- giving form or shape; forming; shaping; fashioning; molding: a formative process in manufacturing.
- relating to formation or development: a child's most formative years.
- Biology.
- capable of developing new cells or tissue by cell division and differentiation: formative tissue.
- concerned with the formation of an embryo, organ, or the like.
- continuous and diagnostic, and covering specifically the current material with which the student is actively engaged; ongoing: formative assessment;formative evaluation;formative feedback.
- relating to a formative, an affix that indicates the part of speech of a derived word.
- a derivational affix, particularly one that determines the part of speech of the derived word, as -ness, in loudness, hardness, etc.
- (in generative grammar) any element, as a word, affix, or inflectional ending, functioning as a minimal syntactic unit that can be used in forming larger constructions.
- of or relating to formation, development, or growth
- shaping; moulding
- (of tissues and cells in certain parts of an organism) capable of growth and differentiation
- functioning in the formation of derived, inflected, or compound words
- an inflectional or derivational affix
- (in generative grammar) any of the minimum units of a sentence that have syntactic function
