Word formation, morphemes, and affixation processes from an intro linguistics course.
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- What is a morpheme?
- The smallest unit of language that carries meaning or grammatical function.
- What is a free morpheme?
- A morpheme that can stand alone as an independent word.
- What is a bound morpheme?
- A morpheme that must be attached to another morpheme to have meaning.
- What is a root morpheme?
- The central, unchanging part of a word that carries the core meaning.
- What is an affix?
- A bound morpheme attached to a root or stem to modify its meaning or function.
- What is a prefix?
- An affix attached at the beginning of a word.
- What is a suffix?
- An affix attached at the end of a word.
- What is an infix?
- An affix inserted in the middle of a word root.
- What is a circumfix?
- An affix with two parts, one at the beginning and one at the end of a root.
- What is derivation?
- A morphological process that creates new words by adding affixes to a base form, often changing word class or meaning.
- What is inflection?
- A morphological process that modifies a word to express grammatical properties without changing its core meaning or part of speech.
- What is compounding?
- A word formation process that combines two or more free morphemes to create a new word.
- What is a compound word?
- A word made from two or more independent words joined together with a new, unified meaning.
- What is blending?
- A word formation process that combines parts of two words to create a new word.
- Give an example of a blend.
- Examples include 'smog' (smoke and fog), 'internet' (international and network), 'motel' (motor and hotel).