formative element

noun

Grammar.

1. a morpheme that serves as an affix, not as a base, or root, in word formation.

2. any noninflectional morpheme, whether base or affix.

Word History and Origins

Origin of formative element¹

First recorded in 1870–75

Example Sentences

It is the formative element in the karma as it has taken shape in bodily existence.—155,

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Rousseau's "Sensibility."—Rousseau was one of those philosophers whose character is the formative element which gives shape to their doctrines.

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Bright young men and women, the advanced students of the schools of to-day, who are to become the leaders of thought and the teachers of to-morrow, find little restraint and no formative element in the creeds and dogmas that in the past have been so much in evidence, and so constraining.

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Humanism again comes forward as an important literary formative element.

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Of these two principles, the bright one being analogous to Fire, the dark one to Earth, he considered the former to be the male or formative element, the latter the female or passive element; the former therefore had analogies to Being as such, the latter to Non-being.

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