Word formation in English language

Introduction
Word formation is the method by which words are formed. Words can be formed in
three ways and those are affixes, conversion and compounds. Many people who have English
as their second language have difficulties forming words. That is why this process of forming
words is so important. The field of linguistics that examines the internal structure of words
and processes of word formation is known as morphology, and in this work we will discuss
some of the most important ideas regarding word formation in English language.

Words and morphemes

Many words can be split into smaller components. When we consider words like
driver, teacher and illustrator we see that they are all nouns related to verbs drive, teach and
illustrate and all of them mean roughly „person or instrument that verb-s“. We can say that the
ending –er (alternatively –or) creates nouns from verbs. Also, there is a way to create verbs
from verbs, as given in the pairs read- re-read, print- re-print, etc. This -re has the meaning of
a repeated action. In both of the aforementioned cases, the complex word consists of a number
of components, each with its own meaning. These components are called morphemes (read-er,
teach-er, etc.). Morpheme is usually described as the minimal linguistic sign which means that
the morpheme is the smallest part which contributes to the meaning of a word. In English
there are two types of morphemes and those are bound and free morphemes. Free morphemes
can stand as a word (teach-er, where teach can stand as a word). On the other side, -er,-or and
re- are unable to stand as a word and they are called bound morphemes.

The starting point for forming a word is called root. A morpheme added to the right of this
root is called a suffix, for example read-er, teach-er, etc. When we add a morpheme on the left
side, it is called prefix, for example re-read, re-illustrate, etc. The term that combines both of
these types is affix. Often there are words that have more than one affix added. We will take
„indecipherability“ for the test subject and determine how many affixes this word has. We
will use labelled bracketing to show the affixes.

We can also present the same outcome using the tree diagram.
There are also words that can switch categories without any affixation. This happens mostly
when we treat nouns as verbs. We will use the word rain to demonstrate this.

-It rained yesterday.

-The rain is good for crops.

This is called conversion and it shows us that words as different categories in sentences.

Another type of forming words is called abbreviation. It involves shortening a word

and we do it in three ways: clipping, acronyms and blends. Clipping is shortening of a word
by removing one or more syllables from it. For example, Matt-Matthew, lab-laboratory etc.
Acronyms are words that combine initial letters from two or more words to produce a
shortened version for easier pronunciation. They are usually pronounced as normal words.
Nowadays we have many of these that are used on an everyday basis like: RAM- random
access memory, WHO- World Health Organization, cd- compact disc. The last type involves
blending of words together to form other words like: motel- motor and hotel, blog- web and
log, smog- smoke and fog.

Back-formation is another way of forming words which includes removing a part of a

word, usually a suffix or rarely a prefix. Mostly we do this to create verbs from nouns. For
example: to liaise (back-formed from the noun liaison).

-Can you liaise with Tim and agree a time for the meeting, please?
 Another type of word formation is new and loan words. Some of these words are used
daily but we do not even know that they are loaned in from other languages. For example
when it comes to loan words we have many of them, especially when it comes to food like:
pizza, sushi, pasta etc. But with time these words have been implemented in everyone’s
vocabulary and are pronounced like English words and are even inflected with suffixes for
plural like pizza-s. When it comes to new words, there are so many regarding Internet and the
use of Internet like: e-bank, e-learning, e-books etc. Also, we can connect a noun with any
other noun to create a new compound noun like: computer virus, carbon footprint etc.

Allomorphs

An allomorph is a variant phonological form of a morpheme, that is, when a unit of

meaning varies in sound without changing the meaning. A simple example is the English
article a. It means “one of something, but not a particular one”, for example:

-a car

-a plane

-a man

-a boy

But, when a word begins with a vowel we use an instead of a, like in:

-an apple

-an idea

-an opera

There is also the notion of written allomorphy where some words in plural are written with –s
like in:

-boys

-streets

-clouds

While in other words we have –es spelling:

-churches
 -lunches

-marshes

When it comes to pronunciation, -s is pronounced as [s] for words that end with voiceless
sounds (books, cats, carrots, etc.). When they end with voiced sound –s is pronounced as [z]
(dogs, birds, etc.). This plural has got three different pronunciations [s] [z] [iz], two different
forms –s and –es, but only one meaning which is two or more of something.

A word segment that represents a morpheme is called a morph. We will take

„endangered“ for an example to explain this. The word „endangered“ has three morphs –en,
-danger and –ed. It's made up of two affixes connected to a root word –en(prefix)+-
danger(root)+-ed(suffix). There are two types of morphs and those are free and bound
morphs. Bound morphs are those that can't stand alone like the endings –er, -ed or shortly
affixes. Free morphs can stand alone like adjective happy, noun home etc., but not all root
words are free morphs. For example in the word “construction”, the root is “struct” and the
word also contains affixes con- and –ion (which determine the word category).

When we have different ways to create a sound, these are called its allomorphs. For
example, the past tense morpheme –ed has different variants. It is realized as [t] after the
voiceless [p] of jump (jumped) and as [d] after the voiced [l] of repel (repelled) and as [əd]
after the voiceless [t] of root or the voiced [d] of wed (rooted/wedded).

