Main Glossary

An inflected form that marks the word as the object of the sentence.

A special type of shortening which takes the first sound from each of several words and makes a new word from those initial sounds.

A part of speech that describes properties of nouns.

A part of speech that describes properties of verbs.

A bound morpheme that specifies a certain aspect of the situation evoked by the root morpheme.

A phonetic variant of a morpheme.

A part of speech that is used to link nouns to the broader context of speech.

A verbal category that specifies the way of viewing the internal temporal structure denoted by a verb (simple, progressive, perfect).

Creation of a new word by removal of a suffix.

Any form to which any derivational suffixes can be added.

A word formation process in which parts of two familiar words are yoked together (usually the first part of one word and the second part of the other) to produce a word which combines the meanings and sound of the old ones.

A morpheme that must be attached to another form in order to be able to function as a word.

An inflected form of a noun that indicates the grammatical function of the noun with respect to other words in the sentence.

A way of shortening words or phrases by clipping off some part of a word and throwing away the rest.

Creation of a new word witout basing it on some pre-existing word or part of a word.

A word that consists of one root morpheme (bound or free) and at least one derivational affix.

A word that consists of more than one root morpheme.

A part of speech that is used to join clauses or sentences.

A word formation process in which a word is assigned to a new word class without any change in form.

Affixes that are used to create new words. Such affixes are not required by the grammatical context.

A special case of conversion which preserves the sounds, but changes the stress.

A new word based on a name.

A morpheme that can function as a word by itself.

The parts of speech that are relatively low in meaning (preposition, conjunction, article, interjection, pronoun).

An inflected form of a noun that marks the noun as being masculine, feminine or neuter.

Adjectifs and adverbs that have three forms that contrast on the dimension of comparison.

Lexical items that are identical in form, but belong to different parts of speech.

A verbal category that expresses the speaker's will as a command or a request.

A verbal category that represents an event as a real fact.

A suffix that is used to create another form of the same word. Its presence is determined by the grammatical context.

An abbreviation where each letter is pronounced individually.

A part of speech that describes strong emotions or feelings.

A way of representing the internal structure of words using square brackets to mark the base of each word contained within.

The basic form of the word that we usually find in the dictionary.

The main four parts of speech that are high in meaning (noun, verb, adjectif, adverb).

A verbal category that indicates whether the speaker presents an event as a real fact, as something unreal, or else as something he wishes to be performed and made real.

The smallest meaningful unit of language.

A branch of linguistics that studies the internal structure of words.

The point in a tree diagram from which two branches sprout.

A part of speech that describes stable features of human experience.

Words that have come from efforts to imitate the sounds of what they stand for.

studies how different words are grouped together into conceptual categories by wharing certain elements in their internal structure.

Word classes established on the basis of similarities in meaning, function and internal structure.

A branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds of speech.

A branch of linguistics that studies how language is used in different social contexts.

A type of affix placed at the beginning of a base word.

A part of speech that shows the relationship of a noun or a pronoun to another word.

A part of speech that is used to replace nouns.

A word formation process in which part or all of a word is repeated.

An acronym formed from an already existing word by defining the meaning of each letter.

The main morpheme in a word that gives the word its meaning. It is no longer analysable, either in terms of derivational or inflectional morphology. It is what remains after the removal of all affixes.

A branch of linguistics that studies words meanings and relations between them in the lexicon.

A word that consists of one root morpheme.

A stem is what remains after the removal of inflectional suffixes.

A verbal category that represents hypothetical (possible) situations and outcomes.

A type of affix placed after the root morpheme.

The use of two or more different root morphemes to represent the same lexeme in different grammatical contexts.

studies how the choice of a word form depends on the word's relation to other words in the sentence.

A branch of linguistics that studies how words combine together in a sentence.

A verbal category that locates the moment when the described event occurs by relating it to the time of speaking (past, present, future).

A diagram that has a branching structure like that of a tree which is used to represent the successive steps of the affixation process.

A part of speech that describes features of human experience that unfold in time.

A verbal category that indicates whether the subject of the sentence corresponds to the doer of the action or to the semantic object.

A mechanism used to create new words.