These examples should look quite different from the kinds of morphology that we’ve concentrated on so far: prefixation, suffixation, compounding, and conversion. In (1a), it looks like a morpheme has been inserted right into a base to form a verb. In (1b), vowels have changed to form the female correlates of male nouns, and in (1c), segments of the base are repeated to form what’s called the frequentative form of the verb (for a verb meaning X, this form means ‘X repeatedly’). Prefixation, suffixation, compounding, and conversion may be the main ways of forming new words in English and many other languages, but there’s a much wider world out there, and there are types of morphology that do not figure in English at all, or figure only in the most minor ways.

we’ll expand our horizons by surveying a number of morphological processes that we have not yet encountered: different kinds of affixes, internal stem changes to consonants and vowels, reduplication, and templatic morphology. Our concentration will be on the structural aspects of morphology – the kinds of rules that languages can make use of to form new words – as opposed to the semantic or grammatical aspects. Our aim here is to characterize a sort of universal toolbag of rules which languages may make use of in word formation.