top hat chapter 3

Morphological Trees

Morphological Trees

Diagrams that represent the internal structure of words, often referred to as word trees.

Morpheme

The smallest grammatical unit in a language; it can be a word or a part of a word.

Free Morpheme

A morpheme that can stand alone as a word.

Affixation

The process of adding a prefix or suffix to a base word to create new words or grammatical forms.

Allomorph

Different phonetic forms of a morpheme that have the same meaning.

Derivational Affix

An affix that changes the meaning or syntactic category of a base word.

Inflectional Affix

An affix that modifies a word to express different grammatical categories.

Compounding

The process of combining two or more free morphemes to form a new word.

Endocentric Compound

A compound whose meaning is based on the head of the compound, typically the rightmost element.

Exocentric Compound

A compound whose meaning is not derived from the head, making it unpredictable.

Reduplication

A morphological process that involves repeating a whole or part of a morpheme to create new words.

Zero Derivation

A process where a word changes its syntactic category without any morphological change in its form.

Clipping

A process that shortens a word by deleting one or more syllables.

Blending

Creating new words from parts of two existing words.

Backformation

The process of creating a new word by removing a supposed affix from an existing word.

Acronyms

Words formed from the initial letters of a series of words, pronounced as a single word.

Initialisms

Abbreviated forms of phrases, pronounced by saying each letter individually.

Coinage

The creation of entirely new words that did not previously exist.

Eponymy

Words that are derived from the names of people.

Internal Change

A morphological process involving the substitution of a non-morphemic element with another to create grammatical distinctions.

Suppletion

The phenomenon where an inflected form of a word is replaced with an unrelated morpheme.