Morphology and Word Formation

  • Active vocabulary = words used in speech and writing 

  • Passive vocabulary = words known but not used 

  • Etymology = study of origin of words 

  • Word formation processes = coinage, borrowing, derivation + conversion, compounding, blendings, shortening 

  • Coinage = newly invented words 

  • Eponyms = type of coinage, involve the use of someone's name in creating a word 

  • Borrowing = involves taking words from another language (usually with phological modifications) 

  • Calques = translation of elements of word or phrase from another language 

  • Derivation = forming new words through using known affixes from existing words 

  • Conversion = changing the part of speech of a word 

  • Compounding = when one lexeme is attached to another lexem to form a new word 

  • Blending = two words ‘smudged’ together where parts of each word appear 

  • Shortening = generic term referring to any time a word is fromed by having pieces removed 

  • Clipping = type of shortening; a word being taken from another word, usually entire syllables or multiple syllables 

  • Abbreviations = type of shortening; similar to clipping, typically removes vowels 

  • Initialisms = form of acronym but is spelled in series of letters (FBI, CIA) 

  • Backronym = formed from letters in an existing word rather than words formed from the first letters of existing phrase (bae, SOS) 

  • Backformation = word being clipped back and then converted to a different part of speech (television, to televise) 

  • Semantic shift = form of language change referencing evolution of the word's usage 

  • Morphology = the analysis of the structure of words 

  • {Morphemes} = the components of words, the smallest meaningful unit of language 

  • Inflection = doesn't create new words, changes words to better fit grammatical contexts. 

  • Free Morphemes = morphemes that can stand on their own and don't another morpheme to appear (Hunter) 

  • Bound morpheme = morphemes that must be attached to a base (Hunter) 

  • Root = a type of morpheme that other morphemes (and other roots) can be attached to ({humid} is the root of ‘dehumidifer’) 

  • Base = words that other morphemes can be added to (‘bat’ serves as base for ‘batty’) 

  • Lexical morphemes = carry most of the meaning in sentences and can serve as roots of complex words that have more than one morpheme; they have meaning 

  • Functional morphemes = the ‘glue’ that holds the sentence together; can't serve as the roots of more complex words (determiners, articles, auxiliary verbs, pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions) 

  • Inflectional morphology = word parts that carry meaning (tense, aspect, number) 

  • Derivational morphology = prefixes + suffixes are added to word to create new meanings 

  • Derivational morpheme = a bound morpheme used to make new words of a different grammatical category ({-er}, {-ly}, {-ish}) 

  • Inflectional morpheme = a bound morpheme used to indicate grammatical function of a word ({-s}, {-’s}) 

  • Isolating languages = have almost one morpheme per word and little inflection  

  • Analytic languages = languages with little inflection but more compounding and affixation in word formation 

  • Synthetic languages = languages that take different meanings that may be indicated by pronouns + prepositions and combine those meanings into the word, having words with multiple morphemes adding meaning 

  • Polysynthetic Agglutinative language = build meaning by adding morphemes to words that express the meaning of a sentence 

  • Affixation = adding morphemes to bases 

  • Affixes = morphemes attached to a base or stem 

  • Suffixes = affixes that attach to the right (end) of the base 

  • Prefixes = affixes that attach to the left (end) of the base 

  • Infixes = inserting the affixes inside of the root 

  • Infixing = splitting a root word with a grammatical morpheme 

  • Circumfixing = surrounding a root word with a grammatical morpheme 

  • Reduplication = the repetition of an entire word or single syllable to change it (‘I like him’ to ‘I like-like him’) 

  • Ablaut = process of vowels within a root change, leading to a change in tense or number (fall vs. fell, man vs. men) 

  • Suppletion = completely substituting one root for a phonetically unrelated one (Is vs. Was) 

  • Allomorph = one of a closely related set of morphs 

  • Morph = actual form used as part of a word (/əz/, /z/, and /s/ are all allomorphs of the plural morpheme {-s})