What is a morpheme?
A morpheme is the smallest unit of language that carries meaning or grammatical function.
What is a word built with?
A word is built with morphemes.
What is a mental lexicon?
A mental lexicon is where morphemes are stored with rules combined with them (e.g. runner, summer, caller all have the affixe -er which means “one of verbs”)
What is an allomorph?
An allomorph is a different surface form of the same morpheme depending on phonological context (e.g. we use “a” before a consonant and “an” before a vowel – They are both the same word (same morpheme) but change because of the phonological context).
What are the two types of words?
- Monomorpheme (consists of a single morpheme) – Pumpkin
- Multimorpheme (consists of multiple morphemes) – Peace-ful-ness
What are the two types of morphemes?
- Free morpheme (can stand alone as words – dog, tall)
- Bound morpheme (can’t stand alone as words - un-, -s)
What do morphemes consist of?
-Root (the meaning of a word – happy)
- Affixes (must attach to something else – un-. -s) bound morphemes
What are the different types of affixes?
- Prefixe (Before root)
- Suffixe (After root)
- Circumfixe (Wrap around the root)
- Infixes (In the root)
What is a compound?
- Word that contains two roots or more
What is affixation?
-Words that contain root + affixation
What is derivational morpheme?
A derivational morpheme is a morpheme that changes the meaning and category of a word (e.g. happy – happiness) turns from adj to noun)
What is an inflectional morpheme?
An inflectional morpheme expresses grammatical information without changing meaning or category (e.g. walk-walked) both verbs
