UNIT 1

LESSON 1 WORD: THE DEFINITION AND CRITERIA

Lesson Learning Outcomes:

At the end of the lesson, you are expected to:
a) Discuss how words are formed; its mechanism and process; and
b) Reflect on how word meaning changes when used in varied context.

BOOST YOUR WORD POWER!

Do It Yourself: List down 5 new words that you just learn recently and provide its definition.

NEW WORD MEANING

1. kitsch Something that appeals to popular or lowbrow taste and is often of poor
quality.
2. milieu It is the physical or social setting in which something occurs or
develops. The word is synonymous with environment.
3. reprobate Is an unprincipled or depraved person. Other names for such a being
are scoundrel and rogue.
4. admonish Means to express warning or disapproval to (someone) especially in a
gentle or earnest manner.
5. lugubrious Means "mournful" or "dismal." It can also mean "very sad in an
exaggerated or insincere way."

BRING HOME THESE KEY CONCEPTS!

LESSON 1: WORD: THE DEFINITION AND CRITERIA

PRESENTATION

The following is an article on How New Words Are Born by Andy Boodle

As dictionary publishers never tire of reminding us, our language is growing. Not content with the million or so words they
already have at their disposal, English speakers are adding new ones at the rate of around 1,000 a year. Recent dictionary debutants
include blog, grok, crowdfunding, hackathon, airball, e-marketing, sudoku, twerk and Brexit.

But these represent just a silver of the tip of the iceberg. According to Global Language Monitor, around 5,400 new words are
created every year; it’s only the 1,000 or so deemed to be in sufficiently widespread use that make it into print. Who invents these
words, and how? What rules govern their formation? And what determines whether they catch on?
 Shakespeare is often held up as a master neologist, because at least 500 words (including critic, swagger, lonely and hint)
first appear in his works – but we have no way of knowing whether he personally invented them or was just transcribing things he’d
picked up elsewhere.

It’s generally agreed that the most prolific minter of words was John Milton, who gave us 630 coinages, including lovelorn,
fragrance and pandemonium. Geoffrey Chaucer (universe, approach), Ben Jonson (rant, petulant), John Donne (self-preservation,
valediction) and Sir Thomas More (atonement, anticipate) lag behind. It should come as no great surprise that writers are behind many
of our lexical innovations. But the fact is, we have no idea who to credit for most of our lexicon.

If our knowledge of the who is limited, we have a rather fuller understanding of the how. All new words are created by one of 13
mechanisms:

