Young children often lack words for what they want to talk about. To fill the gaps in their lexicon, they coin new words. They rely on compounding and derivation to do this. This means identifying and analyzing parts of words – roots or stems, and affixes – and learning their meanings, as well as which combinations are possible. Some languages favor compounding and some derivation in word formation. Children are sensitive to which options are the most productive and adopt those first. Two-year-olds offer analyses of word meanings, as in running-stick (I run with it) or high-chair (it is high), and provide analyses of novel compounds where they take account of language structure (head noun first in Hebrew, second in English). They also analyze derived forms with agentive endings. They start to produce novel words from as young as age two, whether compounds in Germanic languages, or derived forms in Romance and Semitic. They begin with simple forms (minimal or no change to the root), advance to compound or derived word forms that are transparent in meaning, and opt for the most productive options in the adult language, with the goal of finding the right words to convey the child-speaker’s meaning.

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.

In diachronic development and contemporary structure of Slavic lexicons, we see influences of universal semantic mechanisms and specific historical processes, of language development, and of language contact. Old Church Slavonic played a role in forming Slavic vocabulary, especially in Russian, where specific or colloquial synonyms contrast with abstract or formal (golova ‘head as body part’ vs. glava ‘head as top in a hierarchy’). Semantic divergence of Proto-Slavic roots creates inter-lingual enantiosemy (e.g., Rus. čerstvyj ‘stale’ vs. Cze. čerstvý ‘fresh’). To compare languages we use regular abstract semantic relations, e.g. synonymy, antonymy, or lexical functions Magn, Oper. Linguistic expressions may differ, but we find similar semantic oppositions and derivation mechanisms. The languages share the same types of antonymy, albeit using different prefixes. Semantic bleaching patterns also agree: adjectives meaning ‘scary’ develop to mean ‘high degree’. Motion verbs such as ‘go’ come to mean process or result. We give case studies of lexical relations: Polish synonyms honor vs. cześć, Russian pravda vs. istina.

Chapter 6 summarizes new postulates of physicochemical mechanics and gives a simple but systematic derivation of all major transport and equilibrium relations.

This chapter discusses the place of inflectional and derivational morphology in Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). After describing how inflection is encoded in the layered structure of the word, the chapter offers an explanatory account of the factors that motivate inflectional marking. The functional orientation of RRG presupposes a view of morphology distributed throughout the different components of the grammatical model. Additionally, the typological commitment of RRG requires paying close attention to the role of inflectional processes not only in dependent-marking languages but also in head-marking languages, since the interface between inflectional morphology and syntax is much tighter in the latter type of language. The chapter then reflects on word formation as a lexicological process which involves the interaction of lexical semantics and morphology. The approach to derivational morphology can be said to be markedly motivated by semantics.

Latin loanwords (and codeswitches) were normally written in the Greek alphabet and took Greek endings. Their spellings started out as approximate transcriptions of the Latin pronunciation (not transliterations of the Latin spelling), but over time the Greek spellings could either remain fixed as the Latin pronunciation changed or be updated to reflect such changes. Most loanwords joined a Greek declensional class that closely resembled their Latin declension, but some changed declension or gender when borrowed. Some borrowings (including all verbs) acquired Greek suffixes as part of the borrowing process. Some loanwords were created by univerbating Latin phrases, making Latin-Latin compounds, or making Greek-Latin compounds with the Latin element taken directly from Latin. Derivatives could also be formed from previously-borrowed loanwords using any of the usual Greek derivation and compoundingprocesses.

Before venturing into the study of choreographies, we introduce the formalism of inference systems. Inference systems are widely used in the fields of formal logic and programming languages and they were later applied to theory of choreographies as well.

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.

This chapter explores the morphological poverty of the Chinese from an empirical perspective. Until recently, the nature of affixation in Chinese is still not well recognized and has been one of the hotly debated topics in Chinese morphology. Based on the CKIP Morphological Database (incl. 4025 “affixes” in Chinese), this chapter covers the issue of the lack of affixation in Chinese based on a range of linguistic facts and empirical arguments such as lack of productivity and irregularities in word-formation rules.

