1.

The main levels of linguistics are phonetics, phonology, prosody, lexicon, morphology, syntax,
semantics and pragmatics.
● Phonetics studies the quality of sounds used in a language, more particularly their
acoustic properties and how humans produce and perceive them.
● Phonology refers to the study of the sounds' patterns in a language, especially their
function and the processes used to organize and combine them when we speak in
order to convey meaning.
● Prosody is concerned with large units of speech and their linguistic functions such as
intonation, rhythm, stress, pitch and emphasys. Prosody may also convey the
speaker's features or utturance (statement, question, presence of sarcasm).
● Lexicon is about choice of vocabulary and its encoding. Moreover, Lexicon drives the
invention of lexemes in a language.
● Morphology refers to the word-building rules that speakers use to create new words or
alter the meaning of existing words in their language. As a matter of fact, in any given
language, a speaker can add a suffix, prefix, or infix to existing words to create a new
one.
● Syntax defines and describes the rules that speakers use to combine words to create
meaningful phrases and sentences.
● Semantics is the study of the logical rules that we apply to determine the meaning of
phrases, sentences, and entire paragraphs. The two main branches are logical
semantics, concerned with matters such as sense and reference and presupposition
and implication, and lexical semantics, concerned with the analysis of word meanings
and relations between them.
● Pragmatics is the study of the social use of language, including important elements
such as different registers or different conversational styles.

2. Affixation is the formation of words by adding derivational affixes. During affixation,

bound morphemes are added to a root word to create a new one with new different
meaning. It's the most common way of making new words in English.
Example: highlighter (highlight + er)
Compounding derives a new word by joining two morphemes that would each usually
be free morphemes.
Example: gatekeeper (gate + keep - er)

3. Clipping is the word formation process in which a word is reduced or shortened

without changing the meaning of the word.
Examples: situation comedy → sitcom / memorandum → memo / photograph →
photo
Blending is the word formation process in which parts of two or more words combine
to create a new word whose meaning is often a combination of the original words.
Examples: advertisement + entertainment → advertainment / cybernetic + organism →
cyborg / biographical + picture → biopic
4. Conversion refers to the process of changing or converting the class of a word without
changing its form.
Examples: must (modal verb) → must (noun) "doing homework is a must" / butter
(noun) → to butter (verb) "to butter the bread"
Coinage is a type of word formation process that involves the creation and general use
of new words through sources like commercial products, technology, music, movie,
and so on.
Examples: zipper / aspirin / nylon / vaseline

5. Acronyms are new words formed from the initial letters of a set of other words. These
can be forms such as CD (“compact disk”) or VCR (“video cassette recorder”) where
the pronunciation consists of saying each separate letter.
Examples: UNESCO - SCUBA - LASER - RADAR
Borrowing is the process where we take over words from other languages or simply
we borrow words from other languages.
Examples: croissant from French / dope from Dutch / piano from Italian
Reduplication is a morphological process in which the root of a word (or part of it) or
even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change.
Examples: super-duper (rhyming reduplication) or chitchat, zigzag, flipflop.

6. Free morphemes represent the elements that convey the bulk of meaning in autonomy,
as a matter of fact they can stand alone with a specific meaning. Example: brain
Bound morphemes add details and nuance to the meaning of content morphemes,
therefore they cannot stand alone with meaning.
Example: - less
A root is a morphologically simple unit that is irreducible into more meaningful
elements. It may be left bare or it may be attached to a prefix or a suffix (the core of a
word).
A base is a bigger unit to which an affix attaches or to which a morphological process
applies.
Example: paranormality = normal → root / normality → base / para → prefix

7. A morpheme is the smallest unit of morphological structure in a language that has its
own meaning.
Example: desire (1 morpheme) / desirable; desire + able (2 morphemes).
A morph refers to any minimal phonetic form that has its own meaning which can't be
subdivided into smaller meaningful units.
Example: "park" (1 morpheme) → /pa:k/ (morph)
 Allomorphs are alternative variations of a morpheme which carry the same meaning,
but different phonetic and phonological shape (→ same morphemes, different
morphs),
Example: the plural morphemes in English, usually written as /s/, have at least 3
allomorphs → /s/ as in "judges" - /z/ as in "dogs" - /iz/ as in "boxes"

8. We can identify types of morphemes (such as prefixes and suffixes) based on their
position in the word.
Prefix: an affix attached to the beginning of a word (before the base) to alter its
meaning.
Example: Prefix = "fore-" + "sight" → Foresight
Suffix: an affix attached to the end of a word (after the base) to modify its meaning or
change it into a different word class.
Example: Suffix = "-ious" + "grace" → Gracious

9. Inflectional morphemes are affixes that get added to a word, thus, adding a
grammatical value to it. It can assign a tense, a number, a comparison, or a
possession. Here are some examples of inflectional morphemes.
Example: Plural = Bikes / Possessive = Boy’s / Tense = cooked / Comparison = Faster /
Superlative = Fastest
Derivational morphemes are affixes that derive (create) new words by either changing
the meaning or the part of speech.
For example: wonder - wonderful → It changes a word into an adjective (class
change can occur)

10. Productivity is the notion that a given morpheme has a high frequency of usage to the
extent that its meaning is clear even when not attached to a root, or when attached to
an unlikely or novel root. This gives speakers the possibility to accurately recognize
forms never heard before.
According to the principle of compositionality, the meaning of a simple or complex
expression is fully determined by the meaning of its constituents and its structure.