Flashcards on Comprehensive English Studies
Comprehensive English Studies: Key Works & Analysis
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Linguistics
231 cards
Card 1
Question: What is inflectional morphology and what function does it serve?
Answer: Inflectional morphology is the function of making grammatical distinctions (e.g., tense, number, person) without creating new words.
Card 2
Question: Give examples of free and bound morphemes from the content.
Answer: Free morphemes: can, will, may, to (infinitive marker), walk. Bound morphemes: -s (plural), -ing (aspect), -ed (past tense), -est (superlative).
Card 3
Question: What is a lemma?
Answer: A lemma is the dictionary or canonical form of a word and serves as the “name” of a word family.
Card 4
Question: What is a paradigm in morphology?
Answer: A paradigm is the full set of inflected forms that a word can take (e.g., lemma 'run' with paradigm 'runs, running, ran').
Card 5
Question: Define allomorph and give an example.
Answer: An allomorph is a variant form of a morpheme that appears in different contexts without changing meaning (e.g., the definite article pronounced 'the'
Card 6
Question: What is a zero morpheme? Give examples.
Answer: A zero morpheme is an allomorph that is not overtly realized — the morpheme has no phonetic form (e.g., put, fish, sheep where plural or tense may be
Card 7
Question: Name and define the main additive word-formation processes listed.
Answer: Compounding: joining two or more words to make a new one (blueprint, trigger-happy). Derivation: using affixation to create a new word (writer, finali
Card 8
Question: What are subtractive word-formation processes and examples provided?
Answer: Subtractive processes remove material: clipping, blending, acronyms, initialisms. Also phonological changes like stress shifting (e.g., CONstruct vs c
Card 9
Question: List phonological changes affecting morphology mentioned in the content.
Answer: Stress shifting (construct vs contrast), vowel length/quality changes (lead>led>led; meet>met), ablaut (sing>sang>sung; mouse>mice), consonant mutatio
Card 10
Question: What is affixation and what are the two main types?
Answer: Affixation is adding affixes to roots; main types are prefixation (before the root) and suffixation (after the root).