WEEK 2

Morphology
Word Formation Processes

Intro to English Language System

English Class
Professor: John Michael Cultura
 Morphology

Morphology is the study of words. Morphemes are the minimal units of words that have a meaning and
cannot be subdivided further. 

There are two main types: free and bound. Free morphemes can occur alone and bound morphemes
must occur with another morpheme. An example of a free morpheme is "bad", and an example of a
bound morpheme is "ly." It is bound because although it has meaning, it cannot stand alone. It must be
attached to another morpheme to produce a word.

Free morpheme: bad

Bound morpheme: -ly
Word: badly

When we talk about words, there are two groups: lexical (or content) and function (or grammatical)
words. Lexical words are called open class words and include nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.
New words can regularly be added to this group. Function words, or closed class words, are
conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns; and new words cannot be (or are very rarely) added to
this class.

Affixes are often the bound morpheme. This group includes prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and circumfixes.
Prefixes are added to the beginning of another morpheme, suffixes are added to the end, infixes are
inserted into other morphemes, and circumfixes are attached to another morpheme at the beginning and
end.

There are two categories of affixes: derivational and inflectional. The main difference between the two is
that derivational affixes are added to morphemes to form new words that may or may not be the same
part of speech and inflectional affixes are added to the end of an existing word for purely grammatical
reasons. In English there are only eight total inflectional affixes:

-s -3rd person singular present she waits

-ed -past tense -he walked

-ing -progressive -she's watching

-en -past participle -she has eaten

-s -plural -three tables

-'s -possessive -Holly's cat

-er -comparative -you are taller

--est -superlative -you are the tallest

The other type of bound morphemes are called bound roots. These are morphemes (and not affixes) that
must be attached to another morpheme and do not have a meaning of their own.

Some examples are ceive in perceive and mit in submit.

A. Free
1. Open Class
2. Closed Class
B. Bound
1. Affix

a. Derivational
b. Inflectional
2. Root

Open and Closed Word Classes

Some word classes are OPEN, that is, new words can be added to the class as the
need arises. The class of nouns, for instance, is potentially infinite, since it is continually
being expanded as new scientific discoveries are made, new products are developed,
and new ideas are explored.

In the late twentieth century, for example, developments in computer technology have
given rise to many new nouns:
Internet, website, URL, CD-ROM, email, newsgroup, bitmap, modem, multimedia

New verbs have also been introduced:

download, upload, reboot, right-click, double-click

On the other hand, we never invent new prepositions, determiners, or conjunctions. These classes include
words like of, the, and but. They are called CLOSED word classes because they are made up of finite sets
of words which are never expanded (though their members may change their spelling, for example, over
long periods of time). 

What Is a Word Root?

A word root is the base part of a word (i.e., less any prefixes and suffixes).

To change the meaning of a word, a prefix can be added to the front of the word root, or a suffix can be
added to the back. Quite often, a prefix and a suffix are added to a word root to change the meaning.
(Prefixes and suffixes are known as affixes.)

Example: unfriendly

"un" is a prefix.
“friend" is the word root.
"ly" is a suffix
 Word Formation Process

Word Formation Process (also called Morphological Process) is a means by which new words are
produced either by modification of existing words or by complete innovation, which in turn become a part of
the language.

Compounding

Compounding forms a word out of two or more root morphemes. The words are called compounds or
compound words.

In Linguistics, compounds can be either native or borrowed.

Native English roots are typically free morphemes, so that means native compounds are made out of
independent words that can occur by themselves.

Examples:

mailman (composed of free root mail and free root man)

mail carrier
dog house
fireplace
fireplug (a regional word for 'fire hydrant')
fire hydrant
dry run
cupcake
cup holder

Note that compounds are written in various ways in English: with a space between the elements; with a
hyphen between the elements; or simply with the two roots run together with no separation. The way the
word is written does not affect its status as a compound. Over time, the convention for writing compounds
can change, usually in the direction from separate words (e.g. email used to be written with a hyphen. In
the 19th century, today and tomorrow were sometimes still written to-day and to-morrow.
Rhyming compounds (subtype of compounds)
These words are compounded from two rhyming words. 

