Linguistic morphology

identification, analysis and description of the structure of a given language's morphemes and other linguistic units

grammatical system of noun classification

lexeme that consists of more than one stem

In linguistics, declension (verb: to decline) is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence by way of an inflection. Declension may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and determiners. It serves to indicate number (e.g. singular, dual, plural), case (e.g. nominative, accusative, genitive, or dative), gender (e.g. masculine, feminine, or neuter), and a number of other grammatical categories. Inflectional change of verbs is called conjugation.

A diminutive is a word obtained by modifying a root word to convey a slighter degree of its root meaning, either to convey the smallness of the object or quality named, or to convey a sense of intimacy or endearment, and sometimes to belittle something or someone. A (abbreviated ) is a word-formation device used to express such meanings. A is a diminutive form with two diminutive suffixes rather than one.

thumb|upright=0.8|Inflection of the Scottish Gaelic [[lexeme for 'dog', which is for singular, for dual with the number ('two'), and for plural|class=skin-invert-image]]

thumb|220x124px | right | Occurrence of reduplication across world languages In linguistics, reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word, part of that, or the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change.

in linguistics, the process of forming a new word on the basis of an existing one

creation of a new word

In linguistics, an allomorph is a variant phonetic form of a morpheme, or in other words, a unit of meaning that varies in sound and spelling without changing the meaning. The term allomorph describes the realization of phonological variations for a specific morpheme. The different allomorphs that a morpheme can become are governed by morphophonemic rules. These phonological rules determine what phonetic form, or specific pronunciation, a morpheme will take based on the phonological or morphological context in which it appears.

thumb|The middle sign is in Hungarian language|Hungarian, which agglutinates extensively. (The top and bottom signs are in Romanian and German, respectively, both inflecting languages.) The English translation is "Ministry of Food and Agriculture: [[Satu Mare County Directorate General of Food and Agriculture".]]

In linguistics, apophony is an alternation of vowel (quality) within a word that indicates grammatical information (often inflectional). It is also known as ablaut, (vowel) gradation, (vowel) mutation, alternation, internal modification, stem modification, stem alternation, replacive morphology, stem mutation, or internal inflection.

In linguistics, lenition is a sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word lenition means 'softening' or 'weakening' (from Latin 'weak'). Lenition can happen both synchronically (within a language at a particular point in time) and diachronically (as a language changes over time). Lenition can involve such changes as voicing a voiceless consonant, causing a consonant to relax occlusion, to lose its place of articulation (a phenomenon called debuccalization, which turns a consonant into a glottal consonant like or ), or even causing a consonant to disappear en

Morphophonology (also morphophonemics or morphonology) is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes (minimal meaningful units) when they combine to form words.

In linguistics and etymology, suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognates. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as "irregular" or even "highly irregular". For example, go:went is a suppletive paradigm, because go and went are not etymologically related, whereas mouse:mice is irregular but not suppletive, since the two words come from the same Old English ancestor.

word formation involving the creation of a word from an existing word without any change in form

An augmentative (abbreviated ) is a morphological form of a word which expresses greater intensity, often in size but also in other attributes. It is the opposite of a diminutive.

Animacy (antonym: inanimacy) is a grammatical and semantic feature, existing in some languages, expressing how sentient or alive the referent of a noun is. Widely expressed, animacy is one of the most elementary principles in languages around the globe and is a distinction acquired as early as six months of age.

type of consonant change depending on context and surrounding words

Back-formation is the process or result of creating a new word via morphology, typically by removing or substituting actual or supposed affixes from a lexical item, in a way that expands the number of lexemes associated with the corresponding root word. James Murray coined the term back-formation in 1889. (Oxford English Dictionary Online preserves its first use of 'back-formation' from 1889 in the definition of to burgle; from burglar.)

In linguistic morphology and information retrieval, stemming is the process of reducing inflected (or sometimes derived) words to their word stem, base or root form—generally a written word form. The stem need not be identical to the morphological root of the word; it is usually sufficient that related words map to the same stem, even if this stem is not in itself a valid root. Algorithms for stemming have been studied in computer science since the 1960s. Many search engines treat words with the same stem as synonyms as a kind of query expansion, a process called conflation.

word class consisting of pronouns, nouns, adjectives and numerals

grammatical change of vowels in Indo-European languages

In linguistics, nominalization or nominalisation, also known as nouning, 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 transformation, but it does not always. Nominalization can refer, for instance, to the of producing a noun from another part of speech by adding a derivational affix (e.g., the noun "legalization" from the verb "legalize"), but it can also refer to the complex noun that is formed as a result.

word that etymologically derives from at least two languages

In linguistics, a causative (abbreviated ) is a valency-increasing operation that indicates that a subject either causes someone or something else to do or be something or causes a change in state of a non-volitional event. Normally, it brings in a new argument (the causer), A, into a transitive clause, with the original subject S becoming the object O.

