Some Basic Concepts

Some Basic Concepts

1. Words and word-formation

   • Words
     • It does not have a concrete definition
   • Word-formation
     • Depends on what a language considers to be a "word"

2. Word-form, Lexema

   • Word-form
     • Particular form that a word has on a particular occasion.
   • Lexeme
     • Representation of the different categories of inflexion

3. Morpheme, Morph, Allomorph, Formative

   • Morpheme
     • The basic unit of analysis
   • Morph
     • A segment of a word-form which represents a particular morpheme
   • Allomorph
     • Set of morphs that represent a morpheme
   • Formative
     • Distributional segment of a word-form

4. Bond, free

   • Free morph
     • A morph which can occur in isolation
   • Bound morph
     • A morph which can only occur in a word-form in conjunction with at least one other morph

5. Productivity

   • Any process is productive if it can be used synchronously to produce new forms

6. Transparent, Opaque

   • Transparent
     • When a lexeme is analyzable into its constituent morphs
   • Opaque
     • When a lexeme is not clearly analyzable

7. Root, Stem, Base

   • Root
     • The part of a word-form that remains when all inflectional and derivational affixes are removed.
   • Stem
     • The part of the word.form that remains when all inflectional affixes are removed
   • Base
     • Is any form to which affixes of any kind can be added

8. Inflection, Derivation

   • Inflection
     • Produces all the word-forms that a lexeme may have in certain syntactic environments from its stem
   • Derivation
     • It is a process that results in the formation of new lexemes

9. Compound, Complex

   • Compound
     • When two or more elements that can be used as stems are combined to form another stem
   • Complex
     • Means "produced by derivation"

10. Endocentric, Exocentric, Appositional, Dvandva

    • Endocentric Compound
      • Those in which the compound is a hyponym of the grammatical head.
    • Exocentric compound
      • The compound is not a hyponym of the grammatical head, it is a hyponym of some unexpressed head.
    • Appositional Compound
      • Is a hyponym of the grammatical head and the modifiying elemnt
    • Dvandva
      • It is not clear which element is the grammatical head and the compound is not a hyponym of any of the elements

11. Class-maintaining, Class-changing

    • Class-maintaining
      • Produces lexemes that belong to the same form classes as the base
    • Class-changing
      • Produce lexemes that belong to a different form class from the base

12. Conversion

    • Is the change in form class of a form without any corresponding change to the form.