Morphology

* Morpheme: the smallest unit of linguistic meaning. it can't be further analyzed.

* Content word: like nouns, verbs, adjectives, also called open class words. We can and regularly do add new words to these classes.

* Function words: like conjunctions, prepositions, articles, and etc, also called close class words. They don't have clear lexical meaning associated with them, but they have grammatical functions.

* Content words have semantic content and function words play a grammatical role.

* Free morpheme: they can constitute words by themselves, such as boy, desire.

* bound morpheme: they are never words by themselves but parts of words, like -ish, un-(affix, prefix, suffix)

* derivational(衍生) morpheme: Have clear semantic content. This type of morpheme changes the meaning of the word or the part of speech or both. Derivational morphemes often create new words.

* Inflectional morpheme: this morpheme can only be a suffix. The s in cats is an inflectional morpheme. An inflectional morpheme creates a change in the function of the word.

* compare derivational morpheme with inflectional morpheme: derivational morpheme may change the syntactic categories, inflectional morpheme would not.

* word coinage

- compounds: twoA or more words may be joined to form new. EX: whitewash

- Acronyms: words derived from the initials of several words. EX: BTW = by the way

- Abbreviations: also called clipping. EX:TV=television

- Eponyms: words from names. they are common and widely used terminology. EX: sandwich

- blends: two words are combined. It's similar to compounds but part of the words are deleted. EX: smoke+fog=smog

* Morphological types of languages

- Analytic languages: each word consists of a single morpheme, used by itself with meaning intact, like Mandarin Chinese.

- Synthetic languages: build up the meanings of sentences by combining free and bound morphemes to make up words.

> agglutinating languages: the affix can be easily separated form the stem they are attended and each affix generally conveys only one meaning.

> Funsional languages: not easy to separate from the stem they are attended. In addition, there is generally a fusion of meanings that is represented by the affixes.

> Polysynthetic languages: several stem forms may be combined (along with affixes) into a single word.