MODULE WEEK NO.

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College of Education
EL 100: INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS
1st Semester of A.Y. 2021-2022

Introduction

This module introduces the subject of morphology, the study of the

internal structure of words and their meaningful parts. Morphological
processes fulfill two basic purposes: (1) to create new words in a language
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and (2) to modify existing words. We may associate a word with a certain
basic idea, image or event, but modifying the exact form of a word can also
contribute important information, such as who is participating in an event,
when or how it occurred, or something about the speaker’s attitude toward it.

The more complex the word, the more information of this sort it is likely to
convey. By manipulating various parts of a word, we can shade, intensify, or
even negate its basic meaning, or change its grammatical role within a
sentence. Different languages, of course, have different ways of doing this.

Rationale

Every speaker of every language knows tens of thousands of words.

Unabridged dictionaries of English contain nearly 500,000 entries, but most speakers
don’t know all of these words. It has been estimated that a child of six knows as
many as 13,000 words and the average high school graduate about 60,000. A
college graduate presumably knows many more than that, but whatever our level

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of education, we learn new words throughout our lives, such as the many words in
this module that you will learn for the first time.

Words are an important part of linguistic knowledge and constitute a

component of our mental grammars, but one can learn thousands of words in a
language and still not know the language. Anyone who has tried to communicate
in a foreign country by merely using a dictionary knows this is true. On the other
hand, without words we would be unable to convey our thoughts through
language or understand the thoughts of others.

Intended Learning Outcomes

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At the end of the module, students are expected to:

A. recognize key concepts in the study of complex word analysis

B. provide a concise description of some of the varied morphological
phenomena found among the world’s languages
C. illustrate methods used to derive and support linguistic generalizations
about word structure in particular languages
D. discuss briefly on how knowledge of complex word forms comes to be
acquired

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Activity

Here are some nouns from the Philippine language Cebuano.

sibwano “a Cebuano” binisaja “the Visayan language”

ilokano “an Ilocano” ininglis “the English language”

tagalog “a Tagalog person” tinagalog “the Tagalog language”

inglis “an Englishman” inilokano “the Ilocano language”

bisaja “a Visayan” sinibwano “the Cebuano language”

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a. What is the exact rule for deriving language names from ethnic group
names?

b. What type of affixation is represented here?

Discussion

What is a word?

Imagine you were in an environment where everyone around you was

speaking a language you’d never heard before, and you couldn’t understand a
single word of what they were saying. That typical phrase – “couldn’t understand a
single word” – underscores our intuition that words are the fundamental building
blocks of language. The foremost task of any language learner, including young
children acquiring their native language, is to figure out how to segment and
analyze the wall of talking-noise around them into meaningful units – namely, words
and their meaningful parts.

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But what is a word, exactly? Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (1989) defines
a word as the smallest independent unit of language, or one that can be separated
from other such units in an utterance. In the following conversational exchange,
demonstrates the independence of the word tea.

a. Which do you like better – coffee or tea?

b. Tea.

Words can enter into grammatical constructions, such as phrases and

sentences. For example, the word tea can be used in different positions in a
sentence according to its grammatical role:
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a. Tea is good for you.

b. She doesn’t drink tea.
c. There are beneficial antioxidants in tea.

Tea is the subject of the sentence in (a), the direct object in (b), and the
object of a preposition in (c).
Our definition from Webster’s continues: words are “usually separated by
spaces in writing and distinguished phonologically, as by accent” (p. 1643). But this
is only partially accurate. Although spaces are placed between words in the written
form of many languages (like English), orthography (the written form of a language)
cannot be a crucial component of word-hood. There are languages like Chinese
which don’t insert spaces between words in writing, but speakers of these
languages still know what a word is in their language. Similarly, people who can’t
read and speakers of languages without writing systems know what words are in
their languages, too.
On the other hand, phonology does play an important role across languages
in identifying the boundaries between words. For example, consider the string
/grinhaUs/. Phonological stress disambiguates the meaning of the utterances in (a)

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and (b), indicating that /grinhaUs/ is a single (compound) word in (a) but two
distinct words in (b):

a. They walked past a GREENhouse.

b. They walked past a green HOUSE.

