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Informally, word formation rules form "new" words (more accurately, new lexemes), and inflection rules yield variant forms of the "same" word (lexeme). The distinction between inflection and word formation is not at all clear-cut. There are many examples for which linguists fail to agree whether a given rule is inflection or word formation.
the word televise is a back-formation of television; The process is motivated by analogy: edit is to editor as act is to actor. This process leads to a lot of denominal verbs. The productivity of back-formation is limited, with the most productive forms of back-formation being hypocoristics. [5]
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.
In linguistics, blocking is the morphological phenomenon in which a possible form for a word cannot surface because it is "blocked" by another form whose features are the most appropriate to the surface form's environment. [1] More basically, it may also be construed as the "non-occurrence of one form due to the simple existence of another." [2]
Inflection of the Scottish Gaelic lexeme for 'dog', which is cù for singular, chù for dual with the number dà ('two'), and coin for plural. 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 ...
Also syntactically, the compound word behaves like the main word – the whole compound word (or phrase) inherits the word class and inflection rules of the main word. That is to say, since "fish" and "shape" are nouns, "starfish" and "star shape" must also be nouns, and they must take plural forms as "starfish" and "star shapes", definite ...
Affixes may be inflectional, indicating how a certain word relates to other words in a larger phrase, or derivational, changing either the part of speech or the actual meaning of a word. [6] Most roots in English are free morphemes (e.g. examin-in examination, which can occur in isolation: examine), but others are bound (e.g. bio-in biology).
Derivation can be contrasted with other types of word formation such as compounding. Derivational affixes are bound morphemes – they are meaningful units, but can only normally occur when attached to another word. In that respect, derivation differs from compounding by which free morphemes are combined (lawsuit, Latin professor).