Part 1: True or False?

1. Phonemes are meaningful units that can be combined to form phrases and sentences. F
2. In a language there are two main classes of words: content words and function words. T
3. A morpheme can be divided any further into smaller recognizable or meaningful parts. F
4. “Desire” has 2 morphemes. F
5. Derivational affixes are used to form new words. They can be both prefixes and suffixes. For
example, they are {un-} in untie, {-er} in worker, {-ly} in quickly. T
6. Grammatical morphemes express grammatical relationships between a word and its contexts such
as plurality and past tense (i.e. the inflections of words). T
7. Grammatical morphemes which are separate words are called function words (articles, pronouns,
and conjunctions). T
8. Morphophonemes are variations in the form of phonemes because of phonetic factors. The
morphophoneme { -S} may be pronounced as [s], [z], [iz] in books, pens, and boxes. T
9. Compounding is a process that forms new words not from bound affixes but from two or more
independent words. T
10. A blend is a new word made out of the shortened forms of two words. T
Part 2: Gap filling
1. A morpheme is the smallest meaningful linguistic units which can occur on its own in speech
and writing.
2. The content words in English are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs which make up
the largest part of the vocabulary.
3. Conjunctions, prepositions, articles, and pronouns belong to function words.
4. Inflectional morphemes, which are bound morphemes, do not create new lexemes. They are only
used to make a word to fit into its context (phrase or clause). For example, it is the morpheme {–s}
in the sentence “Bill walks to school everyday”.
5. Lexical morphemes are used for the construction of new words, such as {black} and {bird} in
blackbird, and affixes such as {un-}, {-ise}, {-dom}, {-less}.
6. The _____ is that part of a word which carries the main meaning and which is left after all affixes
have been removed. In the word meaningfulness, for instance, removing {–ing}, {-ful}, and {–ness}
leaves the _____ mean.
7. The sound or group of sounds that represents one morpheme is the morph of that morpheme. In
this way the morph of the morpheme {leave} is [liv], and in leaves the morph of the inflectional
morpheme {–s} is [z].
8. In the words incorrect, illegal, irregular, impossible, in-, il-, ir-, im- are the _____ of the negation
morpheme {iN-}.
9. transcription → transcript are called backformation.
10. Conversion is the process by which a word belonging to one word class gets used as part of
another word class without the addition of an affix. Words produced by conversion are mainly
nouns, verbs, and adjectives.