phonetic phenomenon in Uralic languages

linguistic pattern where a morpheme has multiple phonetic realizations

particular classes of nouns, in linguistics

the classification of a language based on its morphological structure

using an acronym followed by one of the words composing that acronym

syllable added to the beginning of the word in certain languages

term of linguistic morphology

word that name objects of reality and their qualities, e.g. living things, family members, natural phenomena, common actions, characteristics; mostly nouns (“dog”), lexical verbs (“eat”), adjectives (“happy”), and adverbs (“happily“)

A bahuvrīhi (), or bahuvrīhi compound, is a type of compound word that denotes a referent by specifying a certain characteristic or quality the referent possesses. A bahuvrihi is exocentric, so that the compound is not a hyponym of its head. For instance, a sabretooth (smil-odon) is neither a sabre nor a tooth, but a feline with sabre-like teeth.

abstract consonant-only roots which are the traditional basis for morphological derivation in the Semitic languages and some other Afroasiatic (Hamitic) languages

In linguistics, glossematics is a structuralist theory proposed by Louis Hjelmslev and Hans Jørgen Uldall. It defines the glosseme as the most basic unit of language.

free or bound morpheme that indicates the grammatical function of the marked word, phrase, or sentence

type of Germanic verb where the stem vowel changes in the past tense

word or form that does not exist in a language but would be permitted by the grammatical rules of that language

degree to which native speakers use a particular grammatical process

Rebracketing (also known as resegmentation or metanalysis) is a process in historical linguistics where a word originally derived from one set of morphemes is broken down or bracketed into a different set. For example, hamburger, originally from Hamburg+er, has been rebracketed into ham+burger, and burger was later reused as a productive morpheme in coinages such as cheeseburger. It is usually a form of folk etymology, or may seem to be the result of valid morphological processes.

in linguistics, a phenomenon in which functionally distinct occurrences of a single lexeme are identical in form; e.g. in English, nominative and accusative forms of “you” coincide

In historical linguistics, metaphony is a class of sound change in which one vowel in a word is influenced by another in a process of assimilation. The sound change is normally "long-distance" in that the vowel triggering the change may be separated from the affected vowel by several consonants, or sometimes even by several syllables.

'''' (, ) is an Arabic term for the declension system of nominal, adjectival, or verbal suffixes of Classical Arabic to mark grammatical case. These suffixes are written in fully vocalized Arabic texts, notably the Qur'an| or texts written for children or Arabic learners, and they are articulated when a text is formally read aloud, but they do not survive in any spoken dialect of Arabic. Even in Literary Arabic, these suffixes are often not pronounced in pausa ( ); i.e. when the word occurs at the end of the sentence, in accordance with certain rules of Arabic pronunciation. (That is, the nuna

linguistic borrowing in which the sound and meaning of a foreign word are adjusted to match existing phonetic and semantic elements in the target language

In linguistics and literature, periphrasis () is the use of a larger number of words, with an implicit comparison to the possibility of using fewer. The comparison may be within a language or between languages. For example, "more happy" is periphrastic in comparison to "happier", and English "I will eat" is periphrastic in comparison to Spanish .

type of verb in Germanic languages

In linguistics, a protologism is a newly used or coined word, a nonce word, that has been repeated but has not gained acceptance beyond its original users or been published independently of the coiners. The word may be proposed, may be extremely new, or may be established only within a very limited group of people.

A dvandva ('pair' in Sanskrit) is a linguistic compound in which multiple individual nouns are concatenated to form a compound word to form a new word with a distinct meaning. For instance, the individual words 'brother' and 'sister' may in some languages be agglomerated to 'brothersister' to express "siblings". The grammatical number of such constructs is often plural or dual.

irregular plural forms in Semitic and other Afroasiatic languages, or those which loan heavily from them

Code-mixing is the mixing of two or more languages or language varieties in speech.

Begadkefat (also begedkefet) is the phenomenon of lenition affecting the non-emphatic stop consonants of Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic when they are preceded by a vowel and not geminated. The name is also given to similar cases of spirantization of post-vocalic plosives in other languages; for instance, in Jerba Berber.

In articulatory phonetics, fortition, also known as strengthening, is a consonantal change that increases the degree or duration of stricture. It is the opposite of the more common lenition. For example, a fricative or an approximant may become a stop (i.e. becomes or becomes ). Although not as typical of sound change as lenition, fortition may occur in prominent positions, such as at the beginning of a word or stressed syllable; as an effect of reducing markedness; or due to morphological leveling.

in morphology and linguistics, the reduction of a word to one of its parts

degree of comparison for adjectives and adverbs

metaphony in Germanic languages, occurring around 450–500, in which vowels are raised or fronted when the following syllable contains /i(ː)/ or /j/; e.g. Engl. foot → feet

term in linguistic morphology

aspect of the Sanskrit language

A privative, named from Latin , is a particle that negates or inverts the value of the stem of the word. In Indo-European languages, many privatives are prefixes, but they can also be suffixes, or more independent elements.