Derivational prefixation in English tends not to change category, but it does add substantial new meaning, for example creating negatives ( unhappy, inconsequential), various quantitative or relational forms ( tricycle, preschool, submarine) or evaluatives ( megastore, miniskirt). For example, the creation of abstract nouns from concrete ones in English ( king ~ kingdom child ~ childhood) is a matter of derivation, as is the creation of names for trees ( poirier ‘pear tree’) from the corresponding fruit ( poire ‘pear’) in French, even though neither process changes category. Derivation need not change category, however. In the clearest cases, derivation changes category, for example taking a verb like employ and making it a noun ( employment, employer, employee) or an adjective ( employable), or taking a noun like union and making it a verb ( unionize) or an adjective ( unionish, unionesque). But derivation serves to create new lexemes while inflection prototypically serves to modify lexemes to fit different grammatical contexts. Either derivation or inflection may be effected by formal means like affixation, reduplication, internal modification of bases, and other morphological processes. The distinction between derivation and inflection is a functional one rather than a formal one, as Booij ( 2000, p. The study of derivation has also been important in a number of psycholinguistic debates concerning the perception and production of language. A number of topics have dominated the theoretical literature on derivation, including productivity (the extent to which new words can be created with a given affix or morphological process), the principles that determine the ordering of affixes, and the place of derivational morphology with respect to other components of the grammar. Most languages have derivation of some sort, although there are languages that rely more heavily on compounding than on derivation to build their lexical stock. Languages frequently also have ways of deriving negatives, relational words, and evaluatives. For verbs, causative and applicative categories are well-attested, as are relational and qualitative derivations for adjectives. For nouns, event and result, personal and participant, collective and abstract noun are frequent. Derived words may fit into a number of semantic categories. Reduplication is also widely found, with various internal changes like ablaut and root and pattern derivation less common. Affixation is best attested cross-linguistically, especially prefixation and suffixation. New words may be derived by a variety of formal means including affixation, reduplication, internal modification of various sorts, subtraction, and conversion. The distinctions between derivation and inflection and between derivation and compounding, however, are not always clear-cut. Derivation may be contrasted with inflection on the one hand or with compounding on the other. Derivational morphology is a type of word formation that creates new lexemes, either by changing syntactic category or by adding substantial new meaning (or both) to a free or bound base.
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