Examples:

lovey-dovey
chiller-killer

There are words that are formally very similar to rhyming compounds, but are not quite compounds in
English because the second element is not really a word--it is just a nonsense item added to a root word to
form a rhyme.

Examples:

higgledy-piggledy
tootsie-wootsie

Clipping
As the name suggests, clipping is the word formation process in which a word is reduced to a shorter form.
With a sharp contrast to back-formation, clipping keeps the original word meaning intact. These words are
very common in everyday speech. For instance: lab is the clipped form of laboratory.

There are four types of clippings:

Back Clipping: As we’ve seen in exam and examination, back clipping is when the back half of a word is
deleted. Another example is memo, the back-clipped form of memorandum.

Fore-clipping: (also called initial clipping; apheresis) it is the removal of the beginning of a word as

in phone from telephone.

Middle clipping: (also medial clipping; syncope) it is the extraction of the beginning and end of a word as
in flu from influenza.

Complex clipping: is removing multiple parts from multiple words as in cablegram from cabletelegram.

Clipped forms are also used in compounds. One part of the original compound most often remains
intact. Examples are: cablegram (cable telegram), op art (optical art), org-
man (organization man), linocut (linoleum cut). 

Borrowing

This refers to the words adopted from other languages. There are two types of borrowings:

Loan-word: By this process, a word is borrowed from another language without translating it into the
target language.

A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word as adopted from one language (the donor language)

and incorporated into another language without translation.

Examples of loanwords in the English language include café (from French café, which means

"coffee"), bazaar (from Persian bāzār, which means "market"), and kindergarten (from
German Kindergarten, which literally means "children's garden").

Loan-translation: Also known as calque, a morphological process wherein a word or phrase from
another language is borrowed by literally translating it into the target language. 

In linguistics, a calque (/kælk/) or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language

by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a
word or phrase from another language while translating its components, so as to create a
new lexeme in the target language.

Examples:

The common English phrase "flea market" is a loan translation of the French marché aux
puces ("market with fleas").

Or “Merkado” in Bisaya dialect is a loan translation from the English term “Market”.
Coinage
Also called invention, is a morphological process by which new words are invented.
Sometimes popular trademark names of various products are adopted by people so
extensively that they ultimately become the everyday words of language. 

For example:
Heroin
Aspirin
Escalator
Xerox
Kerosene
Nylon
Band-Aid
Vaseline
Margarine
Videotape

Again, some words are being invented due to rapid cultural changes and the spread of
information technology, mass media, internet, etc. For example:

Google
Blog
Hotspot
Netbook
Tablet
Tweet
Emoticon
Smartphone
Blending
Blending (also called portmanteau) is a morphological process in which the parts of two
or more words are combined together to form a new word. Usually, the parts consist of
the beginning of one word and the end of the other word(s). Typically, the meaning of
the blended word reverberates with the meanings of the original words.

For example:

breakfast + lunch → brunch

motor+hotel → motel

However, blending should not be confused with compounding, which combines two
words without truncation of parts of the roots of the blended words.

Acronyms
These words are formed with the initial letters or each of the major parts of a word or a longer phrase. With
a few exceptions, acronyms are usually capitalized. Some linguists confuse acronyms with initialisms,
which are also abbreviations formed in the similar manner as the former. In essence, there is a sharp
difference between the two. In language, an acronym is pronounced as a single word rather than just a
sequence of individual letters, which is characteristic of initialisms.

For example:

Acronyms:

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization → UNESCO

Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation → Laser
International Criminal Police Organization → Interpol
Agusan Del Sur College – ADSCO

Initialisms:

Personal Computer → PC
Asian Development Bank → ADB
Liquid Crystal Display → LCD