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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.
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 independent meaning.
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. For example, the noun green in golf (referring to a ...
Compounding is the processing of combining two bases, where each base may be a fully-fledged word. For example: desktop is formed by combining desk and top; railway is formed by combining rail and way; firefighter is formed by combining fire and fighter [5] Compounding is a topic relevant to syntax, semantics, and morphology. [2]
As is often the case with derivational morphology, many English prefixes can only be added to bases of particular lexical categories (or "parts of speech"). For example, the prefix re-meaning "again, back" is only added to verb bases as in rebuild, reclaim, reuse, resell, re-evaluate, resettle. It cannot be added to bases of other lexical ...
Derivational morphology is a process by which a grammatical expression is turned into a noun phrase. For example, in the sentence "Combine the two chemicals," combine acts as a verb. This can be turned into a noun via the addition of the suffix -ation, as in "The experiment involved the combination of the two chemicals." There are many suffixes ...
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 and which does not involve ...
A well-known example of grammaticalization is that of the process in which the lexical cluster let us, for example in "let us eat", is reduced to let's as in "let's you and me fight". Here, the phrase has lost its lexical meaning of "allow us" and has become an auxiliary introducing a suggestion, the pronoun 'us' reduced first to a suffix and ...