Lesson 2.3: Word Formation

Lesson 2.3: WORD FORMATION

Now, let's look at how new words can be formed. There are two major ways to make up new words. They can be created using morphological means by altering the forms, or morphemes, of words. These word formation processes are discussed in chapter 5 of the textbook. New words can also come about by altering the meaning of existing words. This form of language change is discussed in chapter 6. Both discussions are very good and I don't need to add to them. Instead, I have put together an exercise that gives you the opportunity to practice the 11 morphological word formation processes discussed in the book. Before you go through the exercise, however, let's review the object of study of morphology first. As you might remember, morphology deals with the inventory of meaning-bearing forms, or morphemes, in language and the processes by which these forms can be put together to form complex morphemes. It might be a good idea to practice these objects of study in morphology briefly.

When morphologists study the inventory of morphemes in English, the distinction between free and bound morphemes is important. In English, there are many free morphemes, which means that they can stand alone. There are also bound morphemes, which can not stand alone; they need to be attached to a stem or free morpheme. Take, for example, the ambiguous headline Teacher Strikes Idle Kids. It contains the following free morphemes: teacher, strike, idle, and kid. Note that these free morphemes don't have endings attached. Endings (or specifically inflections here) are bound morphemes. The bound morphemes in the headline therefore are the following: -s and -s. One carries the meaning plural/3rd person singular (depending on the interpretation) and the other plural.

As for the other concern of morphologists, morphological processes, there are many processes that speakers of a language can use to form new morphemes or words. In the headline above, the word formation process of affixation (attaching a bound morpheme to a stem) was used to form the words strikes and kids. This process is only one of many morphological processes in English, but it is very common. To refresh your morphological skills a bit, let's engage in a brief exercise.

Take 4-5 longer words, such as industrialization or preventing.
divide these words into morphemes by putting slashes at morpheme boundaries; e.g. industri/al/iz/ation.
post your examples and discuss each others' morphological analyses in the activity item Morph. Analysis at the Conference Center; for this exercise, you are all together in a single item. Click here to the Center.

After this refresher, let's look at how new words were created in English over the centuries. Historically, borrowing words from other languages was very common: 70% of the English vocabulary are loans. Today, however, new words are mostly formed from English resources. Why would this be? Well, English has gained so much in status worldwide that American scientist, doctors, or engineers, to name but a few, are leaders in their fields. Therefore, they "get" to make up new terms and the rest of the world borrows from English. Now we are ready for the exercise.
Exercise on Morphological Processes in English

In the following list of English words, there are examples of words for each of the morphological processes discussed in Culpeper. In fact, there are three examples for each process (some may also fit more than one category). Here is the list of words:

burgle, smog, fatal, SNAFU, sputnik, blackbox, sandwich, splat, girlfriendless, edit, diesel, RADAR, ad, UNESCO, bus, clank, Xerox, orientate, brunch, radiotrician, watt, actor, post office, input, pencil, Kleenex, telly, lunchbox, salsa, kindergarten, keyboard, Q-tip, cockadoodle-doo

And here is what I would like you to do:

a) Identify the three examples in the list above for each of the processes in Culpeper. For example, burgle is one example of back-formation; it was formed from burglary. There are 2 more examples of back-formation in the list. No word should be used twice!
b) List these three examples under the processes that they exemplify. For example, back-formation: Burgle, XXX, YYY, where XXX and YYY are the other 2 examples of backformation.
c) Post your findings in the items Word Formation 1-6 at the Center, and discuss each others' examples. Keep the same group assignments as in the previous exercise. Click here to go to the Center.

These are the morphological processes introduced in Culpeper's chapter 5; some have alternate names, which are given in parentheses:

1. compounding:

2. affixation:

3. onomatopoeia:

4. acronyming:

5. clipping:

6. back-formation:

7. blending (telescoping):

8. eponyming (idea-naming)

9. functional conversion (functional shift):

10. nonce-formation (creation from nothing):

11. loaning (direct borrowing from other languages):

Now you can tackle the homework assignment for this lesson, Assignment 2: Teen Slang.

This is the end of lesson 2. I will talk to you next week for the third and final lesson of this course.