This chapter highlights how phenomena found in modern Romance varieties as well as processes of language change pose challenges to the idea that inflexion, derivation, and compounding may reside in distinct modules or components of the grammar. It discusses the basic and uncontroversial characteristics of inflexion, derivation, and compounding with data from Romance languages and presents specific topics and case studies that challenge the traditional view from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. The first case study considers the ways in which various morphophonological alternations, such as diphthongization and palatalization, pattern alike or differently with respect to inflexion, derivation, and compounding. The question whether inflexion and derivation can be distinguished on semantic grounds is the focus of two further case studies dealing with (i) the formal marking and the semantic interpretation of number in Italian ambigeneric nouns, and (ii) with the different outcomes of the Latin augment /-sc-/ in modern Romance languages, which evolved in some languages into an inflexional marker, while retaining a derivational function in others. A final topic covered is so-called ‘conversion’, defined here as a transpositional (i.e., category-changing) process that is not marked by any formative, and thus applies to fully inflected words.

Researchers on the vocabulary growth of native speakers of English, usually distinguish three main ways in which a learner’s vocabulary increases – through being taught or deliberately learning new words, through learning new words by meeting them in context, and through recognising and building new words by gaining control of the prefixes and suffixes and other word building devices. In this chapter we look at the extent to which word building affects vocabulary size, the psychological reality of the relationship between inflected and derived words and their stem form, and the teaching and learning options for gaining control of English word-building processes. There are two related but distinguishable reasons for focusing on word parts. First, prefixes and stems can work as mnemonic devices to help learners remember new words by relating them to the meanings of the known parts that they contain. Second, knowledge of prefixes and suffixes can help learners see the relationship between word family members where one or more of the members is already known. The chapter contains lists of useful word parts and describes a strategy for using word parts to help remember words.

The acquisition, maintenance, and attrition of morphological properties of heritage languages (HLs) has been a central research focus since the inception of the systematic study of these linguistic varieties. Both child and adult heritage language speakers (HSs) experience difficulty in producing target-like inflectional morphology, and in some instances, the errors in their production are similar to those found in the speech of L2 learners. This chapter offers a broad survey of developmental trends of derivational and inflectional morphology in the nominal (e.g., gender and case) and verbal (e.g., agreement, tense, aspect, mood) domains. Different morphological types (e.g., inflectional, agglutinative, fusion, isolating) are discussed, focusing on whether certain properties of heritage morphology are specific to each type and whether certain properties cut across all of them. Claims regarding the effects of maturational constraints and continued activation on the ultimate attainment of heritage morphology are reviewed. This chapter also considers the issue of age effects in connection with heritage morphology and concludes with a brief discussion of the implications that these findings have on linguistic theory as well as highlighting future directions for the study of heritage morphology.

This chapter takes us on a survey of morphological categories, both derivational and inflectional, focusing not only on MSA but even more particularly on Yemeni, Saudi, and Egyptian dialects in contrastive analysis. Starting with the basics of Arabic derivation, Watson notes the key templatic nature of Arabic word formation and reviews concepts such as verb valency and different types of noun categories. In her discussion of Arabic inflectional categories, Watson covers number, gender, person, aspect, tense, mood, voice, degree, and definiteness.

This chapter begins with the basics of affixation, including the types of morphemes that are commonly found in English (prefixes, suffixes, bound bases, formatives, extenders). Students learn to formulate word formation rules, to represent the internal structure of complex words with tree structures, and to understand difficulties that arise in segmenting words. The chapter also considers the range of meanings that derivational affixes can express. It includes a section on compounding that considers the difficulties in defining what a compound is, the notion of headedness, and the types of compounds that are common in English. The chapter also briefly considers minor types of word formation such as backformation, blending, acronyms, initialisms, and coinage. Students are taught to use corpora such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English to find their own morphological data.

This chapter gives an introductory overview of the strategies for forming words in the languages of mainland Southeast Asia. The chapter begins with a discussion of the form class distinctions that are found, including the categories of noun, verb, adjective, adposition, and adverb. Of the various processes for forming words, the chapter focuses on compounding and reduplication, which are relied upon widely in languages of the area, and affixation, which is a speciality of Austroasiatic languages in particular. The chapter features a section on the uses of tone in word formation, a feature of Hmong-Mien languages. Psycho-collocations are discussed: an area-wide form of compounding involving the mention of body parts to denote emotional and psychological states.