Chapter 4: Morphology

 
grammatical morpheme: type of morpheme encoding grammatical meanings and relations. 
 
head: constituent of a complex lexeme which determines its grammatical and fundamental 
semantic properties. 
 
inflectional morpheme: type of bound morpheme creating word-forms and marking 
grammatical categories and relation, typically positioned at the very end of words. 

inflectional morphology: branch of morphology dealing with the bound morphological 
markers of grammatical categories and relations. 

initialism: product of acronym-formation which is pronounced as a sequence of individual 
letters (e.g. IRC  internet relay chat). 

lexical morpheme: type of morphemes encoding rich conceptual meanings. 
 
modifier: constituent of a complex lexeme which specifies the head. 
 
morpheme: smallest meaning-bearing unit of a language. 
 
morphological conditioning: dependence of the choice of allomorphs on the final morpheme 
of the stem; pertains to „irregular‟ allomorphs, e.g. sang or mice. 

phonological conditioning: dependence of the choice of allomorphs on the final phoneme of 
the stem; pertains to „regular allomorphs, e.g. kissed or dogs. 
possessive compound: type of exocentric compound based on a possessive relation between 
the meaning encoded by the compound constituents and the meaning of the exocentric head 
(e.g. redbreast „ a bird that has a red breast‟). 

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prefixation: type of typically word-class-preserving word-formation process involving the 
attachment of a bound lexical morpheme at the front of a base (e.g. unfair, disagree).