Morphology
1. What is morph?
Ans: A morph is a phonological string of phonemes that cannot be broken down into smaller constituents that have a lexico-grammatical function.
2. What do you understand by zero morph? NU 2015]
Ans: Zero morph indicates plural sense of the same singular form. That is, Sheep + 0 = sheep.
3. Define allomorph?
Ans: An allomorph is one of two or more complementary morphs which manifest a morpheme in its different phonological or morphological environments.
4. What is a zero allomorph? [NU 2012]
Ans: Zero allomorph is an inflection on noun or verbs presumed to be present although invisible.
5. What is morpheme?
Ans: Morpheme is the smallest component of word that has a semantic meaning.
6. Classify morphemes.
Ans: There are mainly two types of morpheme: Free morpheme and Bound morpheme.
7. What is free morpheme?
Ans: If any morpheme represents word itself, it is called free morpheme.
8. What is bound morpheme? [NU 2017]
Ans: A bound morpheme is a morpheme that is not a word itself but appears only as part of words, always in conjunction with a root and sometimes with other bound morphemes.
9. What is the difference between a free and a bound morpheme?
Ans: If any morpheme represents word itself, it is called free morpheme. But a bound morpheme cannot function alone. It is added to the free morpheme.
10. What are affixes?
Ans: Affixes are prefixes, suffixes and infixes which are added to the root word to form new words.
11. What is suffix and prefix?
Ans: A suffix is a letter or a group of letters that is usually added onto the end of words, to change the way a word fits into a sentence grammatically. On the other hand, a prefix is a letter or a group of letters that appears at the beginning of a word and changes the word's original meaning.
12. What is a lexical morpheme?
Ans: The words that have meaning by themselves are called lexical morphemes.
13. Why is "Student" a free morpheme?
Ans: "Student' is a free morpheme because it is the root word and no other bound morpheme is added to it.
14. What is Morphology?
Ans: Morphology is the study of words, their formation rules, and their relationship to other words in the same language.
15. What is the difference between syntax and morphology?
Ans: The difference between syntax and morphology is that syntax deals with the structure of sentences and morphology deals with the structure of words.
16. Give an example of blending.
Ans: Breakfast + lunch' = Brunch
17. What is abbreviation?
Ans: Abbreviation is a shortened or contracted form of a word or phrase as ‘Dr.’ for ‘Doctor’, ‘U.S’. for ‘United States’ etc.
18. What is acronym? [NU 2012, 2016]
Ans: An acronym is a word or name formed as an abbreviation from the initial components in a phrase or a word.
19. What is clipping?
Ans: Clipping is the process of forming a new word by dropping one or more syllables from a polysyllabic word, such as ‘cell’ from ‘cellular phone’.
20. What is derivation?
Ans: Derivation is the process of forming new words by adding the affixes to the root. Such as: develop + ment= development
21. What is conversion?
Ans: Conversion is a word-formation process that assigns an existing word to a different part of speech or syntactic category.
22. What is inflection?
Ans: Inflection is the change in the form of a word to mark such distinctions as tense, person, number, gender, mood, voice, and case.
23. What is back formation?
Ans: Back-formation is the process of forming a new word by removing actual or supposed affixes from another word.
24. What is compounding?
Ans: Compounding is a word formation process based on the combination of lexical elements.
25. What is a bound stem? [NU 2014]
Ans: A bound stem is a stem which cannot occur as a separate word apart from any other morpheme.
26. What is borrowing?
Ans: Borrowing means to borrow words and phrases from one language to another.
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