February 15: Introduction

First, please watch the following video (it's roughly 11 minutes), which explains the very basic concepts of morphology, and make sure you understand everything. If you don't, use the forum to ask & discuss:

Make sure you are familiar with the following concepts (listed in the order of their appearance in the video), and that you can give (your own) examples (from various languages that you speak): word, lexicon, lexical unit, (un)predictable meaning, morpheme, morphology, free morpheme, compound, bound root, root, affix, suffix, prefix, bound morpheme, infix, circumfix, fusional morphology, suppletion

Second, please watch the following lecture by Martin Hilpert, who is a rather prominent cognitive linguist – with a linguistic YouTube channel! The lecture is roughly 34 minutes long, and it provides you with an overview of word-formation processes used in English that you will probably (mostly) have heard of. Again, this is a way for me to make sure that we all have the same baseline knowledge. Again, if you have any questions, comments, or interesting examples that you would like to add, please use the forum.

Make sure you are familiar with the following concepts (listed in the order of their appearance in the video), and that you can give (your own) examples (from various languages that you speak): word, 3 ways of creating new words; compounding (compound, compound stress rule, endocentric × exocentric × copulative), affixation (inflectional × derivational suffixes, multiple affixation, allomorphy, stress shift in affixation), conversion, clipping, backformation (), acronymy (acronyms × initialisms), blending

Finally, as a way for me to check that you know the material, please do the quick exercise below.

If you do not know a word in the exercise, use a dictionary, e.g. Cambridge Dictionary. Also, if you are using Google in English, you can just type "define xxx" and "etymology xxx"! For instance, if you google "define scuba," this is what you get:

If you type in "etymology scuba," this is what you get, and so you can easily find out how scuba was formed:

Useful, innit?