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Morphological derivation, in
linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
, is the process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a
prefix A prefix is an affix which is placed before the Word stem, stem of a word. Adding it to the beginning of one word changes it into another word. For example, when the prefix ''un-'' is added to the word ''happy'', it creates the word ''unhappy'' ...
or
suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry ...
, such as For example, ''unhappy'' and ''happiness'' derive from the
root word A root (or root word) is the core of a word that is irreducible into more meaningful elements. In morphology, a root is a morphologically simple unit which can be left bare or to which a prefix or a suffix can attach. The root word is the prima ...
''happy.'' It is differentiated from
inflection In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and defin ...
, which is the modification of a word to form different
grammatical categories In linguistics, a grammatical category or grammatical feature is a property of items within the grammar of a language. Within each category there are two or more possible values (sometimes called grammemes), which are normally mutually exclusiv ...
without changing its core meaning: ''determines'', ''determining'', and ''determined'' are from the root ''determine''.


Derivational patterns

Derivational
morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines * Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts * Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...
often involves the addition of a derivational suffix or other
affix In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Affixes may be derivational, like English ''-ness'' and ''pre-'', or inflectional, like English plural ''-s'' and past tense ''-ed''. They ar ...
. Such an affix usually applies to
word A word is a basic element of language that carries an semantics, objective or pragmatics, practical semantics, meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of w ...
s of one lexical category (part of speech) and changes them into words of another such category. For example, one effect of the
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...
derivational suffix ''-ly'' is to change an
adjective In linguistics, an adjective (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that generally grammatical modifier, modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Tra ...
into an
adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering ...
(''slow'' → ''slowly''). Here are examples of English derivational patterns and their suffixes: * adjective-to-
noun A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, d ...
: ''-ness'' (''slow'' → ''slowness'') * adjective-to-
verb A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descri ...
: ''-en'' (''weak'' → ''weaken'') * adjective-to-adjective: ''-ish'' (''red'' → ''reddish'') * adjective-to-
adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering ...
: ''-ly'' (''personal'' → ''personally'') * noun-to-
adjective In linguistics, an adjective (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that generally grammatical modifier, modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Tra ...
: ''-al'' (''recreation'' → ''recreational'') * noun-to-verb: ''-fy'' (''glory'' → ''glorify'') * verb-to-adjective: ''-able'' (''drink'' → ''drinkable'') * verb-to-noun ( abstract): ''-ance'' (''deliver'' → ''deliverance'') * verb-to-noun (
agent Agent may refer to: Espionage, investigation, and law *, spies or intelligence officers * Law of agency, laws involving a person authorized to act on behalf of another ** Agent of record, a person with a contractual agreement with an insuranc ...
): ''-er'' (''write'' → ''writer'') However, derivational affixes do not necessarily alter the lexical category; they may change merely the meaning of the base and leave the category unchanged. A prefix (''write'' → '' re-write''; ''lord'' → ''over-lord'') rarely changes the lexical category in English. The prefix ''un-'' applies to adjectives (''healthy'' → ''unhealthy'') and some verbs (''do'' → ''undo'') but rarely to nouns. A few exceptions are the derivational prefixes ''en-'' and ''be-''. ''En-'' (replaced by ''em-'' before labials) is usually a transitive marker on verbs, but it can also be applied to adjectives and nouns to form transitive verbs: ''circle'' (verb) → ''encircle'' (verb) but ''rich'' (adj) → ''enrich'' (verb), ''large'' (adj) → ''enlarge'' (verb), ''rapture'' (noun) → ''enrapture'' (verb), ''slave'' (noun) → ''enslave'' (verb). When derivation occurs without any change to the word, such as in the conversion of the noun ''breakfast'' into the verb ''to breakfast'', it's known as
conversion Conversion or convert may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * "Conversion" (''Doctor Who'' audio), an episode of the audio drama ''Cyberman'' * "Conversion" (''Stargate Atlantis''), an episode of the television series * "The Conversion" ...
, or zero derivation. Derivation that results in a noun may be called
nominalization In linguistics, nominalization or nominalisation is the use of a word that is not a noun (e.g., a verb, an adjective or an adverb) as a noun, or as the head of a noun phrase. This change in functional category can occur through morphological tr ...
. It may involve the use of an affix (such as with ''employ → employee''), or it may occur via conversion (such as with the derivation of the noun ''run'' from the verb ''to run''). In contrast, a derivation resulting in a verb may be called verbalization (such as from the noun ''butter'' to the verb ''to butter'').


