Grammar: Set of structural principles, rules, and constraints that make a language
Linguistic Competence: Knowledge to distinguish possible and impossible utterances of a lang
| Knowledge |
Type of Competence |
| Possible combinations of sounds |
Phonological competence |
| Possible composition of words |
Morphological competence |
| Possible sequence of words in a sentence |
Syntactic competence |
| Possible meaning of sentences |
Semantic competence |
Word: A free-form element (e.g. “disputing” is a word but “-ing” is not)
- Does not have to be in a fixed position relative to neighbours
- Can appear in isolation
- Simple Word: Monomorphemic, contains a single morpheme (e.g. cat)
- Complex Word: Polymorphemic, contains multiple morphemes (e.g. cats)
Morpheme: Smallest unit that has lexical or grammatical meaning
(e.g. sun, dispute, -ing, -er, are all morphemes. “disputing” is not)
- Root: A morpheme that’s the main part of a word
(e.g. cat)
- Affix: A morpheme that’s attached to a word (prefix/suffix/infix)
(e.g. -ing, -s, pre-)
- Base: The part which affix attaches to
- Free Morpheme: Is a word on its own
- Bound Morpheme: Can only make a word with other morphemes
Affix
- Inflectional Affix: A grammatical flag that doesn’t change word meaning/category
(e.g. -s in books, un- in unhappy, )
- Stem: The base to which an inflectional affix is attached.
- e.g. Number, Gender, Person, Tense, Case (role of words in a sentence)
- Derivational Affix: Change meaning or grammatical category
(e.g. -er in builder, -al to national)
Irregular Changes
Inflectional
- Internal Change: Irregular changes like sing → sang
- Suppletion: Phonologically unrelated morphemes like go → went