Morphological Process

A morphological process is a linguistic process that creates word forms by applying the morphological rules within a morphological system.

• Example(s):
  • a Word Formation Process.
    • a Compounded Word Generation Process.
    • a Lexeme Derivation Rule (with Derivational Morphemes).
    • an Agglutination Process.
  • an Inflected Word Generation Process, e.g. Plural(WOLF) =>"wolves" and Past Tense(GO) =>"went".
  • a Word Contraction Process, e.g. “Let us” ⇒ "Let's” and “Common Era” ⇒ "CE”.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • a Word Comprehension Process.
• See: Word Stem, Word Meaning, Word Syntactic Context, Morphological Theory, Morphological Parsing.

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References

2004

• http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAMorphologicalProcess.htm
  • Definition
    • A morphological process is a means of changing a stem to adjust its meaning to fit its syntactic and communicational context.
  • Discussion
    • Most languages that are agglutinative in any way use suffixation. Some of these languages also use prefixation and infixation. Very few languages use only prefixation, and none employ only infixation or any of the other types of morphological processes listed below.
  • Kinds
    • What is affixation?
    • What is prefixation?
    • What is suffixation?
    • What is circumfixation?
    • What is infixation?
    • What is modification?
    • What is reduplication?

2001

• (Minnen et al., 2001) ⇒ G. Minnen, J. Carroll, and D. Pearce. (2001). “Applied morphological processing of English.” Natural Language Engineering, 7(3).

1999

• (Manning and Schütze, 1999) ⇒ Christopher D. Manning and Hinrich Schütze. (1999). “Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing." The MIT Press.
  • Word categories are systematically related by morphological processes such as the formation of the plural form (dog-s). from the singular form of the noun (dog). Morphology is important in NLP because language is productive: in any given text we will encounter words and word forms that we haven't seen before and that are not in our precompiled dictionary. Many of these new words are morphologically related to known words. So if we understand morphological processes, we can infer a log about the syntactic and semantic properties of new words.
  • The major types of morphological processes are inflection, derivation, and compounding. Inflections are the systematic modifications of a root form by means of prefixes and suffixes to indicate grammatical distinctions like singular and plural. Inflection does not change words class of meaning significantly, but varies features such as tense, number, and plurality. All the inflectional forms of a word are often grouped as manifestations of a single lexeme.

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