Derivational morphology

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Derivational morphology changes the meaning of words by applying derivations. Derivation is the combination of a word stem with a morpheme, which forms a new word, which is often of a different class, for example, Develop becomes Development, Developmental or Redevelop.

The suffix -ation converts the verb nationalize, into the derived noun nationalization. The suffix -ize converts the noun plural, into the verb pluralize.

Nominalization is a common kind of derivation in English, and it involves forming new nouns from verbs or adjectives, by adding suffixes to them, for example:

Suffix	Verb/adjective	Derived noun
-ness	happy (A)	happiness
-ee	employ (V)	employee

Derivational morphology can be quite complicated, as the classes of words that an affix apply to are not always clearcut, for example the suffix -ee cannot be added to all verbs, ie to add it to run (V) gives runee, which is clearly not an English word.

[edit] See also

• Inflectional morphology

[edit] References

• Speech and Language Processing, Jufarsky, D. & Martin J.,H.