A morphological pattern is a set of associations and/or operations that build the various forms of a lexeme

Lexeme

A 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 RUN...

, possibly by inflection

Inflection

In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...

, agglutination

Agglutination

In contemporary linguistics, agglutination usually refers to the kind of morphological derivation in which there is a one-to-one correspondence between affixes and syntactical categories. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages...

, compounding

Compound (linguistics)

In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem. Compounding or composition is the word formation that creates compound lexemes...

 or derivation

Derivation (linguistics)

In linguistics, derivation is the process of forming a new word on the basis of an existing word, e.g. happi-ness and un-happy from happy, or determination from determine...

.

Note

It is important to distinguish the paradigm of a lexeme from a morphological pattern. In the context of an inflecting language, an inflectional morphological pattern is not the explicit list of inflected forms. A morphological pattern usually references a prototypical class of inflectional forms, e.g. ring as per sing. In contrast, the paradigm of a lexeme is the explicit list of the inflected forms of the given lexeme (e.g. to ring, rang, rung). Said in other terms, this is the difference between a description in intension

Intension

In linguistics, logic, philosophy, and other fields, an intension is any property or quality connoted by a word, phrase or other symbol. In the case of a word, it is often implied by the word's definition...

 (a morphological pattern) and a description in extension

Extension (semantics)

In any of several studies that treat the use of signs - for example, in linguistics, logic, mathematics, semantics, and semiotics - the extension of a concept, idea, or sign consists of the things to which it applies, in contrast with its comprehension or intension, which consists very roughly of...

(a paradigm).

Sources

• Aronoff, Mark (1993). "Morphology by Itself". Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Comrie, Bernard. (1989). Language universals and linguistic typology (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-11433-3 (pbk).
• Matthews, Peter. (1991). Morphology (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-41043-6 (hb). ISBN 0-521-42256-6 (pbk).
• Mel'čuk, Igor A. (1993-2000). Cours de morphologie générale, vol. 1-5. Montreal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal.
• Stump, Gregory T. (2001). Inflectional morphology: a theory of paradigm structure. No. 93 in Cambridge studies in linguistics. CUP. ISBN 0-521-78047-0 (hb).