Basic Vocabulary
The smallest meaningful part of a word.
What is a morpheme?
An affix that goes before the base.
What is a prefix?
A language type where words generally consist of a single morpheme.
What is analytic? or
What is isolating?
A word made up of two or more potentially independent lexemes.
What is a compound?
An inflectional morpheme that gives information about the time of an action.
What is tense?
This type of affix creates new lexemes.
What is derivational?
What is a word?
An affix that comes after the base.
What is a suffix?
A language type where sequences of morphemes are easily segmentable from the base and associated with a single meaning or function.
What is agglutinative?
A word formation process that forms a word by subtracting a piece (often an affix) from a word that is complex (or appears to be complex).
What is backformation?
Inflectional markings that signal the function of noun phrases in sentences.
What is case?
This type of affix will not change the major category of a word.
What is inflectional?
A phonologically distinct variant of a morpheme.
What is an allomorph?
An affix which is inserted into a base morpheme.
What is an infix?
A language type with complex words that not easily segmentable into distinct morphemes.
A word that is made up from whole cloth rather than by another word formation process.
What is coinage?
A morpheme that increases the valency of a verb by adding an external causer to the verb.
What is causative?
This type of affix can be added to every base for its part of speech.
What is inflectional?
A morpheme that is not an affix but which nevertheless cannot stand on its own.
What is a bound base?
A morpheme that consists of the simultaneous attachment of a prefix and a suffix which convey meaning/function only when they occur together.
What is a circumfix?
A language type where words are complex, consisting of many morphemes, some of which have meanings typically expressed by separate lexemes in other languages.
What is polysynthetic?
A type of word formation in which the category of the base is changed with no corresponding change in its form.
What is conversion?
A morpheme that decreaes the valency of the verb by eliminating an object argument.
What is anti-passive?
This type of affix will be ordered closer to the base.
What is derivational?
Families of words that differ only in their grammatical forms.
What is a lexeme/what are lexemes?
A discontinuous affix which is inserted into a word root, as happens in templatic morphology.
What is a transfix?
Typological measure of how many meanings can be packed into a single inflectional morpheme in a language.
What is index of exponence?
What is blending/What is a blend?
A case in some languages that marks the subjects of intransitive verbs and the objects of transitive verbs with the same case morphemes.
What is ergative?
This type of affix may have irregular meaning.
What is derviational?