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Inflection is the process of adding inflectional morphemes that modify a verb's tense, mood, aspect, voice, person, or number or a noun's case, gender, or number, rarely affecting the word's meaning or class. Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding -s to the root dog to form dogs and adding -ed to wait to form waited.
Paralanguage, also known as vocalics, is a component of meta-communication that may modify meaning, give nuanced meaning, or convey emotion, by using suprasegmental techniques such as prosody, pitch, volume, intonation, etc. It is sometimes defined as relating to nonphonemic properties only.
The term "word" has no well-defined meaning. [6] Instead, two related terms are used in morphology: lexeme and word-form [definition needed]. Generally, a lexeme is a set of inflected word-forms that is often represented with the citation form in small capitals. [7] For instance, the lexeme eat contains the word-forms eat, eats, eaten, and ate.
An example is the conjugation of English verbs, which has become almost unchanging today (see also null morpheme), thus contrasting sharply, for example, with Latin, in which one verb has dozens of forms, each one expressing a different tense, aspect, mood, voice, person, and number.
For example, the Spanish verb comer ("to eat") has the first-person singular preterite tense form comí ("I ate"); the single suffix-í represents both the features of first-person singular agreement and preterite tense, instead of having a separate affix for each feature. Another illustration of fusionality is the Latin word bonus ("good").
The exchange above is an example of using intonation to highlight particular words and to employ rising and falling of pitch to change meaning. If read out loud, the pitch of the voice moves in different directions on the word "cat." In the first line, pitch goes up, indicating a question.
Creaky voice is frequent in a number of languages, including Finnish, where it serves as a cue for phrase-boundaries and turn-taking. [13] Some languages, such as Jalapa Mazatec , use vocal fry (creaky voice) as a linguistically significant marker; the presence or absence of vocal fry can then change the meaning of a word.
For example, chatters has the inflectional root or lemma chatter, but the lexical root chat. Inflectional roots are often called stems. A root, or a root morpheme, in the stricter sense, a mono-morphemic stem. The traditional definition allows roots to be either free morphemes or bound morphemes.