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Back-formation. In linguistics, back-formation is the process of forming a new word by removing actual affixes, or parts of the word that is re-analyzed as an affix, from other words to create a base. [5] Examples include: the verb headhunt is a back-formation of headhunter. the verb edit is formed from the noun editor [5]
v. t. e. In linguistics, morphology ( mor-FOL-ə-jee[ 1]) is the study of words, including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language. [ 2][ 3] Most approaches to morphology investigate the structure of words in terms of morphemes, which are the smallest units in a language with some ...
Morphological derivation, in linguistics, is the process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix, such as un- or -ness. For example, unhappy and happiness derive from the root word happy. It is differentiated from inflection, which is the modification of a word to form different grammatical categories ...
Compound (linguistics) In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme (less precisely, a word or sign) that consists of more than one stem. Compounding, composition or nominal composition is the process of word formation that creates compound lexemes. Compounding occurs when two or more words or signs are joined to make a longer word or sign.
Inflection. In linguistic morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation [ 1] in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. [ 2] The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, while the ...
Conversion (word formation) In linguistics, conversion, also called zero derivation or null derivation, is a kind of word formation involving the creation of a word (of a new part of speech) from an existing word (of a different part of speech) without any change in form, [ 1] which is to say, derivation using only zero.
Nonconcatenative morphology. Diagram of one version of the derivation of the Arabic word muslim in autosegmental phonology, with root consonants associating (shown by dotted grey lines). Nonconcatenative morphology, also called discontinuous morphology and introflection, is a form of word formation and inflection in which the root is modified ...
t. e. Etymology ( / ˌɛtɪˈmɒlədʒi /, ET-im-OL-ə-jee [1]) is the scientific study of the origin and evolution of a word's semantic meaning across time, including its constituent morphemes and phonemes. [2] [3] It is a subfield of historical linguistics, philology, and semiotics, and draws upon comparative semantics, morphology, pragmatics ...