Ali Kaan Akgün, 06.10.

2022, Word Formation and Morphology

Word Formation
Word formation section in George Yule’s book explains how words in English are incorporated. Even
the Dutch language was only a passing political presence in America, Dutch language effected many
words. Such words like blunderbuss, scow, stoop, span, coleslaw and even the distinctive American
interrogative “how come?” was adopted into the language. Around 1900 someone named J. Murray
Spangler invented a device called “electric suction swepper” and this device became very popular
and we could’ve been know it as “Spangler” but he sold his invention to the man named William H.
Hoover and his first machine was known as “Hoover”. Still in Britain some people uses “Hoovering”
instead of “Vacuuming” and if it was the Spangler that put the device on market there would be new
words like Spangler, Spanglerish, Spanglerism, Spanglering or Spanglered and with this information
we can understand that English has a lot of Word-formation processes in itself. Goerge Yule than
expands on the sub-topics and incorporation techniques like Etymology, Coinage, Borrowing,
Compounding, Blending, Clipping, Backformation, Conversion, Derivation (Prefixes, Suffixes and
Infixes) and lastly multiple processes to show how to apply such techniques. Let me briefly explain
each one.

Etymology is knowing a word and its background and it can show us how languages adopt new words
or create new ones.

Coinage is “making up” so we make up new words to describe things but it is not popular as its other
counterparts and one of the most popular words derrived from this technique is Google/Googling.
The first example about Spangler can be fall into this catagory and such words like these called
eponyms.

Borrowing is pretty self-explanitory but in short it is basically adopting words from other languages
and it is one of the most common sources of new words.

Compounding is joining of two separate words to produce a single form. Some common English
compounds are bookcase, fingerprint, sunburn etc. Even though it is well documanted in English and
German we can also find this productive technique in completely unrelated languages aswell.

Blending is taking the beginning of one Word and joining it to the end of another word.
Gasohol(Gas+Alcohol), Smog(Smoke+Fog) are commonly seen ones but there are other methods to
blend some words. Telex(Teleprinter/Exchange) is made up from the beginnings of each word can be
done aswell.

Clipping is type of reduction that is noticeable in blending can be more apperent in the process.
Clipping usually begins in daily speech. Some well known clipped words are fan(fanatic), pub(public
house), cab (cabriolet). English speakers like to clip others names like Mike, Ron, Sam, Tom etc. In
Aussie and British English there is a technique called “hypocorisms” and its process is taking a longer
word and making it a single syllable and adding “-y” or “-ie” at the end of the word. Movie(moving
Picture), Telly(Television), Aussie(Australian).
Backformation is a reduction process and taking a word of one type (usually noun) and reduced to
form of another type (usally verb). Work, Worker / Donation, Donate / Babysitter, Babysit and this is
the whole thing.

Conversion is a change in the function of a word. It has two common processes that called Catagory
Change and Functional shift. Bottle(N), Bottle smth(V) etc.

Acronyms are a new words formed from the initial letters of other words. Such as NATO, NASA,
UNESCO, CD these examples have kept their capital letters but most of the acronyms simple became
everyday terms. Laser, scuba, radar and zip are heard at least once in most of the english speakers.

Derivation is by far the most common word formation process to be found in creating new English
words. In English there are “bits” which can not be found in dictionaries listings. These bits are
affixes and they help us when we are creating new words. Happy, Unhappy / Present, Mispresent
etc.

These are all the techniques explained in the Word formation section.

Morphology
In short morphology is basically takes one word and dissects it and tries to understand written
English deeply. But observations has some problems attempting to describe language in general and
individual linguistic forms in particular. In many languages single forms actually turno ut to contain
large number of word-like elements. For Example in Swahili the form “Nitakupenda” conveys in
English something like “I will love you”. Is the Swhaili form a single word? If its a word then it seems
to consist of a number of elements which turn up as separate “words”. Roughly we can present:

ni- ta- ku- penda

“I will you love”

It would seem that this swahili “word” is rather bizzare from what we think of as an English word.
Yet, there are some similarity or at least similar message can be seen. This type of exercise we just
did is an example of investigating basic forms in language. Elements in this segment are in the
linguistic form known as “morphemes”.

Morphemes in really short are prefixes, suffixes and infixes. We can recognize that English word
forms such as talks, talker, talked and talking must consist the one element “talk” so the other
number of elements such as “-s, -er, -ed and -ing” must be Morphemes. The definition is “a minimal
unit of meaning or grammatical function.” Units of grammatical functions help us indicate past tense
or plural, for example. In the word “reopened” consists of three morphemes. One minimal unit open,
other one is re-(again) and a minimal unit of grammatical function is -ed(past tense).

We need to take into account free and bound morphemes. There are free morphemes ,that is,
morphemes that can stand by themselves as a single words like open and tour. There are also bound
morphemes, which are those forms that can not stand as a unit themselves like “re-, -ist, -ed, -s.”
These are affixes and we can easily say that all affixes (Prefixes and suffixes) in English are bound
morphemes. The free morphemes can generally be identified as the set of sparate English word
fomrs like basic nouns, adjective, verbs, etc. When they are used with bound morphemes, the basic
word forms become “stems.” For Example:

undressed carelessness
un- dress -ed care -less -ness
prefix stem suffix stem suffix suffix
(bound) (free) (bound) (free) (bound) (bound)

There are a number of English words in which the element treated as the stem is not, in fact, a free
morpheme. In words such as receive,reduce and repeat, we can identify the bound morpheme “re-“
at the beginning, but the elements “-ceive, -duce and -peat” are not separate word forms and hence
cannot be free morphemes. These types of forms are sometimes described as “bound stems” to keep
them distinct from “free stems” such as dress and care.

