Professional Documents
Culture Documents
6.4 Derivational Morphology: Check Yourself
6.4 Derivational Morphology: Check Yourself
4 DERIVATIONAL MORPHOLOGY
The other job that morphemes do is derivation, the process that creates new
words. In English, one of the most common ways to derive a new word is by
adding a derivational affix to a base. The newly-derived word can then serve
as a base for another affix.
CHECK YOURSELF
1. Which of the following best describes the derivation of the
word assignment?
VIDEO SCRIPT
The last unit talked about inflection, which is one of the jobs that morphology
can do. The other big job that morphemes have is a derivation. The
derivation is the process of creating a new word. The new, derived word is
related to the original word, but it has some new component of meaning to it,
and often it belongs to a new category.
One of the most common ways that English derives new words is by affixing a
derivational morpheme to a base. For example, if we start with a verb that
describes an action, like teach and we add the morpheme –er, we derive a
morphologically complex noun, teacher, that refers to the person who does
the action of teaching. That same -er morpheme does the same job
in singer, dancer, baker, and writer.
danc
-er dancer
e
danc
-er dancer
e
Nou
Suffix Adjective
n
Adjectiv
Suffix Verb
e
Each instance of derivation creates a new word, and that new word could then
serve as the base for another instance of derivation, so it’s possible to have
words that are quite complex morphologically.
For example, say you have a machine that you use to compute things; you
might call it a computer (compute + -er).Then if people start using that
machine to perform a task, you could say that they’re going
to computerize (computer + -ize) that task. Perhaps
the computerization (computerize + -ation) of that task makes it much more
efficient. You can see how many words have many steps in their derivations.
An interesting thing to note is that once a base has been inflected, then it can
no longer go through any derivations. We can inflect the word computer so
that we can talk about plural computers, but then we can’t do derivation on the
plural form (*computers-ize). Likewise, we can add tense inflection to the
verb computerize and talk about how yesterday we computerized something,
but then we can’t take that inflected form and use it as the base for a new
derivation (*computerized-ation). Inflection always occurs as the last step in
word formation.
1. Which of the following best describes the derivation of the
word assignment? Verb + -ment ➔ Noun.