Phonology can help us identify words, but we need other information as well.
Consider the following:
a. Tea’s good for you.
b. That shop sells teas from around the world.
c. I asked him not to tease the cat.
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Is tea’s in (a) one word or two? The sound form of tea’s is phonetically
identical to that of teas in (b) and even tease in (c); all are pronounced /tiz/. But
your intuition is probably that the word-hood status of tea’s is somehow
grammatically different from that of teas or tease. There is an additional element in
tea’s which, although phonologically dependent on tea (as a contracted form of
the word is), is nonetheless a distinct grammatical word.

Webster’s also states that words are “typically thought of as representing an

indivisible concept, action, or feeling, or as having a single referent.”
Clearly, the word tease in (c) has a different referent than teas in (b). But the
word teas also means something a bit different than the simple word tea –
something like ‘more than one kind of tea.’ This difference in meaning is conveyed
by the ending -s (pronounced [z]) on the word tea. But this -s ending is not an
independent word; rather, it must be attached directly to an independent word
whose basic meaning it is modifying – in this case, to indicate plural meaning. We
can conclude that even though teas is just one word, the -s ending is a distinct
subpart that contributes some piece of additional information to the word’s overall
meaning.

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It appears that we require a fairly complex definition of word, defining it in
relation to meaning, grammar, and phonology. For now, let us more simply define
a word (a surprisingly difficult term in linguistics) as an abstract sign that is the
smallest grammatically independent unit of language.
All languages have words, but the particular sign a language uses to express
a particular meaning is arbitrary. For example, there’s nothing inherent in the sound
form of the word water that actually carries the meaning of ‘water.’ French
speakers refer to the very same stuff as eau, Japanese speakers call it mizu, and
Italians acqua.
The human impulse to discover and create words, it seems, transcends even
profound differences in physical capabilities. The words of one’s language make
up its lexicon. One might think of the lexicon as a kind of mental dictionary where
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words are stored. Our knowledge of each word, like the lexical entries in a
dictionary, includes several kinds of information. Consider what you know, for
example, about the word sleep:
•how it is pronounced: /slip/
•what it means – informally, something like to repose or rest in the body’s
natural periodic unconscious state. Your knowledge of the meaning of sleep
also includes the information that only animate objects – like babies, cats,
and students (but not trees or ideas) – can get sleepy.
•the grammatical contexts in which the word can be used. Sleep is an
intransitive verb (it doesn’t take a direct object), as in the sentence Sally
sleeps late on weekends. But it can also be a noun as in John talks in his sleep.
It can be found in compound words such as sleepwalking and sleep-
deprived and in idioms such as to let sleeping dogs lie.
•that it is an irregular verb for past-tense marking in English, requiring that we
memorize its past form slept /slEpt/ instead of simply adding the regular past
marker to produce *sleeped /slipt/.

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When you stop to consider for a moment all the (tens of thousands of ) words
that are in your lexicon and everything you already know about each of them, you
can begin to appreciate the magnitude of the accomplishment of this impressive
feat. Moreover, new items are continually being added, just as dictionaries are
continually revised and updated (e.g. beer goggles, DVD-player). The meanings of
the listed words might also change over time, or acquire (or lose) different shades
of meaning (e.g. dude, gay).
However, the contemporary study of word formation is not as much about
the study of existing, listed dictionary words as it is the study of possible words in
one’s language and the mental rules for constructing and understanding them. Not
all of the words you can produce and interpret are listed in the lexicon, because
the number of possible words is infinite.
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For example, a recent quick look through a single magazine turned up the
following words:
outgeneraled extraterritorialization
scrounginess hyperparenting
on-messagism transhumanists
unanswerability balconied
In that same issue there were also many freely coined compound-word
expressions, including the following:
thwack-time interval floppy-haired
poultry-litter composting cultural studies semiotics junkies
receipt-management strategy snowy-headed
cringe-making puzzled-chimp expression
It’s possible that one of these newly created words will “stick” in your lexicon –
perhaps popping up again someplace else as more people adopt it or maybe
because you just like it. Most of these words, however, are destined to be
immediately forgotten, but even though they are ephemeral, they demonstrate
the human capacity to mentally represent the complex structure of words in one’s
language.

