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Feb 10, 2010
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der•i•va•tion



Pronunciation: (der"u-vā'shun), [key]
—n.
1. the act or fact of deriving or of being derived.
2. the process of deriving.
3. the source from which something is derived; origin.
4. something that is or has been derived; derivative.
5. Math.
a. development of a theorem.
b. differentiation.
6. Gram.
a. the process or device of adding affixes to or changing the shape of a base, thereby assigning the result to a form class that may undergo further inflection or participate in different syntactic constructions, as in forming service from serve, song from sing, and hardness from hard (contrasted with inflection).
b. the systematic description of such processes in a given language.
7. Ling.
a. a set of forms, including the initial form, intermediate forms, and final form, showing the successive stages in the generation of a sentence as the rules of a generative grammar are applied to it.
b. the process by which such a set of forms is derived.

Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Copyright © 1997, by Random House, Inc., on Infoplease.

derivderivative
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