1. Derivation
The commonest method of creating a new word is to add a prefix or suffix to an existing one. Hence realisation (1610s),
democratise (1798), detonator (1822), preteen (1926), hyperlink (1987) and monogamish (2011).
2. Back formation
The inverse of the above: the creation of a new root word by the removal of a phantom affix. The noun sleaze, for example,
was back-formed from “sleazy” in about 1967. A similar process brought about pea, liaise, enthuse, aggress and donate.
Some linguists propose a separate category for lexicalisation, the turning of an affix into a word (ism, ology, teen), but it’s
really just a type of back formation.
3. Compounding
The juxtaposition of two existing words. Typically, compound words begin life as separate entities, then get hitched with a
hyphen, and eventually become a single unit. It’s mostly nouns that are formed this way (fiddlestick, claptrap, carbon dating,
bailout), but words from other classes can be smooshed together too: into (preposition), nobody (pronoun), daydream (verb),
awe-inspiring, environmentally friendly (adjectives).
4. Repurposing
Taking a word from one context and applying it to another. Thus the crane, meaning lifting machine, got its name from the
long-necked bird, and the computer mouse was named after the long-tailed animal.
5. Conversion
Taking a word from one word class and transplanting it to another. The word giant was for a long time just a noun, meaning a
creature of enormous size, until the early 15th century, when people began using it as an adjective. Thanks to social media, a
similar fate has recently befallen friend, which can now serve as a verb as well as a noun (“Why didn’t you friend me?”).
6. Eponyms
Words named after a person or place. You may recognise Alzheimer’s, atlas, cheddar, alsatian, diesel, sandwich, mentor,
svengali, wellington and boycott as eponyms – but did you know that gun, dunce, bigot, bugger, cretin, currant, hooligan,
marmalade, maudlin, maverick, panic, silhouette, syphilis, tawdry, doggerel, doily and sideburns are too? (The issue of
whether, and for how long, to retain the capital letters on eponyms is a thorny one.)
7. Abbreviations
An increasingly popular method. There are three main subtypes: clippings, acronyms and initialisms. Some words that you
might not have known started out longer are pram (perambulator), taxi/cab (both from taximeter cabriolet), mob (mobile
vulgus), goodbye (God be with you), berk (Berkshire Hunt), rifle (rifled pistol), canter (Canterbury gallop), curio (curiosity), van
(caravan), sport (disport), wig (periwig), laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation), scuba (self-contained
underwater breathing apparatus), and trump (triumph. Although it’s worth noting that there’s another, unrelated sense of
trump: to fabricate, as in “trumped-up charge”).
8. Loanwords
Foreign speakers often complain that their language is being overrun with borrowings from English. But the fact is, English
itself is a voracious word thief; linguist David Crystal reckons it’s half-inched words from at least 350 languages. Most words
are borrowed from French, Latin and Greek; some of the more exotic provenances are Flemish (hunk), Romany (cushty),
Portuguese (fetish), Nahuatl (tomato – via Spanish), Tahitian (tattoo), Russian (mammoth), Mayan (shark), Gaelic (slogan),
Japanese (tycoon), West Turkic (horde), Walloon (rabbit) and Polynesian (taboo). Calques (flea market, brainwashing, loan
word) are translations of borrowings.
9. Onomatopeia
The creation of a word by imitation of the sound it is supposed to make. Plop, ow, barf, cuckoo, bunch, bump and midge all
originated this way.
10. Reduplication
Q1 The repetition, or near-repetition, of a word or sound. To this method we owe the likes of flip-flop, goody-goody, boo-boo,
 helter-skelter, picnic, claptrap, hanky-panky, hurly-burly, lovey-dovey, higgledy-piggledy, tom-tom, hip hop and cray-cray.
(Willy-nilly, though, came to us via a contraction of “Will he, nill he”.)
11. Nonce words
Words pulled out of thin air, bearing little relation to any existing form. Confirmed examples are few and far between, but
include quark (Murray Gell-Mann), bling (unknown) and fleek (Vine celebrity Kayla Newman).
12. Error
Misspellings, mishearings, mispronunciations and mistranscriptions rarely produce new words in their own right, but often lead
to new forms in conjunction with other mechanisms. Scramble, for example, seems to have originated as a variant of scrabble;
but over time, the two forms have taken on different meanings, so one word has now become two. Similarly, the words shit
and science, thanks to a long sequence of shifts and errors, are both ultimately derived from the same root. And the now
defunct word helpmeet, or helpmate, is the result of a Biblical boo-boo. In the King James version, the Latin adjutorium simile
sibi was rendered as “an help meet for him” – that is, “a helper suitable for him”. Later editors, less familiar with the archaic
sense of meet, took the phrase to be a word, and began hyphenating help-meet.
13. Portmanteaus
Compounding with a twist. Take one word, remove an arbitrary portion of it, then put in its place either a whole word, or a
similarly clipped one. Thus were born sitcom, paratroops, internet, gazunder and sexting. (Note: some linguists call this
process blending and reserve the term portmanteau for a particular subtype of blend. But since Lewis Carroll, who devised
this sense of portmanteau, specifically defined it as having the broader meaning, I’m going to use the terms willy-nilly.)

