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Disfix
In linguistic morphology, a disfix is a subtractive morpheme, a morpheme manifest through the subtraction of segments from a root or stem. Although other forms of disfixation exist, the element subtracted is usually the final segment of the stem. Productive disfixation is extremely rare among the languages of the world but is important in the Muskogean languages of the southeastern United States. Similar subtractive morphs in languages such as French and Portuguese are marginal.Hardy & Montler, 1988, "Alabama H-infix and Disfixation", in Haas, ed., ''In Honor of Mary Haas: From the Haas Festival Conference On Native American Linguistics'', p. 399. Terminology The terms "disfix" and "disfixation" were proposed by Hardy and Timothy Montler in a 1988 paper on the morphology of the Alabama language. The process had been previously described by Leonard Bloomfield who called it a ''minus feature'', and Zellig Harris who called it a "minus morpheme". Other terms for the same or simila ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Affix
In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Affixes may be derivational, like English ''-ness'' and ''pre-'', or inflectional, like English plural ''-s'' and past tense ''-ed''. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes. Affixation is the linguistic process that speakers use to form different words by adding morphemes at the beginning (prefixation), the middle (infixation) or the end (suffixation) of words. Positional categories of affixes ''Prefix'' and ''suffix'' may be subsumed under the term ''adfix'', in contrast to ''infix.'' When marking text for interlinear glossing, as in the third column in the chart above, simple affixes such as prefixes and suffixes are separated from the stem with hyphens. Affixes which disrupt the stem, or which themselves are discontinuous, are often marked off with angle brackets. Reduplication is often shown with a tilde. Affixes which c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nonconcatenative Morphology
Nonconcatenative morphology, also called discontinuous morphology and introflection, is a form of word formation and inflection in which the root is modified and which does not involve stringing morphemes together sequentially. Types Apophony (including Ablaut and Umlaut) In English, for example, while plurals are usually formed by adding the suffix -s, certain words use nonconcatenative processes for their plural forms: *foot → feet ; Many irregular verbs form their past tenses, past participles, or both in this manner: *freeze → froze , frozen . This specific form of nonconcatenative morphology is known as ''base modification'' or ''ablaut,'' a form in which part of the root undergoes a phonological change without necessarily adding new phonological material. In traditional Indo-Europeanist usage, these changes are termed ''ablaut'' only when they result from vowel gradations in Proto-Indo-European. An example is the English stem ''s⌂ng'', resulting in the four ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Affix
In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Affixes may be derivational, like English ''-ness'' and ''pre-'', or inflectional, like English plural ''-s'' and past tense ''-ed''. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes. Affixation is the linguistic process that speakers use to form different words by adding morphemes at the beginning (prefixation), the middle (infixation) or the end (suffixation) of words. Positional categories of affixes ''Prefix'' and ''suffix'' may be subsumed under the term ''adfix'', in contrast to ''infix.'' When marking text for interlinear glossing, as in the third column in the chart above, simple affixes such as prefixes and suffixes are separated from the stem with hyphens. Affixes which disrupt the stem, or which themselves are discontinuous, are often marked off with angle brackets. Reduplication is often shown with a tilde. Affixes which c ... [...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] |
Zellig Harris
Zellig Sabbettai Harris (; October 23, 1909 – May 22, 1992) was an influential American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and discourse analysis and for the discovery of transformational structure in language. These developments from the first 10 years of his career were published within the first 25. His contributions in the subsequent 35 years of his career include transfer grammar, string analysis ( adjunction grammar), elementary sentence-differences (and decomposition lattices), algebraic structures in language, operator grammar, sublanguage grammar, a theory of linguistic information, and a principled account of the nature and origin of language. Biography Harris was born on October 23, 1909, in Balta, in the Podolia Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine). He was Jewish. In 1913 when he was four years old his family immigrated to Philadelphia, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Apocope
In phonology, apocope () is the loss (elision) of a word-final vowel. In a broader sense, it can refer to the loss of any final sound (including consonants) from a word. Etymology ''Apocope'' comes from the Greek () from () "cutting off", from () "away from" and () "to cut". Historical sound change In historical linguistics, ''apocope'' is often the loss of an unstressed vowel. Loss of an unstressed vowel or vowel and nasal * Latin → Portuguese (''sea'') * Vulgar Latin → Spanish (''bread'') * Vulgar Latin → French (''wolf'') * Proto-Germanic → Old, Middle, and Modern English ''land'' * Old English → Modern English ''love'' (noun) * Old English → Modern English ''love'' (verb) * The loss of a final unstressed vowel is a feature of southern dialects of Māori in comparison to standard Māori, for example the term ''kainga'' (village) is rendered in southern Māori as ''kaik''. A similar feature is seen in the dialects of Northern Italy. Loss of other so ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Suppletion
