English Language & Usage Asked on June 7, 2021
Is there a word that refers to the different forms of a word, or a word’s following four parts of speech—verb, adverb, noun, adjective?
For example:
confuse verb
confusedly adverb
confusion noun
confused, confusing, & confusable adjective
What word should be inserted if I wanted to say:
"I’m looking for all the [forms/parts of speech] of confuse."
or
"I want to use a [form/part of speech] of startle that is not in the dictionary; bestartlement, for example."
I think the answer to my question might be here Word form dictionary/system/tool, but I couldn’t understand the descriptions of Inflection and Conjugation well enough to be certain that either is the word I am looking for.
EDIT:
After reading through the links on declensions and derivational morphology provided by Benjamin Harman and John Lawler respectively, I agree with Lawler that declensions are not what I am talking about. I think I want to refer to the set of any given content word’s semantically associated parts of speech, i.e. all the various derivational morpheme altered forms of a given content word (and sometimes to just one of a content word’s corresponding forms in a different lexical category).
All these terms are new to me, so I apologize if I used any of them incorrectly.
Different variations of a non-verb word by parts of speech, by syntactic function, are called "declensions," so "confusedly" is the adverbial declension, "confusion" is the nounal declension, "confused" an adjectival declension. Another word used is "case," like "happy," "happily," and "happiness" are all different cases (i.e., adjective, adverb, and noun, respectively).
When the word is a verb, the variations are called "conjugations."
Answered by Benjamin Harman on June 7, 2021
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