Some words came about via a combination of methods: yuppie is the result of initialism ((y)oung and (up)wardly mobile) plus
derivation (+ -ie); berk is a clipped eponym (Berkshire hunt); cop, in the sense of police officer, is an abbreviation of a derivation
(copper derives from the northern British dialect verb cop, meaning to catch); and snarl-up is a conversion (verb to noun) of a
compound (snarl + up).

The popularity of the various methods has waxed and waned through the ages. For long periods (1100-1500 and 1650-1900),
borrowings from French were in vogue. In the 19th century, loanwords from Indian languages (bangle, bungalow, cot, juggernaut,
jungle, loot, shampoo, thug) were the cat’s pyjamas. There was even a brief onslaught from Dutch and Flemish.

In the 20th century, quite a few newbies were generated by derivation, using the -ie (and -y) suffix: talkies, freebie, foodie, hippy,
roomie, rookie, roofie, Munchie, Smartie, Crunchie, Furby, scrunchie. Abbreviations, though, were the preferred MO, perhaps because
of the necessity in wartime of delivering your message ASAP. The passion for initialisms seems to be wearing off, perhaps because
things have got a little confusing; PC, for example, can now mean politically correct, police constable, per cent, personal computer,
parsec, post cibum, peace corps, postcard, professional corporation or printed circuit.

But today, when it comes to word formation, there’s only one player in town: the portmanteau. Is this a bodacious development –
or a disastrophe? I’ll get the debate rolling tomorrow.

Twitter: @AndyBodle

This article was amended on 8 February 2016 to remove an incorrect reference to Oxford Dictionaries Online.

SPEAK UP PLEASE!

Activity #1: ESSAY

Based on the article that you have read, answer the following questions:
a. How are new words formed?
In the English language, the word formation process creates new words and places them in different grammatical categories,
as well as giving some words new meanings. In fact, most new words are simply old words with new functions. We often think
of word formation as something that happened centuries ago, but it actually happens today.
Language is constantly evolving and expanding! Others emerge as some words fade out of favor and fade into obscurity, often
as a result of highly specific time and place contexts. Different stages or processes are involved in word formation, and they all
work together to form words. In the English language, different processes of word formation exist. The derivation, back,
 compounding, repurposing, conversion, eponyms,abbreviations,loanwords,onomatopeia,reduplication,nonce
error,portmanteus One of the 13 mechanisms generates all new words, and there are also methods that combine them.
Language is a constantly changing phenomenon. Although English has a core set of words that are essential to sentence
construction and have remained consistent over centuries, there are also a large number of words that enter and exit the
language as time passes, reflecting the concerns of society at the time. Some new words are ephemeral, linked to cultural or
technical concepts that lose their meaning over time. Others stick to their guns, usually because they represent ideas that
have become ingrained in society

b. How are words formed?

In traditional grammar, words are the basic units of analysis grammarians classify words according to their parts of speech.
Words are potentially complex units composed of even more basic units called morphemes .A morpheme is the smallest part
of a word that has grammatical function or meaning. For example, sawed, sawn, sawing, and saws can be analyzeed into the
morphemes {saw}+ {ed},{n},{-ing} and {s},respectively. None of these last fpur can be further divided into meaninhful units and
each occurs in many other words. {Saw} can occur on its own as a word does not have to be attached to another morpheme is
it is called as a free morpheme. However, none of the other morphemes listed just above is free. It must be affixed or attached
to some other unit which can only occur as a part of a word. Morphemes that must be attached edward partners are called
bound morphemes. Affixes are classified according to whether they are attached before or after. The form to which they are
added prefixes are attached before and suffixes are after.

c. How many new words are created every day?

