Chapter 4: Morphology

 
 

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Glossary 
 
acronym-formation: non-morphemic word-formation process forming new words by 
reducing compounds and phrases to their initials; acronyms, in the narrow sense, are products 
of this process which can be pronounced like normal words, e.g. NATO, AIDS. 
 
agglutinating language: type of synthetic language (e.g. Turkish) which is rich in inflectional 
morphemes and produces long words by concatenating sequences of morphemes that do not 
overlap and typically have a one-to-one relation of form and meaning. 
 
allomorph: different formal realizations of morphemes, especially inflectional ones. 
 
analytic language: type of language which does not encode grammatical categories by means 
of inflectional morphemes affixed to stems but by other means such as word order, auxiliaries 
and particles. 
 
appositional compound: a type of two-headed, non-determinative compound combining two 
different descriptions of the same referent (e.g. singer-songwriter). 
 
back-formation: typically word-class-changing word-formation process involving the 
deletion of a suffix or suffix-like element (e.g. to babysit  babysitter). 
 
bahuvrihi compound: type of exocentric compound where the meaning of the compound 
stands for a property or part of the head (e.g. paleface „person who has a pale face‟). 
 
blending: type of non-morphemic word-formation process involving the merging or 
telescoping of two lexemes into one. 

bound morpheme: type of morpheme that cannot occur by itself but only as an affix to a free 
morpheme. 
clipping: type of non-morphemic word-class-preserving word-formation process involving 
the deletion of parts of the source lexeme at the end (back-clipping, e.g. photo  

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photograph), front (front-clipping, e.g. bus  omnibus) or on either side (e.g. flu  
influenza).