Understanding Morphology and Linguistic Terms
What is Morphology?
Morphology is the branch of linguistics concerned with the study of word structure and word formation. It focuses on the internal structure of words and forms a core part of linguistic study.
Contrastive Morphology
Contrastive morphology is the branch of linguistics that involves a contrastive analysis of the morphological structure of one language with another.
Parts of Speech
Noun
A noun is a word used to name people, objects, places, feelings, animals, and other entities.
Verb
A verb is the most important word in a sentence, expressing actions, states, and processes.
Adjective
An adjective is a word used to express properties or characteristics of the noun it complements.
Adverb
Adverbs are invariable words that modify the meaning of verbs (e.g., casualmente, definitely).
Preposition
A preposition is a word used to establish a dependency relationship between two or more words (e.g., sobre, into).
Conjugation
Conjugation refers to the different forms of a verb, such as voice, mode, time, aspect, number, and person (e.g., y, or).
Article
An article is a word that accompanies the noun and always precedes it (e.g., the, a, an, los, las).
Pronoun
A pronoun is a word that designates a thing without using its name, common or proper (e.g., Nosotros, they).
Morphemes
What is a morpheme? It is the smallest unit of language that has lexical or grammatical meaning and cannot be divided into smaller significant units.
Words
A word is the smallest independent unit of a language, a fundamental building block.
Content Words
Content words provide meaning and content. Prefixes or suffixes can be added to change their meaning or use. They are identifiable through signal words in sentences.
Functional Words
Functional words provide structure for open-class parts of speech. They do not change form or meaning and are often signal words themselves.
Spanish Grammatical Terms
Flexion
Flexion (inflection) is the alteration that words undergo through constituent morphemes according to grammatical or categorical meaning to express their different functions within the sentence.
Derivación
Derivación (derivation) is one of the procedures for word formation, allowing languages to designate concepts semantically related to others, in a sense considered primitive, by adding affixes.
Objeto Directo
Objeto directo (direct object) is a syntactic element that indicates what directly receives the action.
Objeto Indirecto
Objeto indirecto (indirect object) is a syntactic element that indicates the recipient of the action. It is indirect because it is introduced by a preposition, which can be a or para. It can be found in sentences with transitive verbs along with a direct object. In those cases, it is the recipient of the action.
Latin Grammatical Terms
The nominative is named from nominare (to name) because it has the virtue of naming the noun purely and simply.
The genitive, from the Latin genitivus (that engenders), indicates the dependence or generation of one thing by another.
The dative, from the Latin dativus (that gives), indicates the action of giving or attribution.
The accusative, from ad (under) and cudere (to strike), indicates the action of the verb on the noun, the object on which the action falls.
The vocative, from vocativus, derived from vocare (to call), calls or has the force of calling.
The ablative, from ablativus (that takes away), expresses the idea of extraction, abduction, or separation.