Morphology
morphology | the study of the structure of words |
morpheme | the smallest meaningful grammatical unit in English |
bound morpheme | morpheme that cannot stand meaningfully on its own |
free morpheme | morpheme that can stand meaningfully on its own |
inflectional m. | bound m. which changes a word's inflection, not its word class |
derivational m. | bound m. which changes a word's class |
prefix | m. which is added to the beginning of a world |
suffix | m. which is added to the end of a word |
stem | the base form of a word (root plus theme) |
number | numerical quality of a noun or pronoun (singular, dual, plural) |
case | inflectional quality of a noun, pronoun, or adjective |
gender | quality of a noun which reflects its PIE theme vowel or the gender of its referent (m., f., n.) |
nominative | the case of the subject of a sentence and associated words |
accusative | the case of the direct object (and of some prepositions) |
dative | the case of the indirect object (and of some prepositions) |
genitive | the possessive case and others (genitive of respect, of material, etc.) |
positive | base form of an adjective (e.g., "tall") |
comparative | the -er form of an adjective (e.g., "taller") |
superlative | the -est form of an adjective (e.g., "tallest") |
word class | any of eight ways in which a word enters into a sentence's syntax (as a noun, verb, etc.) |
open class | word classes which can be increased through derivation (n., adj., v., adv., int.) |
closed class | word classes which cannot be increased through derivation (pron., prep., conj.) |