = s
▪ Sounds vary slightly but the meaning of /s/ stays the same;
plural.
– identify different types of affixes
o prefix – before the word = re-
o suffix – after the word = –ing
o Infix – in the middle of the word
o Circumfix – around the word = X-word-Y
▪ Infix and circumfix doesn’t happen often in English
– Types of morphemes
o Free morpheme – can stand alone = cat
o Bound morpheme – can’t stand alone = re–
o Content morpheme – carries semantic content = house, tree
o Function morpheme – provides information about the
grammatical relationships between words in a sentence.
(pronouns, conjunctions, articles)
o Derivational morphemes – creating words out of other words
▪ Suffixes or prefixes
▪ Change lexical category of stem
▪ Change meaning of stem
▪ Precede inflectional suffixes
▪ May pile up
o Inflectional morphemes – creation of different grammatical
forms
▪ There are 6 so just memorize them and every other
bound morpheme is derivational
-ing, –s, -er, -ed, -est, –‘s
– state the characteristics of different morphological types of languages
o isolating/analytic – each word consists of only one morpheme,
easy to divide, no affixations. Example: Mandarin Chinese
o Synthetic – allow affixation and have bound morphemes
▪ Agglutinative – these languages have words that may
consist of more than one and possibly many morphemes.
Example: Swahili
▪ Fusional – if there are 4 pieces of grammatical information
there will be 4 morphemes, however the ‘past tense’
meaning is shared among several morphemes
▪ Polysynthetic – high degree of affixation (many
morphemes). This is a combination of agglutinative and
fusional. May have words with multiple stems in a single