We all know of the verb Go, it is one the most frequently used verbs in English. It has
a past tense form Went which is totally different from the base form. This is called suppletion.
Because there is no similarity in form between these words this is called total suppletion.
There is also the notion of partial suppletion where we have similar forms between the base
and the past tense form like in become-became.

Morphological processes – derivation and inflection

One of the most important concepts in morphology is that of a word. We need to

consider the following examples in order to understand the notion of a lexeme.

A1) car

A2) cars
But

B1) car

B2) bike

These two words represent the same lexeme, A1) is in the singular form while A2) is in its
plural form. We can say that these two examples illustrate two word forms of one lexeme.
The singular and plural forms of one lexeme are called inflections. Inflectional morphemes
add grammatical information to words. In the next two examples we have two word forms
and both of them are in singular form and represent the two lexemes, CAR and BIKE.

The number is inflectional morphology, nouns mostly use –s or –es morphemes for
plural (cars, marshes, planes etc.), but some use irregular plural morphemes. Some languages
use special morphemes to express duality, two of the same thing. We have an example from
Manam, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea. Here we can see three different examples
for number, first one being for singular, the second for exactly two things (in this case
women) and the last one for more than two or plural.

The tense is also inflectional morphology. Usually the past tense in English is spelled
with an –ed (climbed, jumped, picked) while there are other irregular verbs that change the
vowel in the verb (rang, ate, wrote).

Agreement is another type of inflectional morphology. In French the suffix at the end
of a verb changes depending on who the subject is. We can see different morphemes at the
end of each verb.

The last type of inflection is called case inflection which depends on the role of a noun
in a sentence. We will take German for this comparison:

„The boy“ is the word in focus here. We can see the inflection for case in the second sentence
„Jungen“ which signals the case inflection.

Derivational morphology is required for the creation of new lexemes. Prepositions do

not participate in derivation, while adverbs are derived only from adjectives by the suffixation
of –ly (bad, bad-ly). Nouns, verbs and adjectives can be derived from each other. We can see
this in the next few examples.

When we remove all inflections we are left with a form that is called a stem. The notion of
stem is different from a root. The root is the smallest morphological unit associated with a
lexeme, while a stem is that form to which inflections are added. For example the root of the
word form printers is print, but the stem is printer, which is a root and a suffix –er.

Usually English derives words by affixing a derivational morpheme to a base. We take a verb
that describes an action and we add –er, for example cook-er, climb-er, bake-er.

If we add the suffix –ness to an adjective like happy we get the noun happiness.

If we add the suffix –ful to a noun gives us an adjective like hopeful.

If we add the suffix –ize to an adjective we get a verb like finalize.

Every derivation creates a new word and a new base which can be used for further derivation,
so it is possible to stack affixes as long as they have meaning.
Compounds

English as many other languages have the ability to create new words from combining
old words. For example, greenhouse is formed from the adjective green and the noun house.
These words are therefore called compound words. In these type of words we have a head and
a modifier. For example, house is the head of the greenhouse, while green is the modifier. It is
also possible to create compounds out of compounds. Both of the words contribute to the
meaning of the compound, but the head determines its category. English is a head-final
language because the second part determines the category. There are also languages which are
head-initial with a head as the first element in a compound. Because a compound is a noun, it
can be subject to further compounding which is a property called recursion and we say that
compounding is recursive. There are also some instances of ambiguity in compounding. It
will be demonstrated through the example of „toy car crusher“. This compound can mean two
different things and those are: -a car crusher which is a toy or –crusher for toy cars. This
instance of ambiguity is called structural ambiguity. It is a very important phenomenon
because it shows the importance of labelled bracketing and tree diagrams without which we
could not resolve this issue.

We have two types of compounds: endocentric and exocentric compounds. Endocentric

compounds have a clear meaning „sea food- a specific type of food, not a type of sea“. The
exocentric type of compounds don't have a clear meaning „a nest egg- money that you have
saved but not a type of egg“.

Clitics

Clitics are morphemes that have syntactic characteristics of a word, but depend
phonologically on another word or phrase. Clitics can't stand alone in a sentence and can't be
stressed- in order to be pronounced they have to be attached to another word (same as an
affix). Because of this they are called bound words. Examples for clitics are: it's, they've,
she'll, wasn't etc.

Similar phenomenon happens with the possessive –'s (John's pen). It is misleading to think
that John's is a suffixed form of John, the same as we think that pens is a suffixed form of pen.
This type of element never corresponds to a full word and hence it is called a phrasal affix.

Both bound words and phrasal affixes are examples of clitics (which means „to lean“ in
Greek) and the word which it „leans“ on is called the host. Clitics that appear to the right of
their host are called enclitics (-'ve, -'s), but when they are on the left side they are called
proclitics which is common for other languages like Spanish. In some languages there are
even mesoclitics and endoclitics. Mesoclitics appear between the stem of the host and other
affixes, Portuguese is the best representative of this. Endoclitics split apart the root and are
inserted between the two parts. These endoclitics are very rare and can be found in minor
languages like Udi and Pashto languages.
Conclusion
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