Essential Linguistic Concepts: Morphology and Grammar

Morphological Processes

• Prefix: Affixes attached to the left, or front, of a base.
• Infix: A kind of affix that is inserted inside a lexical root.
• Circumfixing: A two-part or discontinuous morpheme that surrounds a root.
• Ablaut: Signals a grammatical change by substituting one vowel for another in a lexical root.
• Derivation: The process by which we get new words from existing ones; the meaning changes and the word category might change. It creates new lexemes from existing ones.
• Inflection: The process by which we add grammatical information to a word; the meaning changes but the word category doesn’t change (e.g., singular/plural, 1st/2nd person, masculine/feminine, past/non-past).
• Compounding: The concatenation of two or more lexemes to form a single new lexeme.

Grammatical Features

• Person: A grammatical feature that distinguishes entities referred to in an utterance.
• Number: The grammatical property of nouns to be singular (one) or plural (more than one).
• Gender: Helps to indicate which adjectives, determiners, etc., are masculine, feminine, common, or neuter.
• Case: Distinguishes the roles played by the various participants in an event by indicating a particular noun’s relation to some other element in a clause or phrase.

Tense and Aspect

• Tense: The expression of the location in time of an action or state (e.g., present/past).
• Aspect: The expression of the temporal structure of an action or state. English expresses ongoing actions or states with or without distinct end points. English has four aspects: simple, progressive, perfect, and perfect-progressive.
• Progressive aspect: Expresses incomplete or ongoing actions or states at a specific time.
• Perfect aspect: Expresses the consequences resulting from a previous action or state.
• Perfect-progressive aspect: Expresses incomplete or ongoing actions or states that began in the past and continue to a specific time.
• Present participles: Or -ing forms, are formed by adding the suffix -ing to the base form of a verb.

Mood and Voice

• Mood: The expression of the modality of an action or state.
• Indicative mood: States an actuality or fact, assertion, denial, or question.
• Imperative mood: Makes a request, advice, or command.
• Subjunctive mood: Expresses unreal situations, possibility, and wish; often used with an "if" clause.
• Conditional mood: The form of a verb used to make requests or express under what condition something would happen. It uses helping or auxiliary verbs such as might, would, should, and could.
• Voice: The expression of relationships between the predicate and nominal functions.
• Active voice: The subject performs the action of or acts upon the verb, and the direct object receives the action.
• Passive voice: The subject receives the action of the transitive verb.