GRACE MISSION COLLEGE

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MODULE 1 Key IDEAS

Word: The Definition and Criteria In traditional grammar, word is the basic unit of language.

The following is an article on How New Words Are A word refers to a speech sound, or a mixture of two or
Born by Andy Boodle more speech sounds in both written and verbal form of
language. A word works as a symbol to represent/refer to
something/someone in language to communicate a
As dictionary publishers never tire of specific meaning.
reminding us, our language is growing. Not content
with the million or so words they already have at Example: ‘love’, ‘cricket’, ‘sky’ etc.
their disposal, English speakers are adding new
ones at the rate of around 1,000 a year. Recent "[A word is the] smallest unit of grammar that can stand
dictionary debutants include blog, grok, alone as a complete utterance, separated by spaces in
crowdfunding, hackathon, airball, e-marketing, written language and potentially by pauses in speech." (David
sudoku, twerk and Brexit. Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.
Cambridge University Press, 2003)
But these represent just a sliver of the tip of the
iceberg. According to Global Language Monitor,
around 5,400 new words are created every year; it’s There are several criteria for a speech sound, or a
only the 1,000 or so deemed to be in sufficiently combination of some speech sounds to be called a word.
widespread use that make it into print. Who invents
these words, and how? What rules govern their There must be a potential pause in speech and a space in
formation? And what determines whether they written form between two words.
catch on?
1. For instance, suppose ‘ball’ and ‘bat’ are two different
Shakespeare is often held up as a master neologist, words. So, if we use them in a sentence, we must have a
because at least 500 words (including critic, potential pause after pronouncing each of them. It cannot be
swagger, lonely and hint) first appear in his works – like “Idonotplaywithbatball.” If we take pause, these sounds
but we have no way of knowing whether he can be regarded as seven distinct words which are ‘I,' ‘do,'
personally invented them or was just transcribing ‘not,' ‘play,' ‘with,' ‘bat,' and ‘ball.'
things he’d picked up elsewhere.
2. Every word must contain at least one root. If you break
this root, it cannot be a word anymore.
It’s generally agreed that the most prolific minter of
For example, the word ‘unfaithful’ has a root ‘faith.' If we
words was John Milton, who gave us 630 coinages,
break ‘faith’ into ‘fa’ and ‘ith,' these sounds will not be
including lovelorn, fragrance and pandemonium.
regarded as words.
Geoffrey Chaucer (universe, approach), Ben Jonson
(rant, petulant), John Donne (self-preservation,
3. Every word must have a meaning.
valediction) and Sir Thomas More (atonement,
anticipate) lag behind. It should come as no great For example, the sound ‘lakkanah’ has no meaning in the
surprise that writers are behind many of our lexical English language. So, it cannot be an English word.     
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
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.

Activity #1: ESSAY

Based on the article that you have read, answer the following questions:
a. How are new words formed?
b. How are words formed?
c. How many new words are created every day?
d. What are some mechanisms in forming new words?
e. Which word formation process is the source of the English word modem?

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).

Activity #2: Reflection Paper

How important is possessing (morphological word formation) awareness?
What do you think is its implication to your role as a future English Teacher?
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.”

Activity #3
1. What can you infer from this statement, “Discovering what’s universal about languages can help us
understand the core of our humanity?”
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?
3. As a future educator, how can you prove that words are powerful? Give a concrete example.
4. Create a cinquain about WORDS/LANGUAGE.

*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

DEADLINE: April 6,2021