- Derivational morphology
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Derivational morphology changes the meaning of words by applying derivations. Derivation is the combination of a word stem with a morpheme, which forms a new word, which is often of a different class. For example, develop becomes development, developmental or redevelop.
The suffix -ation converts the verb nationalize, into the derived noun nationalization. The suffix -ize converts the noun plural, into the verb pluralize.
Nominalization is a common kind of derivation in English, and it involves forming new nouns from verbs or adjectives, by adding suffixes to them, for example:
Suffix Verb/adjective Derived noun -ness happy (A) happiness -ee employ (V) employee The study of derivational morphology can be quite complicated, as the classes of words that an affix apply to are not always clearcut. For example, the suffix -ee cannot be added to all verbs, i.e. to add it to run (V) gives runee, which is clearly not an English word.
See also
References
- Speech and Language Processing, Jufarsky, D. & Martin J.,H.
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