Glossary: Guideline Sheet Level 1 and 2
Morpheme
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in the grammar of a language.
Unladylike The word unladylike consists of three morphemes and four syllables.
Morpheme breaks:
 un- 'not'
 lady '(well behaved) female adult human'
 -like 'having the characteristics of'
None of these morphemes can be broken up any more without losing all sense of meaning. Lady
cannot be broken up into "la" and "dy," even though "la" and "dy" are separate syllables. Note that
each syllable has no meaning on its own.
Dogs The word dogs consists of two morphemes and one syllable:
 dog, and
 -s, a plural marker on nouns
Note that a morpheme like "-s" can just be a single phoneme and does not have to be a whole
syllable.
Technique


The word technique consists of only one morpheme having two syllables.
Even though the word has two syllables, it is a single morpheme because it cannot
be broken down into smaller meaningful parts.
Lexical Words (content words)
Words which carry meaning unlike functional words (grammatical words).
These included include nouns, verbs, adjectives, and most adverbs, though some adverbs are
function words (e.g. then, why).
Inflection
In grammar, inflection is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational
categories such as tense, mood, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, case.
In English many nouns are inflected for number with the inflectional plural affix -s (as in "dog" →
"dog-s"), and most English verbs are inflected for tense with the inflectional past tense affix -ed (as
in "call" → "call-ed").
Derivational suffixes
These suffixes give related words different meanings and/or show that they belong to different
word classes.
prince - princess
the suffix -ess relates princess to prince, with a change of meaning indicating gender.
derive - derivation - derivational
the suffixes ation (noun) and al (adjective) show that the words derivation and derivational are
related to the verb derive, but are members of different word classes.
These derivational relations are the basis for the word families.
The following are some of the most common derivational suffixes. They are given here with their
grammatical functions in order to stress their importance in grammar as well as in spelling.
 ism forms nouns from other nouns (e.g. race/racism, organ/organism);
 ist forms nouns or adjectives from nouns (e.g. tour/tourist, Buddha/Buddhist);
 ful forms nouns or adjectives from nouns (e.g. spoon/spoonful, skill/skilful);
 ation forms nouns from verbs (e.g. emigrate/emigration, civilise/civilisation);
 ity forms nouns from adjectives (e.g. moral/morality, able/ability, rapid/rapidity);
 ly forms adverbs from adjectives, (e.g. actual/actually, sincere/sincerely);
 ise forms verbs from adjectives or nouns (e.g. normal/normalise,
synchrony/synchronise).