| Term | Definition |
|---|
| suppletion | morphological process whereby a completely different phonological form is derived from a base form: go, went, is, be, good, better, bad, worse |
| suppletives forms/roots | phonologically different roots involved in suppletion |
| 4 sources of irregular homosemy | historical change in: English morpheme, set of morphemes, sound-pattern or "borrowing," set of sound patterns from another language |
| affixal irregularity | where a stem takes a different affix than the expected one: ox, oxen, sheep, sheep |
| stem irregularity | where the stem itself changes instead of adding an affix, run, ran, eat, ate |
| affixal +stem irregularity | where the stem takes an affix and also undergoes a change itself: child, children, sleep, slept |
| Why do we have stem and affixal irregularity? | Because the morpheme (-ed) was changed to -d, leading to unpronouncable English words, so phonologically conditioned allomorphs were created to make the words pronouncable. |
| homoseme | a listeme which expresses the same idea as another listeme, but is phonologically unrelated to it, such as the -i in alumni and the -s in dogs |
| allomorph | an alternative pronunciation of a morpheme that depends on the phonological context the morpheme appears in, such as the -t, -ed, and -d used to express the past tense |
| Group I suffixes: | borrowed from French after 1100 AD, shift stress to final syllable of the stem |
| Group II suffixes: | Some Germanic & some early borrowings from French, don't shift stress at all |
| Group III suffixes: | late, Latinate borrowings, shift stress from stem to suffix |
| Germanic suffixes | can follow Latinate affixes (-ness in rusticness), can only attach to free roots |
| Latinate suffixes | can never follow Germanic ones, can attach to bound and free roots (-able to cap in capable, -able to wash in washable) |
| Discuss the historical process by which -ed became the irregular adjective forming suffix. | -ed used to be the regular suffix in Middle English, but was eventually changed to -d, which led to unpronouncable words. Phonologially conditioned allomorphs were created, to make the words pronouncable, namely -ed, -d, and -ed |
| Cases where -ed was preserved? | For context, such as in the church (blessed) and poetry, to preserve the meter. |
| Explain the historical change of -ez to -z | Old English had a regular phonotactic rule that required fricatives to be voiced between two vowels.-ez was the regular plural, so we had words like wifez, but that put the voiceless fricative at the end of the singular stem between two vowels. Thus, the old rule kicked in an converted the voiceless fricative into a voiced one, although the old rule no longer applies. |
| fricative | a consonant produced by creating a very small opening in the oral tract, through which air flows turbulently. Some fricatives are /s/, /v/, and /z/ |
| alveolar stop | a consonant produced just behind the teeth, on the aveolar ridge between the teeth and the soft palate. /t/ and /s/ are aveolar consonants |
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