Studied by 46 peopleWhat is a morpheme?
the smallest units of meaning (or function) that cannot be broken down further and remain meaningful (or functional);
ex: looked; look-ed with look being meaningful and -ed being functional
Derivational morpheme
an affix that either clearly changes the meaning of the root OR changes it’s lexical category
Inflectional morpheme
an affix that adds a gramatical function that is required for a sentence to make sense
ALL of them in English: pluralizing suffix - dog-s possessive suffix - Mary-'s 3rd person singular present tense - love-s past tense suffix - love-d past participle - eat-en or walk-ed progressive participle - eat-ing comparative - bigg-er superlative - bigg-est
Acronym
a morphological process; words that are formed by the first letters of a string of words and are pronounced as a word would
ex: NASA (from National Aeronautics and Space Administration), scuba (from Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus)
Alphabetic initialism
a morphological process; words that are formed by the first letters of a string of words in which each letter is pronounced
ex: ER (from Emergency Room), CD (from Compact Disk)
Back formation
a morphological process; forming of new words by removing a part of a word that is homophonous with an affix, but isn’t actually part of the word
ex: burgle (from burglar), donate (from donation)
Blending
a morphological process; a word that is formed by taking shortened portions of two words and putting them together
ex: brunch (from breakfast and lunch), Spanglish (from Spanish and English)
Clipping
a morphological process; deleting a section of a word to form a shorter word
ex: phone (from telephone), bro (from brother), ad (from advertisement), photo op (from photographic opportunity)
Compounding
a morphological process; a word made up of two or more full roots; not necessisarily hyphenated; to test if its a true compund, use the stress test (leftmost word takes the stress) or affixiation
ex: White House vs white house, highchair can’t be higherchair
Trade names
a morphological process; words that are formed based on a brand’s name
ex: q-tip (referring to any cotton swap), google (referring to any search engine)
Note
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