Derivation and inflection

Derivation can be contrasted with
inflection In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and defin ...
, in that derivation can produce a new word (a distinct
lexeme A lexeme () is a unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of words that are related through inflection. It is a basic abstract unit of meaning, a unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken ...
) but isn't required to change this, whereas inflection produces grammatical variants of the same word. Generally speaking, inflection applies in more or less regular patterns to all members of a
part of speech In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assi ...
(for example, nearly every
English verb Verbs constitute one of the main parts of speech (word classes) in the English language. Like other types of words in the language, English verbs are not heavily inflected. Most combinations of tense, aspect, mood and voice are expressed peri ...
adds ''-s'' for the third person singular present tense), while derivation follows less consistent patterns (for example, the nominalizing suffix ''-ity'' can be used with the adjectives ''modern'' and ''dense'', but not with ''open'' or ''strong''). However, it is important to note that derivations and inflections can share homonyms, that being,
morphemes A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone a ...
that have the same sound, but not the same meaning. For example, when the affix -er, is added to an adjective, as in ''small-er'', it acts as an inflection, but when added to a verb, as in ''cook-er'', it acts as a derivation. As mentioned above, a derivation can produce a new word (or new part of speech) but is not required to do so. For example, the derivation of the word "common" to "uncommon" is a derivational morpheme but doesn't change the part of speech (adjective). An important distinction between derivational and inflectional morphology lies in the content/function of a listeme. Derivational morphology changes both the meaning and the content of a listeme, while inflectional morphology doesn't change the meaning, but changes the function. A non-exhaustive list of derivational morphemes in English: -ful, -able, im-, un-, -ing, -er A non-exhaustive list of inflectional morphemes in English: -er, -est, -ing, -en, -ed, -s


Derivation and other types of word formation

Derivation can be contrasted with other types of word formation such as compounding. For full details see
Word formation In linguistics, word formation is an ambiguous term that can refer to either: * the processes through which words can change (i.e. morphology), or * the creation of new lexemes in a particular language Morphological A common method of word form ...
. Note that derivational affixes are
bound morpheme In linguistics, a bound morpheme is a morpheme (the elementary unit of morphosyntax) that can appear only as part of a larger expression; a free morpheme (or unbound morpheme) is one that can stand alone. A bound morpheme is a type of bound form, ...
s – they are meaningful units, but can only normally occur when attached to another word. In that respect, derivation differs from
compounding In the field of pharmacy, compounding (performed in compounding pharmacies) is preparation of a custom formulation of a medication to fit a unique need of a patient that cannot be met with commercially available products. This may be done for me ...
by which ''free'' morphemes are combined (''lawsuit'', ''Latin professor''). It also differs from
inflection In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and defin ...
in that inflection does not create new
lexeme A lexeme () is a unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of words that are related through inflection. It is a basic abstract unit of meaning, a unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken ...
s but new
word form In linguistics, morphology () is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Morph ...
s (''table'' → ''tables''; ''open'' → ''opened'').


Productivity

Derivational patterns differ in the degree to which they can be called
productive Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods or services expressed by some measure. Measurements of productivity are often expressed as a ratio of an aggregate output to a single input or an aggregate input used in a production proces ...
. A productive pattern or affix is one that is commonly used to produce novel forms. For example, the negating prefix ''un-'' is more productive in English than the alternative ''in-''; both of them occur in established words (such as ''unusual'' and ''inaccessible''), but faced with a new word which does not have an established negation, a native speaker is more likely to create a novel form with ''un-'' than with ''in-''. The same thing happens with suffixes. For example, if comparing two words ''Thatcherite'' and ''Thatcherist'', the analysis shows that both suffixes ''-ite'' and ''-ist'' are productive and can be added to proper names, moreover, both derived adjectives are established and have the same meaning. But the suffix ''-ist'' is more productive and, thus, can be found more often in word formation not only from proper names.


See also

*
Agglutination In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative lang ...
*
Collocation In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words th ...
*
Inflection In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and defin ...
*
Nominalization In linguistics, nominalization or nominalisation is the use of a word that is not a noun (e.g., a verb, an adjective or an adverb) as a noun, or as the head of a noun phrase. This change in functional category can occur through morphological tr ...
*
Word formation In linguistics, word formation is an ambiguous term that can refer to either: * the processes through which words can change (i.e. morphology), or * the creation of new lexemes in a particular language Morphological A common method of word form ...
*
Word root A root (or root word) is the core of a word that is irreducible into more meaningful elements. In morphology, a root is a morphologically simple unit which can be left bare or to which a prefix or a suffix can attach. The root word is the prima ...


References

{{reflist *Speech and Language Processing, Jurafsky, D. & Martin J.,H. Linguistic morphology Etymology