Chapter 4: Morphology

derivational morphology, but goes beyond that. The field of word-formation deals with 
the patterns and rules guiding the formation of new words (rather than just word-forms of 
existing words). From this perspective, the word unemployment, for instance, would first 
be segmented into the base employ and the derivational morphemes un- and -ment, and it 
would be stated that the affixes un-  and -ment are added to the base employ, thus 
manifesting the word-formation types of prefixation and suffixation respectively. In 
addition to derivational morphology, word-formation encompasses the study of 
compounding (e.g. employment agency) and also those word-formation types that do not 
use morphemes as their basic building-blocks, i.e. non-morphemic types such as blending 
(e.g. infotainment  information and entertainment) and clipping (e.g. flu  influenza). 
The scope of the fields of morphology and word-formation is summarized in Figure 4.1. 

---

3 
In appreciating this figure you should keep in mind, however, that the situation is not quite 
as simple and clear as suggested by the neat division: firstly, the word-formation type of 
compounding does not really fall within the scope of derivational morphology, but is 
placed in the same branch as prefixation and suffixation because it shares with these the 
property that it uses morphemes as basic building blocks. Secondly, conversion, i.e. the 
transfer of a word from one word class to another without the addition of a morpheme, 
and back-formation, as in the verb to sightsee derived from the longer noun sightseeing, 
could be seen as relying on morphemes, too, but this is much less straightforward than is 
the case in the other types of morphemic word-formation patterns. 
Figure 4.1: The scope of morphology and word-formation (adapted from Schmid 2011: 
15) 
morphology 
inflectional morphology 
derivational morphology
and compounding 
non-morphemic
word-formation 
 
word-formation