Morphology preview
Decide whether the statements are true or false
1. Morphology is the study of the function of words.
2. Morphology technically concerns with the structure of words and with
relationships between sounds involving the morphemes that compose them.
3. Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words.
4. A morpheme is a short segment of language.
5. A morpheme is the smallest meaningful units of a language.
6. A morpheme is a meaningless / meaningful word or a part of word, which is
indivisible and recurs in deffering verbal environments with a relatively stable
meaning.
7. Morphemes are identifiable from one word to another and contribute in some way
to the meaning of the whole word.
8. Content morphemes (words) carry some grammatical information.
9. Functional morphemes provide semantic content.
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1. A morpheme differs from a phoneme in that the former has meaning whereas the
latter does not.
2. Phonemes have meaning; they have distinctive features that help distinguish
meaning.
3. Morphemes are generally short sequences of phonemes.
4. A morpheme may consist of only a single phoneme like the /–z/ in goes.
5. Any matches between morphemes and syllables are fortuitous (ngẫu nhiên) as
many poly-syllabic words are mono-morphemic.
6. A morpheme cannot consist of one syllable or several whole syllables.
7. A morpheme is identical with a syllable.
8. Words are made up of morphemes; in other words, morphemes are the constituents
of words.
9. A word cannot be composed of more than one morpheme.
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1. Morphemes are of three kinds: free, bound, and neutral.
2. A free morpheme is one that can be uttered (said) alone.
3. Free morphemes ‘may stand alone as words in their own right, as well as enter into
the structure of other words’.
4. Past tense morpheme is a bound morpheme.
5. Bases are almost always bound whereas affixes can be either free or bound.
6. A bound morpheme cannot be uttered alone with meaning because it is always
annexed (occupied) to one or more morphemes to form a word.
7. A bound morpheme can utter in isolation with meaning.
8. ‘Wive’ in {wives} is a bound morpheme.
9. It is impossible for a word to consist entirely of bound morphemes.
10. A morpheme can or cannot be a lexical item.
11. Morphological structure of words is largely independent of their phonological
structure (their division into sounds, syllables, and rhythmic units).
12. A base may have more than one phonemic form. -sent-
13. A BASE (also called A ROOT) is ‘that morpheme in a word that has the principal
meaning’.
14. Affixes are indeed always bound, and roots are always free.
15. Root is the nucleus of the word which affixes attach to.
16. Root is the “core of a word” that makes the most precise and concrete/stable
contribution to the word’s meaning.
17. An affix is a free morpheme that occurs before (prefix) or within (infix) or after
(suffix) or around a base (circumfix).
18. Prefixes in English number about 75.
19. Meanings of prefixes are often those of English prepositions and adverbials.
20. Infixes are free morphemes that have been inserted within a word.
21. Suffixes may pile up to the number of three or four.
22. Prefixes are commonly single, except for the negative un- before another prefix.
23. The words to which these suffixes are attached are called bases or roots.
24. The stem includes the base or the root and all the derivational affixes.
25. The stem is word without its inflectional affixes.
26. It is possible for a bound morpheme to be limited in its distribution that it occurs
in just one complex word such as cranberry, buckleberry, and gormless.
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1. There are 07 English inflectional suffixes in total.
2. Inflectional suffixes can change the part of speech/grammatical catergory/word
form.
3. Inflectional suffixes come last in a word.
4. Inflectional suffixes go with all stems of a given part of speech.
5. Inflectional suffixes do not pile up; only one can end a word.
6. Derivational suffixes change the part of speech. Develop (v.), development (n.)
7. The plural inflection -s on the verb does not make any independent contribution to
the meaning of a sentence.
8. Inflectional morphology deals with the inflected forms of words, that is the kind of
variation that words exhibit in the basis of their semantic context.
9. Derivational affixes may be of two kinds: Class-changing derivational affixes and
class-maintaining derivational affixes. Mark (v.) à Remark (v.)
10. Derivational suffixes usually do not close off a word.
11. The derivational paradigm is a set of related words composed of the same base
morphemes and all the inflectional affixes that can go with the bases.
12. In English, affixes are almost always bound morphemes and bases are nearly
always free.
13. Inflection creates new forms of the same word: bring, brought, brings, bringing.
14. Performs, perfomed, and perform are all derivational variants – lexeme.
15. Derivation creates new words: logic, logical, logician, illogical, illogicality.
16. An ending of a word is an inflectional suffix.
17. Derivation tends to affect the meaning of the word, while inflection tends to affect
only its syntactic function.
1. The past-tense ending has 02 phonemic forms.
2. Allomorphs or positional variants are related forms of a set of word that have the
same meaning and are in complementary (additional) distribution.
3. Braces {} are used for morphemes and slants // for allomorphs. Page 113
4. Every morpheme is pronounced the same in all contexts.
5. The past-tense morpheme {-D pt} has three allomorphs that are in complementary
distribution, determined by the morphological environment.
6. The selection of all allomorphs is morphologically conditioned by indentifying
specific morphemes.
7. The ~ refers to a morphologically conditioned alternation and the∞to a
morphologically conditioned alternation.
