Morphemization is a term describing the process of creating a new

morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology. In English, morphemes are ...

using existing linguistic material. Silver used the term for fused words, or for phrasal words like "La Brea Tar Pits" as a

proper noun A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity (''Africa'', ''Jupiter'', ''Sarah'', ''Microsoft)'' as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a class of entities (''continent, ...

. The term is also used by some Korean linguists to capture the common phenomena between

grammaticalization In historical linguistics, grammaticalization (also known as grammatization or grammaticization) is a process of language change by which words representing objects and actions (i.e. nouns and verbs) become grammatical markers (such as affixes or p ...

and

lexicalization In linguistics, lexicalization is the process of adding words, set phrases, or word patterns to a language's lexicon. Whether ''word formation'' and ''lexicalization'' refer to the same process is controversial within the field of linguistics. M ...

, i.e., to capture the phenomena that result in new morphemes via reanalysis, fusion, coalescence,

univerbation In linguistics, univerbation is the diachronic process of combining a fixed expression of several words into a new single word. The univerbating process is epitomized in Talmy Givón's aphorism that "today's morphology is yesterday's syntax". ...

etc. ). In addition to traditional examples of grammaticalization (for example, 'wanna' from 'want to' or 'gonna' from 'going to', etc.), traditional examples of

(for example, 'forever' from 'for ever', 'nonetheless' from 'non the less', etc.) make new morphemes. A very clear reason that those

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 are not analyzable into smaller pieces is that the sum of those pieces from any of the lexemes wouldn't equal to the original meaning. These processes may be called 'morphemizations'. Recently, the term 'morphemization' is also used to indicate morphologization in Chinese linguistics.Chen, Lian-jun 2010, On the Morphemization of "ZHI"(志), 《Journal of China West Normal University(Philosophy & Social Sciences)》2010-02-008.

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