Linguistics Exam 2
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31 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 morpheme | the smallest unit of language that carries information about meaning or function |
| morphology | the study of the system of categories and rules involved in word formation and interpretation. |
| lexicon | speaker's mental dictionary containing information about the syntactic properties meaning and phonological representation of a languages words. |
| zero morpheme | morpheme without phonological shape. Able to change part of speech w/out affix |
| allomorph | alternative form of a morpheme |
| morphophonemic | ways that specific morphemes change--not applying to all sounds |
| phoneme | the contrastive segmental unit with predictable phonetic variant |
| phone | any sound in human language |
| allophone | variants of a phone |
| contrastive distribution | when sounds occur in the same position and envirtonment in a string of sounds |
| minimal pairs | a pair of words with distinct meanings that differ by only one segment found in the same position in each form |
| free variation | the free alternation of and/or phonemes in a given environment |
| complementary distribution | the distribution of allophones in their respective phonetic environments such as that one never appears in the same phonetic context as the other |
| natural classes | a class of sounds sharing features or phonetic properties |
| major classes | large groups of natural classes (ie. vowels) |
| distinctive features | feature that distinguishes one phoneme from another. |
| syllable | position and effect of stressed syllables: insertion and deletion |
| affixation | words formed by the combination of bound affixes and free morphemes |
| compounding | words formed by the combination of two or more independent words |
| reduplication | words formed by doubling on entire word or part of the word (hocus-pocus) |
| ablaut | irregular forms by the vowel change; vowel alternation that makes a grammatical contrast (sing/sang) |
| suppletion | irregular forms by substitutions (are/was go/went) |
| blends | compounds that are less than coumpound; created from already existing forms (smoke fog = smog) |
| ellipsis | removal of redundant part (china) |
| back formation | subtracting an affix (peddle) |
| folk etymology | changes based on people's conception of certain words or how the word works |
| hyper correct | attribution of some form to a particular social group and stats |
| acronyms | NASA |
| eponym | comes from someone's name |
| borrowing | make another language's words your own |
| grammaticalization | content word becomes a funcional word and perhaps a bound suffix (will>residue> i'll) |
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