Agent noun
In
linguistics,
agent noun (or
nomen agentis) is a word that is derived from another word denoting an
action (
A) and that has the meaning
`entity that does A'.
Agent noun (or
nomen agentis) is also the name of this derivational meaning (also called a
derivateme).
An
English example: the noun
driver, derived from the verb
to drive.
-er is the common English agent noun-forming suffix.
Usually,
derived in the above definition has the strict sense attached to it in
morphology, i.e., the
derivation takes as an input a
lexeme and produces a new lexeme. However, the classification of
morphemes into derivational morphemes and
inflectional 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
language (for example, of the agent noun-forming morpheme).
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Nominalization
