Morphology

Morphology or word formation, is the way that the words are created, and the study of its internal construction.

The morphemes are the smallest unit of meaning, and are the words, the word stems, and the affixes. Most of the time, a single word, contains more than one morpheme.

Affix
A morpheme added to a word to change its function or meaning. There are three different types:
 * Prefix: the morpheme goes in the beggining of the word.
 * e.g. adding im to some words to make its opposite: impossible, immortal, immobile.


 * Suffix: the morpheme goes in the end of the word.
 * e.g. adding ly to some adjectives to turn them into adverbs: cheerfully, finally.


 * Infix: goes in the middle of the word, but is not common in the English language.



Types of Word Formation
1. Acronym: A word formed from initial letters of the words in a phrase.
 * Derivation: Derivation is the process of forming new words from existing ones by adding  affixes  to them, like  shame +  less +  ness → shamelessness. In cases in which there is a one-to-one correspondence between affixes and syntactical categories, this is known asagglutination,  as seen in agglutinative languages.
 * Conversion: Also known as zero-affixation, conversion involves forming a new word form an existing identical one, like forming verb green from the existing adjective.
 * Blending: Word formed by joining parts of two or more older words. An example is smog, which comes from smoke and fog, or brunch which comes from breakfast and lunch.

2. Clipping: Taking part of an existing word
 * Calque: A word borrowed from another language literal.
 * Neologism: A completely new word.