Categories of word-formation

Categories such as agent noun, place noun, or gender marking, are the oldest, most common and most widely used semantic categories in word-formation, providing a suitable onomasiological basis for crosslinguistic comparison. Among the proposals to group such categories into more general semantic sets, the most well-known – especially in Slavic linguistics – is the one proposed by the Czech linguist Miloš Dokulil, who distinguished transposition, mutation and modification. In the present article, a more refined classification will be proposed.