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Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Key definitions
1. Morphemes: The smallest units of language that carry meaning or function.
2. Free morphemes: Words that can stand alone and still make sense.
3. Bound morphemes: Morphemes that cannot stand alone, they need to be attached to a free
morpheme in order to be a proper, meaningful word.
4. Affixes: A morpheme attached to something else.
5. Root: The core of the word. Whats left when affixes are taken away.
6. Syntax: The study of sentence structure.
7. Vowel Harmony: The first vowel of the suffix depends on the last vowel of the word that the
suffix is being attached to.
Aims of Morphology
Identification of morphemes
Study meaning of morphemes
Assign meaning to parts of words
Example
*-ing on words such as jumping, running, borrowing, boxing.
Syntax follows strict rules, whereas morphology is often inconsistent with many
exceptions to the rules.
[1] Fasold, R. and Connor-Linton, J., (2006). An Introduction to Language and Linguistics. New York:
Cambridge University Press.