In linguistics and etymology, suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as "irregular" or even "highly irregular". The term "suppletion" implies that a gap in the paradigm was filled by a form "supplied" by a different paradigm. Instances of suppletion are overwhelmingly restricted to the most commonly used lexical items in a language. Irregularity and suppletion An irregular paradigm is one in which the derived forms of a word cannot be deduced by simple rules from the base form. For example, someone who knows only a little English can deduce that the plural of ''girl'' is ''girls'' but cannot deduce that the plural of ''man'' is ''men''. Language learners are often most aware of irregular verbs, but any part of speech with inflections can be irregular. For most synchronic purposes—first-language acquisition studies, psycho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Penult
Penult is a linguistics term for the second to last syllable of a word. It is an abbreviation of ''penultimate'', which describes the next-to-last item in a series. The penult follows the antepenult and precedes the ultima. For example, the main stress falls on the penult in such English words as ''banána'', and ''Mississíppi'', and just about all words ending in –ic such as músic, frántic, and phonétic. Occasionally, "penult" refers to the last word but one of a sentence. The terms are often used in reference to languages like Latin and Ancient Greek, where the position of the pitch accent or stress of a word only falls on one of the last three syllables, and sometimes in discussing poetic meter. In certain languages, such as Welsh and Polish, stress is always on the penult. in the World Atlas of Language S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Word Stem
In linguistics, a word stem is a part of a word responsible for its lexical meaning. The term is used with slightly different meanings depending on the morphology of the language in question. In Athabaskan linguistics, for example, a verb stem is a root that cannot appear on its own and that carries the tone of the word. Athabaskan verbs typically have two stems in this analysis, each preceded by prefixes. In most cases, a word stem is not modified during its declension, while in some languages it can be modified (apophony) according to certain morphological rules or peculiarities, such as sandhi. For example in Polish: ("city"), but ("in the city"). In English: "sing", "sang", "sung". Uncovering and analyzing cognation between word stems and roots within and across languages has allowed comparative philology and comparative linguistics to determine the history of languages and language families. Usage In one usage, a word stem is a form to which affixes can be attached. T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre and its stress patterns. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ''ignite'' is made of two syllables: ''ig'' and ''nite''. Syllabic writing began several hundred years before the first letters. The earliest recorded syllables are on tablets written around 2800 BC in the Sumerian city of Ur. This shift from pictograms to syllables has been called "the most important advance in the history of writing". A word that consists of a single syllable (like English ''dog'') is called a monosyllable (and is said to be ''monosyllabic''). Similar terms include disyllable (and ''disyllabic''; also '' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Penultimate
Penult is a linguistics term for the second to last syllable of a word. It is an abbreviation of ''penultimate'', which describes the next-to-last item in a series. The penult follows the antepenult and precedes the ultima. For example, the main stress falls on the penult in such English words as ''banána'', and ''Mississíppi'', and just about all words ending in –ic such as músic, frántic, and phonétic. Occasionally, "penult" refers to the last word but one of a sentence. The terms are often used in reference to languages like Latin and Ancient Greek, where the position of the pitch accent or stress of a word only falls on one of the last three syllables, and sometimes in discussing poetic meter. In certain languages, such as Welsh and Polish, stress is always on the penult. in the World Atlas of Language S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pluractionality
In linguistics, pluractionality, or verbal number, if not used in its aspectual sense, is a grammatical aspect that indicates that the action or participants of a verb is/are plural. This differs from frequentative or iterative aspects in that the latter have no implication for the number of participants of the verb. Often a pluractional transitive verb indicates that the object is plural, whereas in a pluractional intransitive verb the subject is plural. This is sometimes taken as an element of ergativity in the language. However, the essence of pluractionality is that the action of the verb is plural, whether because several people perform the action, it is performed on several objects, or it is performed several times. The exact interpretation may depend on the semantics of the verb as well as the context in which it is used. The lack of verbal number does not generally mean that the action and participants are singular, but rather that there is no particularly notable plur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
