Formative (Noun)
Meaning
Minimal language unit that has a syntactic (or morphological) function.
Classification
Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents.
Examples
- Morphemes can be identified as the smallest formative unit of a language's meaningful structure, connecting sign and sense.
- The researchers classified and compared these linguistic formative units to see how often they appeared across their dataset.
- Lexemes are open formative units that admit variations by both inflection and derivation.
- The simple formative constitutes the semanteme, or core of meaning, and the inflectional formative denotes the relationships.
- Regularly recurrent combinations of those formative units are discernible in bound structures.