Our language is constantly evolving. English speakers, are adding new ones to millions of words at a rate of around 1,000 per
year. Blog, grok, crowdfunding, hackathon, airball, e-marketing, sudoku, twerk, and Brexit are among the most recent
dictionary additions. However, this is only a sliver of the iceberg's surface. According to the Global Language Monitor,
approximately 5,400 new words are created each year; however, only about 1,000 of them are deemed to be in widespread
use enough to make it into print.
d. What are some mechanisms in forming new words?
All new words are created by one of the 13 mechanisms. These are the derivation, back, compounding, repurposing,
conversion, eponyms, abbreviations, loanwords, onomatopoeia, reduplication, nonce, error,portmanteus One of the 13
mechanisms generates all new words, and there are also methods that combine them.
e. Which word formation process is the source of the English word modem?
The word "modern" was originated from a blend of the words which are "modulator" and "demodulator" .Since the word is
taken from two words and based on sound fractures, the resulting word modem is called blend. Typically blending process is
accomplished by taking only the beginning of one word and joining it to the end of the other word. Therefore, the word
formation process used here is blending.

The following is a research article on Morphological Awareness and Some Implications for English Language Teaching.
In the past decade there has been a surge of research interest in morphological awareness (MA), which refers to an
individual's ability to decode the morphemic structure of words and further analyze them. This review gives conceptual insights into MA
from linguistic perspectives and provides some implications for English language teaching based on empirical research findings.
Recent research into MA suggests that there is a significant rate of achievement among students who are exposed to strategies for not
only understanding the meanings of words but also recognizing different morphological forms of the same word in reading texts, as
opposed to students who are not exposed to such strategies. Indeed, a large number of studies conducted have established that MA is
a critical factor in enabling comprehension and ensuring that students have a clearer understanding of vocabulary. In addition, it has
emerged that for many educators, an emphasis on a clear understanding of such aspects as prefixes, suffixes, and roots determines
the success rate in teaching vocabulary. Therefore, language teachers can engage in teaching MA in the classroom as part of explicit
language instruction by adopting some instructional strategies that can be adjusted to suit each age group.
The second component of language is morphology (from the Greek word morphe “form”). Morphology is the study of the
structure or form of words in a particular language, and of their classification. While the concept of a word is intuitively clear, it is not
easy to define it objectively (is ice cream one word or two?), and morphology must begin by trying to formulate such a definition.
Morphology then considers principles of word formation in a language: how sounds combine into meaningful units such as prefixes,
suffixes and roots, which of these units are distinctive and which are predictable variants (such as a and an), and what processes of
word formation in a language characteristically uses, such as compounding (as in roadway) or (suffixing as in pavement).
 LET’S STAY CONNECTED

Reflection Essay: Write your answer on the following questions.

1. How important is possessing (morphological word formation) awareness?
Understanding the meaning of new words is easier when you know what a morpheme is. Possessing
morphological awareness is very it helps us in decoding of words, inferring their meaning, and facilitating word
reading and comprehension in texts.
2. What do you think is its implication to your role as a future English Teacher?
As a future English teacher, it is important for me to possess a morphological awareness because it is beyond
essential for an English teacher to become knowledgeable in terms of vocabulary and reading comprehension and
it can also help me in promoting my future students vocabulary knowledge.

Read On: The following article will show the power of the words in a language.

The Power of Language: How WORDS can shape people, culture

By Alex Shashkevich

Speaking, writing and reading are integral to everyday life, where language is the primary tool for expression and
communication. Studying how people use language – what words and phrases they unconsciously choose and combine – can help us
better understand ourselves and why we behave the way we do.

Linguistics scholars seek to determine what is unique and universal about the language we use, how it is acquired and the
ways it changes over time. They consider language as a cultural, social and psychological phenomenon.

“Understanding why and how languages differ tells about the range of what is human,” said Dan Jurafsky, the Jackson Eli
Reynolds Professor in Humanities and chair of the Department of Linguistics in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford.
“Discovering what’s universal about languages can help us understand the core of our humanity.”

People speak roughly 7,000 languages worldwide. Although there is a lot in common among languages, each one is unique,
both in its structure and in the way it reflects the culture of the people who speak it.
Jurafsky said it’s important to study languages other than our own and how they develop over time because it can help scholars
understand what lies at the foundation of humans’ unique way of communicating with one another.
“All this research can help us discover what it means to be human,” Jurafsky said.

