The present chapter summarizes the patterns of lexical derivation in Slavic languages. Lexical derivation is presented here as word formation. Words are formed in the sentence by word-structure rules that expand root categories like N and A to derived structures like N[A–N] and A[N–A], followed by the lexicalization of the root and suffix categories with morphemes from the lexicon. Differing from the morpheme approach to morphology is the word approach, which assumes a lexicon of words and favors processes over items. The author presents basic patterns of prefixation, suffixation, and suffixless recategorization.

The concepts being discussed in this chapter are bound morpheme, free morpheme, root, affix, semi-affix, inflection, derivation and their application in the analysis of Chinese word-formation process. The inflectional affixes include aspectual markers, plural marker, potential infixes as well as those involved in reduplication. Two major approached are presented in this chapter about the derivation of Chinese words. The essence of the morphological derivation approach is that most word-building blocks have equal status as free root and bound roots, except for affixes. Chinese words are formed with these roots according to morphological rules and the syntactic status of a word is determined by its head. The essence of the syntactic-semantic is that the majority of Chinese words are constructed according to syntactic rules in that the relationship between morphemes in a word could be described as conjunction, modification, subject-predicate, verb-object or verb-result. A few bound morphemes are treated as affixes since their semantic content has been bleached, and they form words with morphological rules.

Chapter 4 focuses on morphology, the study of how words are formed. It explains how words, in spite of the fact that we often think of them as a single unit, can be made up of one or more smaller units referred to as morphemes. It examines different types of morphemes: roots, bases, and affixes. It shows how morphemes can be subdivided into different classes according to their properties: whether they are free, stand-alone morphemes, or bound morphemes (affixes), that must be attached to another morpheme; whether they are suffixes, prefixes, or infixes. The concept of allomorphy, important because it represents an interface between phonology and morphology, is presented and practiced. The chapter shows how different languages can build words in different ways, and how in some languages, a word can translate as a whole sentence in English. Readers will learn that morphemes are put together in words following rules, that is, words have structure. Extensive practice is given on how to represent the structure of words using tree diagrams. Various processes for creating or adapting words are also presented. Finally, an appendix details step-by-step how to build morphological trees.

Much of contemporary linguistics presumes that affixes are monomorphemic. I discuss the opposite perspective, according to which complex affixes may themselves arise through the conflation of simpler affixes. The evidence in favor of this perspective is extensive and varied. As I show, this includes evidence of the following sorts: an affix may be paradigmatically opposed to a combination of affixes; two affixes may overlap in both their form and the content that they express; an affix’s alignment may vary according to whether it is alone or accompanied by some other affix; the content expressed by a combination of affixes may not be directly deducible from the content of those individual affixes; and the appearance of an affix in some word form may depend on the presence of a more peripheral affix in that word form. I explain the theoretical significance of this evidence with particular attention to its implications for developing an inferential-realizational theory of inflectional morphology.