Lexicon
a speaker's mental dictionary, which contains information about the syntactic properties, meaning and phonological representation of a language's words
morphology
the system of categories and rules involved in word formation and interpretation
words
the smallest free forms found in language
free form
an element that does not have to occur in a fixed position with respect to neighbouring elements and may even be able to appear in isolation
morpheme
the smallest (minimal) unit of language that carries information about meaning or function (e.g. books consists of the two morphemes book and s)
simple word
a word that consists of a single morpheme (e.g., horse)
complex word
a word that contains two or more morphemes (e.g., theorise, unemployment)
free morpheme
a morpheme that can be a word by itself (e.g., fear)
bound morpheme
A morpheme that must be attached to another element (e.g., the past tense marker -ed)
allomorphs
Variants of a morpheme (e.g., [-s], [-z] and [-?z] are allomorphs of the English plural morpheme)
root (of a word)
the morpheme in a word that carries the major component of the word's meaning and belongs to a lexical category (e.g., collect in the word collection)
affix
A morpheme that does not belong to a lexical category and is always bound (e.g., -ing, un-)
lexical category
The word-level syntactic categories noun (N), verb (V), adjective (A) and preposition (P)
tree structure
A diagram depicting the internal organisation of a linguistic unit such as a word, phrase or sentence
base
The form to which an affix is added (e.g., the book is base for the affix -s in books, modernise is the base for the affix -ed in modernised)
prefix
An affix that is attached to the front of its base (e.g., re- in replay)
suffix
An affix that is attached to the end of its base (e.g., -ly in quickly)
infixes
an affix that occurs within its base
tiers
Levels on the feature hierarchy that reflect the relation of the nodes and features to each other
word-based morphology
morphology in which most complex words are formed from a base that can itself be a word
derivation
an affixational process that forms a word with a meaning and/or category distinct from that of its base
compounding
The combination of lexical categories (N, V, A or P) to form a larger word (e.g., fire+engine)
head (of a word)
The morpheme that determines the category of the entire word (e.g., bird in blackbird)
endocentric compound
A compound whose rightmost component (in English) identifies the general class to which the meaning of the entire word belongs (e.g., dump truck is a type of truck)
exocentric compound
A compound whose meaning does not follow from the meaning of its parts (e.g., redneck, since its referent is not a type of neck)
inflection
The modification of a word's form to indicate the grammatical subclass to which it belongs (e.g., the -s in books marks the plural subclass)
stem
The base to which an inflectional affix is added (e.g., modification is the stem for -s in the word modifications)
productivity
The relative freedom with which affixes can combine with bases of the appropriate category
case
A morphological category that encodes information about an element's grammatical role (subject, direct object and so on) (e.g., the contrast between he and him)
agreement
The result of one category being inflected to mark properties of another (e.g., the verb is marked for the person and/or the number of the subject)
internal change
A process that substitutes one non-morphemic segment for another to mark a grammatical contrast (e.g., sing/sang)
ablaut
A vowel alternation that marks a grammatical contrast (e.g., mouse/mice)
umlaut
A phonological change in Germanic languages that results in the fronting of a vowel in the root under the influence of a front vowel in a suffix
concatenative
A term used for the morphological process that builds word structure by assembling morphemes in an additive, linear fashion
suppletion
A morphological process that marks a grammatical contrast by replacing a morpheme with an entirely different morpheme (e.g., be/was)
partial suppletion
A morphological process that marks a grammatical contrast by replacing part of a morpheme (e.g., think/thought)
reduplication
A morphological process that duplicates all or part of the base to which it applies
full reduplication
A morphological process that duplicates the entire word (e.g., in Turkish, /[t?abuk]/ 'quickly' /[t?abukt?abuk]/ 'very quickly')
partial reduplication
A morphological process that duplicates part of the base to which it applies (e.g., in Tagalog, takbuh 'run' and tatakbuh 'will run')
clitic
A morpheme that is like a word in terms of its meaning and function, but is unable to stand alone as an independent form for phonological reasons (e.g., 'm in I'm)
host
The element to which clitics are attached
enclitic
A clitic that attaches to the end of a word
proclitics
A clitic that attaches to the beginning of a word
conversion
A word formation process that assigns an already existing word to a new syntactic category (also called zero derivation) (e.g., nurse (V) from nurse (N))
clipping
A word formation process that shortens a polysyllabic word by deleting one or more syllables (e.g., prof from professor)
blend
A word that is created from parts of two already existing items (e.g., brunch from breakfast and lunch)
backformation
A word formation process that creates a new word by removing a real or supposed affix from another word in the language (e.g., edit came from editor through the remocal of -or)
acronym
A word that is formed by taking the initial letters of some or all of the words in a phrase or title and pronouncing them as a word (e.g., NATO for Norht Atlantic Treaty Organisation)
initialism
An abbreviation created by pronouncing a series of letters (e.g., EU or USA) as letters rather than as a word
onomatopoeic words
Words that sound like the thing that they name (e.g., plop, hiss)
word manufacture (coinage)
The creation of a word from scratch, sometimes with the help of a computer (e.g., Kodak)
eponym
A word created from a name (e.g., watt)
morphophonemics (morphophonology)
Rules that account for alternations among allomorphs