Word Analysis

Core Morphological Terms

Morphology: The study of the internal structure of words and how they are formed from smaller meaningful units called morphemes.

Morpheme: The smallest meaningful unit of language that cannot be further divided. For example, in "cats", "cat" and "-s" are morphemes.

Root: The core meaning-bearing part of a word that remains after removing all affixes. Example: "play" in "playing", "played", "plays".

Affix: A morpheme that is attached to a root to modify its meaning or grammatical function. Includes prefixes, suffixes, and infixes.

Inflectional Morphology: Word formation that changes grammatical features (like tense, number, person) without changing the word's core meaning or category.

Derivational Morphology: Word formation that creates new words, often changing the grammatical category (e.g., "happy" → "happiness").

Grammatical Features

Gender: A grammatical category that classifies nouns and related words. In this experiment: male, female, or NA (not applicable).

Number: Indicates whether a word refers to one (singular) or more than one (plural) entity.

Person: Indicates the relationship between the speaker, listener, and the subject of the sentence:

  • First person: speaker (I, we)
  • Second person: listener (you)
  • Third person: others (he, she, they)

Case: Indicates the grammatical function of a noun in a sentence. In this experiment, refers to script type (Devanagari, Roman).

Tense: Indicates when an action occurs relative to the time of speaking (present, past, future).

Aspect: Indicates how an action is viewed in terms of its completion or duration (perfect, continuous, habitual).

Language-Specific Terms

Devanagari: The writing system used for Hindi and several other Indian languages.

Roman: The Latin alphabet writing system used for English and many other languages.

Postposition: A word that follows a noun to indicate grammatical relationships (similar to prepositions in English). Common in Hindi: का(kaa), की(kii), के(ke), को(ko), में(meM).

Oblique Case: A grammatical case used when a postposition follows a noun in Hindi.

Direct Case: A grammatical case used when no postposition follows a noun in Hindi.

Analysis Terms

Morphological Analysis: The process of breaking down words into their constituent morphemes and identifying their grammatical features.

Lexical Category: The grammatical class of a word (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction).

Word Form: A specific inflectional or derivational variant of a root word.

Morphological Richness: The degree to which a language uses inflectional morphology to encode grammatical information.