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