In
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
, an
agent noun (or
nomen agentis) is a word that is derived from another word denoting an
actionIn philosophy, action has developed into a sub-field called philosophy of action. Action is what an agent can do.For example, throwing a ball is an instance of action; it involves an intention, a goal, and a bodily movement guided by the agent...
, and that identifies an entity that does that action. For example, "driver" is the agent noun corresponding to the
verbkalleah hit meIn syntax, a verb is a word that usually denotes an action , an occurrence , or a state of being . Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its tense, aspect, mood and voice...
"to drive". The endings "-er" and "-or" are commonly used in English to form agent nouns. "Agent noun" is also the name of the derivational meaning (also called a
derivateme).
Usually,
derived in the above definition has the strict sense attached to it in
morphologyMorphology is the identification, analysis and description of the structure of words . While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most languages, words can be related to other words by rules...
, that is the
derivationIn linguistics, derivation is "Used to form new words, as with happi-ness and un-happy from happy, or determination from determine...
takes as an input a
lexemeA lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word. For example, in the English language, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, conventionally written as
and produces a new lexeme.
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In
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
, an
agent noun (or
nomen agentis) is a word that is derived from another word denoting an
actionIn philosophy, action has developed into a sub-field called philosophy of action. Action is what an agent can do.For example, throwing a ball is an instance of action; it involves an intention, a goal, and a bodily movement guided by the agent...
, and that identifies an entity that does that action. For example, "driver" is the agent noun corresponding to the
verbkalleah hit meIn syntax, a verb is a word that usually denotes an action , an occurrence , or a state of being . Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its tense, aspect, mood and voice...
"to drive". The endings "-er" and "-or" are commonly used in English to form agent nouns. "Agent noun" is also the name of the derivational meaning (also called a
derivateme).
Usually,
derived in the above definition has the strict sense attached to it in
morphologyMorphology is the identification, analysis and description of the structure of words . While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most languages, words can be related to other words by rules...
, that is the
derivationIn linguistics, derivation is "Used to form new words, as with happi-ness and un-happy from happy, or determination from determine...
takes as an input a
lexemeA lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word. For example, in the English language, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, conventionally written as
and produces a new lexeme. However, the classification of morphemeIn morpheme-based morphology, a ' is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning.In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes , and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes .The concept morpheme differs from the concept word, as many morphemes...
s into derivational morphemes and inflectionIn grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language modifies word forms to handle grammatical relations and relational categories such as tense, mood, voice, aspect , person, number , gender, case . Beside conjugation and declension there is comparison with its maximum category number of two In...
al ones is not generally a theoretical question that is straightforward, and different authors can make different decisions as to the general theoretical principles of the classification as well as to the actual classification of morphemes presented in a grammar of some languageA language is a system for encoding and decoding information. In its most common use, the term refers to so-called "natural languages" — the forms of communication considered peculiar to humankind. In linguistics the term is extended to refer to the human cognitive facility of creating and using...
(for example, of the agent noun-forming morpheme).