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To further illustrate what you know about words, let’s consider a word you’re
not likely to know (because I’ve made it up): frimp. If you heard it in the context of
an English sentence such as John likes to frimp on weekends, then you would
deduce that it’s a verb that can be used intransitively (that is, without a direct
object). And once you knew that, then even before learning its exact meaning
(which would depend on the context and your knowledge that it’s an “action”),
you would already know how to construct several other word forms based on this
verb. You’d know how to use its past form (he frimped all day yesterday) and
progressive form (he was in the kitchen frimping when I called). You’d also know
how to turn it into an adjective (I wish he’d mend his frimping ways). You would
know to look up (or list) frimp, not frimped or frimping, as the “dictionary” form,
because you’d assume that frimp is a regular verb. Since the -ed and -ing endings
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can attach to all regular verbs, the forms frimped and frimping don’t really need to
be listed in the lexical entry for frimp. You’d also know that John was a frimper. As
you can see, you already know quite a lot about this hypothetical word!
Each language has its own rules and processes for creating new words, and
these words are interpretable in their contexts even if they are never recorded in a
dictionary. The forms of words may be simple or extremely complex; our knowledge
of the mental rules and categories that enable us to produce and interpret them
makes up the subject of morphology.

Morphemes
We said earlier that tea and teas are both words with slightly different
meanings, and that this difference is due to the -s ending on teas. But since -s is not
itself a word, how can it have its own meaning? In fact, it is not words, but rather
morphemes, that are the smallest units of language that combine both a form (the
way they sound) and a meaning (what they mean).
Words are made up of morphemes. Simple words consist of a single
morpheme. Complex words consist of more than one morpheme. For example, cat
is a simple word compared with cats, which contains two morphemes – the noun

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cat plus a plural marker -s. Similarly, in the word unfriendly, there are three
morphemes: un-, friend, and -ly, each of which contributes some meaning to the
overall word. Some words in morphologically rich languages can contain so many
morphemes that we need an entire complex sentence in English to translate them.

Bound and Free Morphemes

Prefixes and Suffixes

Our morphological knowledge has two components: knowledge of the
individual morphemes and knowledge of the rules that combine them. One of the
things we know about particular morphemes is whether they can stand alone or
whether they must be attached to a base morpheme.
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Some morphemes like boy, desire, gentle, and man may constitute words by
themselves. These are free morphemes. Other morphemes like -ish, -ness, -ly, pre-,
trans-, and un- are never words by themselves but are always parts of words. These
affixes are bound morphemes. We know whether each affix precedes or follows
other morphemes. Thus, un-, pre- (premeditate, prejudge), and bi- (bipolar,
bisexual) are prefixes. They occur before other morphemes. Some morphemes
occur only as suffixes, following other morphemes. English examples of suffix
morphemes are -ing (sleeping, eating, running, climbing), -er (singer, performer,
reader), -ist (typist, pianist, novelist, linguist), and –ly (manly, sickly, friendly), to
mention only a few.

Infixes
Some languages also have infixes, morphemes that are inserted into other
morphemes. Bontoc, spoken in the Philippines, is such a language, as illustrated by
the following:
Nouns/Adjectives Verbs
fikas “strong” fumikas “to be strong”
kilad “red” kumilad “to be red”

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fusul “enemy” fumusul “to be an enemy”

In this language, the infix -um- is inserted after the first consonant of the noun
or adjective. Thus, a speaker of Bontoc who knows that pusi means “poor” would
understand the meaning of pumusi, “to be poor,” on hearing the word for the first
time, just as an English speaker who learns the verb sneet would know that sneeter
is “one who sneets.” A Bontoc speaker who knows that ngumitad means “to be
dark” would know that the adjective “dark” must be ngitad.
Oddly enough, the only infixes in English are full-word obscenities, usually
inserted into adjectives or adverbs.

Circumfixes
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Some languages have circumfixes, morphemes that are attached to a base

morpheme both initially and finally. These are sometimes called discontinuous
morphemes. In Chickasaw, a Muskogean language spoken in Oklahoma, the
negative is formed with both a prefix ik- and the suffix -o. The final vowel of the
affirmative is dropped before the negative suffix is added. Examples of this
circumfixing are:
Affirmative Negative
chokma “he is good” ik + chokm + o “he isn’t good”
lakna “it is yellow” ik + lakn + o “it isn’t yellow”
palli “it is hot” ik + pall + o “it isn’t hot”
tiwwi “he opens (it)” ik + tiww + o “he doesn’t open (it)”

Roots and Stems

Morphologically complex words consist of a morpheme root and one or
more affixes. Some examples of English roots are paint in painter, read in reread,
ceive in conceive, and ling in linguist. A root may or may not stand alone as a word
(paint and read do; ceive and ling don’t). In languages that have circumfixes, the
root is the form around which the circumfix attaches, for example, the Chickasaw

