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.