Morphology Glossary
25 essential terms — because precise language is the foundation of clear thinking in Morphology.
Showing 25 of 25 terms
A bound morpheme attached to a root or stem, including prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and circumfixes.
A morphological process in which words are formed by concatenating distinct morphemes, each with a single clear meaning.
A variant form of a morpheme that is conditioned by its phonological or morphological environment.
The creation of a new word by removing a real or supposed affix from an existing word.
A word-formation process that merges parts of two or more words into a single new word.
A morpheme that cannot stand alone as an independent word and must be attached to another morpheme.
An affix that consists of two parts, one placed before and one after the root, functioning as a single morphological unit.
The word-formation process of shortening a polysyllabic word without changing its meaning.
Combining two or more free morphemes to create a single new word with its own meaning.
A word-formation process that changes a word's grammatical category without adding any visible affix.
A bound morpheme that occurs in only one word and carries no independently identifiable meaning.
A word-formation process that adds affixes to a base to create new words, often changing grammatical category.
A morpheme that can stand alone as an independent word with meaning.
A language type in which individual morphemes encode multiple grammatical categories simultaneously.
An affix inserted within a root or stem rather than being attached at the beginning or end.
The modification of a word to express grammatical relationships such as tense, number, person, or case without changing its lexical category.
The smallest unit of language that carries meaning or grammatical function.
The classification of languages based on their dominant patterns of word formation and morpheme organization.
The study of the interaction between morphological and phonological processes in word formation.
The complete set of inflected forms of a word, showing all its grammatical variants.
A single form that expresses two or more morphemes simultaneously, where the morphemes cannot be clearly segmented.
The degree to which a morphological rule or pattern can be freely applied to create new words in a language.
The core morpheme of a word that carries its primary lexical meaning after all affixes are removed.
The part of a word to which inflectional affixes are added; may consist of a root alone or a root plus derivational affixes.
An irregular morphological process in which a word form is completely replaced by a phonologically unrelated form to express a grammatical distinction.