Morphology and Word Formation

Active vocabulary

Words used in speech and writing.

Passive vocabulary

Words known but not used.

Etymology

Study of the origin of words.

Word formation processes

Methods of creating new words, including coinage, borrowing, derivation, conversion, compounding, blendings, and shortening.

Coinage

Newly invented words.

Eponyms

A type of coinage involving the use of someone's name to create a word.

Borrowing

Taking words from another language, usually with phonological modifications.

Calques

Translation of elements of a word or phrase from another language.

Derivation

Forming new words by using known affixes from existing words.

Conversion

Changing the part of speech of a word.

Compounding

Attaching one lexeme to another to form a new word.

Blending

Combining two words where parts of each appear.

Shortening

Generic term for creating words by removing pieces.

Clipping

A type of shortening where whole syllables or multiple syllables are removed.

Abbreviations

A type of shortening that typically removes vowels.

Initialisms

A form of acronym spelled as a series of letters (e.g., FBI, CIA).

Backronym

Formed from letters in an existing word rather than from the first letters of a phrase.

Backformation

Clipping a word back and converting it to a different part of speech.

Semantic shift

Evolution of a word's usage over time.

Morphology

The analysis of the structure of words.

Morphemes

The smallest meaningful units of language.

Inflection

Changes words to fit grammatical contexts without creating new words.

Free Morphemes

Morphemes that can stand alone and do not require additional morphemes.

Bound Morpheme

Morphemes that must be attached to a base.

Root

A type of morpheme that other morphemes can attach to.

Base

Words to which other morphemes can be added.

Lexical morphemes

Carry most meaning in sentences and can serve as roots.

Functional morphemes

Morphemes that hold sentences together but cannot serve as roots.

Inflectional morphology

Word parts that indicate grammatical meaning (tense, number, etc.).

Derivational morphology

Adding prefixes and suffixes to create new meanings.

Derivational morpheme

A bound morpheme used to make new words of a different grammatical category.

Inflectional morpheme

A bound morpheme indicating grammatical function.

Isolating languages

Languages with almost one morpheme per word and little inflection.

Analytic languages

Languages with little inflection but more compounding and affixation.

Synthetic languages

Languages combining meanings in words with multiple morphemes.

Polysynthetic Agglutinative language

Build meaning by adding morphemes to express sentence meaning.

Affixation

Adding morphemes to bases.

Affixes

Morphemes attached to a base or stem.

Suffixes

Affixes that attach to the end of a base.

Prefixes

Affixes that attach to the beginning of a base.

Infixes

Affixes inserted inside of the root.

Infixing

Splitting a root word with a grammatical morpheme.

Circumfixing

Surrounding a root word with a grammatical morpheme.

Reduplication

Repetition of a word or syllable to change its meaning.

Ablaut

Process of vowel change in a root affecting tense or number.

Suppletion

Substituting one root for a phonetically unrelated one.

Allomorph

A closely related set of morphs.

Morph

The actual form used as part of a word.