Morphology: the area of linguistic that deals with the structure of the words
Morpheme: smaller meaningful units (internal stability and indivisibility)
FREE / BOUND: independent, stand-alone / needs to be attached to a root
FUNCTIONAL (GRAMMATICAL) / LEXICAL: depending on the context and meaning
AFFIXATION
INFLECTIONAL: affixes that define basic grammatical categories (tense and
plurality). It does not change meaning
DERIVATIONAL: creates new words (prefixes and suffixes = time, number,
privation, negation, nominaliser, verbalizer)
REDUPLICATION: process forming new words in which a word is doubled (goody-
goody, nitty-gritty)
CONVERSION: functional shift, words change in meaning but not in form (run, look,
head, shoulder, daily)
COMPOUDING: combination of two or more roots (makeup, hand out)
BLENDS (Macedonia): compounding + clipping off (SMOG)
BACK FORMATION: deriving elemental form by deleting affixes
SHORTENING: clipping various parts at the end or start (ad/advert, burger)
SAXON GENITIVE: form of the possessive with an apostrophe, survived from the Old
English (Anglo-Saxon); refers to an antecedent (head noun)
Possession (belonging to, ownership)
Place reference, shops (greengrocer’s)
Qualities
Place where someone spends time or works
Time, duration, monetary value, length
we use the of-construction with inanimate and abstract nouns (academic writing,
tends to add new information)
