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Bound And Free Morphemes
In linguistics, a bound morpheme is a morpheme (the elementary unit of morphosyntax) that can appear only as part of a larger expression; a free morpheme (or unbound morpheme) is one that can stand alone. A bound morpheme is a type of bound form, and a free morpheme is a type of free form. Occurrence in isolation A form is a free form if it can occur in isolation as a complete utterance, e.g. ''Johnny is running'', or ''Johnny'', or ''running'' (this can occur as the answer to a question such as ''What is he doing?''). A form that cannot occur in isolation is a bound form, e.g. ''-y'', ''is'', and ''-ing'' (in ''Johnny is running''). Non-occurrence in isolation is given as the primary criterion for boundness in most linguistics textbooks. Roots and affixes Affixes are bound by definition. English language affixes are almost exclusively prefixes or suffixes: ''pre-'' in "precaution" and ''-ment'' in "shipment". Affixes may be inflectional, indicating how a certain word relates to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguistics is concerned with both the cognitive and social aspects of language. It is considered a scientific field as well as an academic discipline; it has been classified as a social science, natural science, cognitive science,Thagard, PaulCognitive Science, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). or part of the humanities. Traditional areas of linguistic analysis correspond to phenomena found in human linguistic systems, such as syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences); semantics (meaning); morphology (structure of words); phonetics (speech sounds and equivalent gestures in sign languages); phonology (the abstract sound system of a particular language); and pragmatics (how social con ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Language
Chinese (, especially when referring to written Chinese) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China. About 1.3 billion people (or approximately 16% of the world's population) speak a variety of Chinese as their first language. Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be variants of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered separate languages in a family. Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin (with about 800 million speakers, or 66%), followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shangh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fossil Word
A fossil word is a word that is broadly wikt:obsolete#Adjective, obsolete but remains in current use due to its presence within an idiom, word sense, or phrase. An example for a word sense is 'navy' in 'merchant navy', which means 'commercial fleet' (although that sense of navy is obsolete elsewhere). An example for a phrase is 'wikt:in point, in point' (relevant), which is retained in the larger phrases 'wikt:case in point, case in point' (also 'case on point' in the legal context) and 'wikt:in point of fact, in point of fact', but is rarely used outside of a legal context. English-language examples * ''ado'', as in "wikt:without further ado, without further ado" or "wikt:with no further ado, with no further ado" or "wikt:much ado about nothing, much ado about nothing", although the homologous form "to-do" remains attested ("make a to-do", "a big to-do", etc.) * ''amok'', as in "wikt:run amok, run amok" * ''bandy'', as in "wikt:bandy, bandy about" or "wikt:bandy, bandy-legged" ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fixed Expression
A phraseme, also called a set phrase, idiomatic phrase, multi-word expression (in computational linguistics), or idiom, is a multi-word or multi-morphemic utterance whose components include at least one that is selectionally constrained or restricted by linguistic convention such that it is not freely chosen. In the most extreme cases, there are expressions such as ''X kicks the bucket'' ≈ ‘person X dies of natural causes, the speaker being flippant about X’s demise’ where the unit is selected as a whole to express a meaning that bears little or no relation to the meanings of its parts. All of the words in this expression are chosen restrictedly, as part of a chunk. At the other extreme, there are collocations such as ''stark naked'', ''hearty laugh'', or ''infinite patience'' where one of the words is chosen freely (''naked'', ''laugh'', and ''patience'', respectively) based on the meaning the speaker wishes to express while the choice of the other (intensifying) word (''st ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Synthetic Language
A synthetic language uses inflection or agglutination to express Syntax, syntactic relationships within a sentence. Inflection is the addition of morphemes to a root word that assigns grammatical property to that word, while agglutination is the combination of two or more morphemes into one word. The information added by morphemes can include indications of a word's grammatical category, such as whether a word is the subject or object in the sentence. Morphology can be either relational or derivational. While a derivational morpheme changes the syntactic category, lexical categories of words, an inflectional morpheme does not. In the first example below, the adjective ''fast'' followed by the suffix ''-er'' yields ''faster'', which is still an adjective. However, the verb ''teach'' followed by the suffix ''-er'' yields ''teacher'', which is a noun. The first case is an example of inflection and the latter derivation. * ''fast'' (adjective, positive) vs. ''faster'' (adjective, co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Analytic Language
In linguistic typology, an analytic language is a language that conveys relationships between words in sentences primarily by way of ''helper'' words (particles, prepositions, etc.) and word order, as opposed to using inflections (changing the form of a word to convey its role in the sentence). For example, the English-language phrase "The cat chases the ball" conveys the fact that the cat is acting on the ball ''analytically'' via word order. This can be contrasted to synthetic languages, which rely heavily on inflections to convey word relationships (e.g., the phrases "The cat chase''s'' the ball" and "The cat chase''d'' the ball" convey different time frames via changing the form of the word ''chase''). Most languages are not purely analytic, but many rely primarily on analytic syntax. Typically, analytic languages have a low morpheme-per-word ratio, especially with respect to inflectional morphemes. A grammatical construction can similarly be ''analytic'' if it uses unboun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Word Order
In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic sub-domains are also of interest. The primary word orders that are of interest are * the ''constituent order'' of a clause, namely the relative order of subject, object, and verb; * the order of modifiers (adjectives, numerals, demonstratives, possessives, and adjuncts) in a noun phrase; * the order of adverbials. Some languages use relatively fixed word order, often relying on the order of constituents to convey grammatical information. Other languages—often those that convey grammatical information through inflection—allow more flexible word order, which can be used to encode pragmatic information, such as topicalisation or focus. However, even languages with flexible word ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