Linguists analyze how certain speech patterns correspond to particular behaviors, including how language can impact
people’s buying decisions or influence their social media use.

For example, in one research paper, a group of Stanford researchers examined the differences in how Republicans and
Democrats express themselves online to better understand how a polarization of beliefs can occur on social media.
“We live in a very polarized time,” Jurafsky said. “Understanding what different groups of people say and why is the first step in
determining how we can help bring people together.”

SPEAK UP PLEASE!
 1. What can you infer from this statement, “Discovering what’s universal about languages can help us understand the core of our
humanity?”
Understanding how people use language, what words and phrases they choose and combine unconsciously can
help us better understand ourselves and why we act the way we do. Language is most likely the only feature that
distinguishes us from our closest relatives, the chimps. All of our other major differences are most likely due to
language. It allows you to implant a thought from your mind directly into the mind of another person, and the other
person can attempt to do the same to you without either of you having to undergo surgery. Humans use discrete
pulses of sound, which we call language, to change the internal settings of another person's brain to suit their
needs. Language is a form of social learning because it is not a solitary endeavor.
2. “If we understood the power of our thoughts, we would guard them more closely. If we understood the awesome power of our
words, we would prefer silence to almost anything negative. In our thoughts and words, we create our own weaknesses and
our own strengths.” What do you think is the meaning of that statement?
The majority of us are unaware of our language's power and how it shapes our reality. Language is a powerful tool,
but the trick is figuring out how to use it to our advantage. What we think has a direct impact on how we feel, which
in turn has a direct impact on how we act. We will feel like a failure if we believe we are a failure. This will cause us
to act like a failure, which will provide us with evidence that we are a failure, reinforcing our belief that we are.
So, our thoughts, and thus our words, have a great deal of power. This is why it's critical to keep a close eye on them and be
aware of what other information we allow to influence our thoughts. The experience we have will be determined by whether we
watch, listen to, or use fear-inducing language during this time. If we concentrate on using more positive language to describe
who we are and how we want our lives to be, we will experience more positive thoughts, feelings, and, as a result, more
positive behaviors and outcomes. With the language we use, we have the ability to create the life we want.

3. As a future educator, how can you prove that words are powerful? Give a concrete example.
Words are beyond powerful. Students respect teachers in school and they automatically follow what a teacher says
and instructs them. It occurs not only in the classroom, but also at home and in our community. As I observe my
teachers at school, I've come to realize that a teacher's rapport with each student is determined by how well they
communicate with them. Students' thoughts, feelings, and experiences are validated when they express empathy.
Each child becomes an integral part of the class community through their words of warmth and acceptance. So I
realized that I will value the words of my future students. I will hear out and understand their little voice. Finally, as a
future educator, I must learn to weigh my words carefully because the right decision can change someone's life.
Being articulate is one of the most valuable skills a person can have, and thus one of the most valuable skills a
future educator like me can foster.
4. Create a cinquain about WORDS/LANGUAGE.
Word
Vital, meaningful
Transmitting, expressing, communicating
Satisfaction…when properly understood
Term

*For those who are not familiar with cinquain, I’ll give you the definition and the example below.

Cinquain /ˈsɪŋkeɪn/ is a class of poetic forms that employ a 5-line pattern.

 The first line is one word which is the title of the poem.
 The second line contains two words which are adjectives that describe the title.
 The third line has three words that tell the reader more about the subject of the poem or show action. Many times these words
are gerunds that end with -ing.
 The fourth line has four words that show emotions about the subject of the poem and may be individual words or a phrase.
 The fifth line is one word that is a synonym of the title or is very similar to it.
 Snow

"Look up …
From bleakening hills
Blows down the light, first breath
Of wintry wind … look up, and scent
The snow!"
- by Adelaide Crapsey