Free morphemes fall into two catagories. First one is ordinary nouns, adjective and verbs that the
words that carry the contect of the message we convey. These free morhpemes are called “Lexical
M.” And some expamples are: girl man house. We can add new lexical moprhemes to the language
so we call them “Open” class of words. Other types of free morphemes are called “Functional M.”
Examples are and, but, when, because. This set consists large of the functional words in the language
such as cunjuctions, prepositions and pronouns. Since we almost never add new functional m. We
can describe them as “Closed” words.

Set of affixes that constructs the catagory of bound m. We can divide it into two types. One type is
the derivation of words and they are called Derivational M. We use these bound m. To make new
words or maket he words of different grammatical catagories from the stem. Good – Goodness /
Care – Careful, Careless. These kind of words makes a list of derivational m. That includes suffixes
such as “-ish, -ly, -ment” and it also contains prefixes like “re-, pre-, ex-, mis-“and many more. The
second set of bound m. Are called inflectional m. These are not used to produce new words but
rather to indicate grammatical function. Inflectional m. Tells us that the words is plural or singular, it
is in past tense or not etc. English has only eight infelctional morphemes and these are: Possesive,
Pulural, Abbreviation, Present Participle, Past Tense, Past Pariticple, Comparative and Superlative.

Noun + -’s, -s
Verb + -s, -ing, -ed, -en
Adjective + -er, -es

Worth the note, sometimes possesive can appear as -s’ like in “the Boys’.”

Except derivational morphemes other morphemes can not change the grammatical catagory of a
word. Old and Older are both adjectives. But think of Teach and Teacher both havedifferent
catagories. Just because “-er” are both there they do not do the same work. Whenever there is a
derivational suffix and an iflectional suffix in the same word, they always appear in order. First
derivational “-er” then infectional “-s” to make teach-er-s.

These all however creates problems in the description. Most of the plurals just adds “-s” on a word to
make it plural like cat to cats, dog to dogs etc. But what about sheep to sheep? Or woman to
women? Or in the word legal can we take out “-al” to acquire stem “leg” of course no. This happens
because of Borrowing technique in word-formation.

There are morphs and allomorphs. Easy way to identify morphs and allomorphs you need to
understand the concept first. Morphs are the actual forms used to realize morphemes. For example
cats has two morphs, cat + -s, realizing lexical morpheme and an inflectional morpheme. We can find
the morphs and we can say there must be at least two different morphs. Allophones on the other
handa re particular morphemes. When we find a group of different morphs, all versions of one
morpheme, we can say that these are all Allomorphs. In short Allomorphs can be said in certain
conditions, all units must do the same job. For example “-s” PLURAL ALLOMORPH units must be only
used to puluralize a word.

We can look different languages aswell to find similar things between languages. By looking at the
morphology of other languages we can find patterns and forms we identified. For example in Kanuri
“nəm-” derrivational morpheme derive nouns from adjectives. In Ganda “omu-“ prefix indicates
singular and “aba-“ indicates pulural. In Ilocano they use reduplication “ulo to ululo” “dalan to
daldalan” etc. They use this technique to make the word plural. And lastly in Tagalog people use
repetition of the first syllable. For example basa(Read) bumasa(Read!) babasa(Will Read).

Conculusion of both of the Topics

To conclude both Morphology and Word Formation writings we can for sure say that without word-
formation, morphology would be incomplete. Word-formation help us understand the each words
background and components therefore we can create new words with the use of the techniques
such as Etymology, Coinage, Borrowing, Compounding, Blending, Clipping, Backformation,
Conversion, Derivation (Prefixes, Suffixes and Infixes). For the Morphology part, it needs word-
formations “Derivation” technique to function better. Thanks to Prefixes, Suffixes and Infixes we can
find the similarities between languages that are not alike. Although word-formation helps us it can
create problems aswell.

My Experiences
As far as I remember, I don’t recall learning Word-formation or Morphology to this day in my studies
or my student life. Of course I came across with Prefixes, Suffixes or Infixes or Conjuctions etc. But I
never knew they belong to a different topic as a whole. This study helped me understand similarities
between other languages and how to identify them. Learning a new language always a hard task and
therefore knowing where similarities occur I can enhance my learning process. I don’t know how
much it will help or would it be helpful at all? Only time will tell. Thanks to the passage I can now
understand better when I see a word that I am not used to because I can cut now the word in
morphs and try to understand it deeply.
Overall Thoughts and Combination of Both My
Experiences and the Topics

After reading the passage and concluding my experiences together I can say that both morphology
and word-formation can help a person understand a language deeply and can be useful in language
teaching. After reading the paragraph I thought if language teaching courses interpret both
morphology and word-formation they may teach the course attendants even better. It is kind of
complex at the first glance but I will try to do it if I have to learn a second language. Because I have
easy time linking things together and If I can find similarities in “Morphs” betweem languages I think I
can learn better. Other than that I am not sure where I can use the terms and techniques I learned
today. In the end I didn’t enjoyed reading it aswell. So I have mixed feelings about wheter I will need
it or not. It has potential but may be not for me. I do learned new things that is certain but like I said
before I think its pretty situational. If I don’t want to learn additional languages I think I’ll pass these
methods and stick to the traditional methods that works for me.