What is a morphological process?

Definition
	A morphological process is a means of changing a stem to adjust its meaning to fit its syntactic and communicational context.

Discussion
	Most languages that are agglutinative in any way use suffixation. Some of these languages also use prefixation and infixation. Very few languages use only prefixation, and none employ only infixation or any of the other types of morphological processes listed below.

Kinds

Here are some kinds of morphological processes:

Note:

The process suppletion, though not strictly morphological, typically encodes the same type of information as the above morphological processes. It is often discussed in conjunction with them.

See also
	What is a morphosyntactic operation? What is inflection?

Sources
	Matthews 1991 125–126, 130

Context for this page:

Concept module: morphological process
In overview module: Glossary (Linguistics): M
In modular book: Glossary of linguistic terms, by Eugene E. Loos (general editor), Susan Anderson (editor), Dwight H., Day, Jr. (editor), Paul C. Jordan (editor), and J. Douglas Wingate (editor)
In bookshelf: Linguistics

This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 5.0 published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 2003. [Ordering information.]

Page content last modified: 5 January 2004