Morphology: Terms Morphology the module of the grammar that contains information regarding words their structure and meaning Morpheme minimal meaning-bearing unit (sound-meaning unit) bound morpheme a morpheme that never occurs alone (i.e., is not a word) - re-write free morpheme a morpheme that may occur alone (i.e., is a word) - re-write Morphological rules rules for combining morphemes to form stems and words Word minimal free form Homonyms (homophones) morphemes which sound the same but have different meanings. bear vs. bare Synonyms morphemes which sound different but have the same meanings walk vs. stroll Open class the class of lexical content words; a category of words that commonly adds new words, e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives Closed class a category, generally a functional category, that rarely has new words added to it, e.g., prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, determiners Function word a word that does not have a clear lexical meaning but has a grammatical function; function words include conjunctions, prepositions, determiners, pronouns, auxiliaries, complementizers Word constituents Root the lexical/semantic "center" of a word; the morpheme that remains when all affixes are stripped from a complex word; the invariant of a group of related stems Affixes morphemes which are added to other morphemes (especially roots, stems) a suffix follows the root/stem a prefix precedes the root/stem a infix is inserted into the root/stem Stem the base to which affixes are attached to create a more complex form that may be another stem or a word; the items produced by derivational morphology desire : desir-able : un-desirable pick : pick-s : pick-ed Derivational morphology creates the dictionary of stems from roots, other stems, and derivational affixes. Inflectional morphology adds inflectional affixes to stems to form words (as they are used in sentences) Paradigm full set of inflected forms of a given stem declension paradigm of nominal forms (nouns, adjectives, numerals, pronouns) conjugation paradigm of verbs Recursion the reapplication of rules to the results of their prior applications Morphophonemic alternation variation in the phonemic shape of a morpheme Allomorphs phonemic variants of a single morpheme which are in complementary distribution Compound words words containing more than one root training course middle-aged online cover-up Compounding a process that forms new words from two or more independent words containing more than one root pay phone breakup Affixation a process that forms new words from two or more independent words containing more than one root pay phone breakup Suppletion extremely irregular morphophonemic variation in which the morpheme's variants have entirely different shapes good : bett-er : b-est Suppletive forms a term used to refer to inflectional forms in which the regular rules do not apply better, best went, gone am, are, is was, were