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root chokm in ikchokmo (“he isn’t good”). In infixing languages the root is the form
into which the infix is inserted; for example, fikas in the Bontoc word fumikas (“to be
strong”)

When a root morpheme is combined with an affix, it forms a stem. Other

affixes can be added to a stem to form a more complex stem, as shown in the
following:
root believe verb
stem believe + able verb + suffix
word un + believe + able prefix + verb + suffix

root system noun

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stem system + atic noun + suffix

stem un + system + atic prefix + noun + suffix
stem un + system + atic + al prefix + noun + suffix + suffix
word un + system + atic + al + ly prefix + noun + suffix + suffix
+ suffix
With the addition of each new affix, a new stem and a new word are formed.
Linguists sometimes use the word base to mean any root or stem to which an affix
is attached. In the preceding example, system, systematic, unsystematic, and
unsystematical are bases.

Bound Roots
Bound roots do not occur in isolation and they acquire meaning only in
combination with other morphemes. For example, words of Latin origin such as
receive, conceive, perceive, and deceive share a common root, ceive; and the
words remit, permit, commit, submit, transmit, and admit share the root mit.
For the original Latin speakers, the morphemes corresponding to ceive and
mit had clear meanings, but for modern English speakers, Latinate morphemes such

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as ceive and mit have no independent meaning. Their meaning depends on the
entire word in which they occur.
The morpheme huckle, when joined with berry, has the meaning of a berry
that is small, round, and purplish blue; luke when combined with warm has the
meaning “somewhat.” Both these morphemes and others like them (cran, boysen)
are bound morphemes that convey meaning only in combination.

Rules of Word Formation

We said earlier that knowledge of morphology includes knowledge of
individual morphemes, their pronunciation, and their meaning, and knowledge of
the rules for combining morphemes into complex words.
By using the morphological rules of English, he created a new word. The
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rules that he used are as follows:

Adjective + ify Verb “to make Adjective”
Verb + cation Noun “the process of making Adjective”

Derivational Morphology
Bound morphemes like -ify and -cation are called derivational morphemes.
When they are added to a base, a new word with a new meaning is derived. The
addition of -ify to pure—purify—means “to make pure,” and the addition of -
cation—purification—means “the process of making pure.” If we invent an
adjective, pouzy, to describe the effect of static electricity on hair, you will
immediately understand the sentences “Walking on that carpet really pouzified my
hair” and “The best method of pouzification is to rub a balloon on your head.”
This means that we must have a list of the derivational morphemes in our
mental dictionaries as well as the rules that determine how they are added to a
root or stem. The form that results from the addition of a derivational morpheme is
called a derived word.
Derivational morphemes have clear semantic content. In this sense they are
like content words, except that they are not words. As we have seen, when a

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derivational morpheme is added to a base, it adds meaning. The derived word
may also be of a different grammatical class than the original word, as shown by
suffixes such as -able and -ly. When a verb is suffixed with -able, the result is an
adjective, as in desire + able. When the suffix -en is added to an adjective, a verb
is derived, as in dark + en. One may form a noun from an adjective, as in sweet
+ ie. Other examples are:

Noun to Adjective Verb to Noun Adjective to Adverb

boy + -ish acquitt + -al exact + -ly
virtu + -ous clear + -ance
Elizabeth + -an accus + -ation
pictur + -esque sing + -er
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affection + -ate conform + -ist

health + -ful predict + -ion
alcohol + -ic

Noun to Verb Adjective to Noun Verb to Adjective

moral + -ize tall + -ness read + -able
vaccin + -ate specific + -ity creat + -ive
hast + -en feudal + -ism migrat + -ory
free + -dom run(n) + -y
Some derivational suffixes do not cause a change in grammatical class. Prefixes
never do.

Noun to Noun Verb to Verb Adjective to Adjective

friend + -ship un- + do pink + -ish
human + -ity re- + cover red + -like
king + -dom dis- + believe a- + moral
New Jersey + -ite auto- + destruct il- + legal
vicar + -age in- + accurate

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Paul + -ine un- + happy
America + -n semi- + annual
humanit + -arian dis- + agreeable
mono- + theism sub- + minimal
dis- + advantage
ex- + wife
auto- + biography

Some of the many derivational affixes of English are shown below.

Prefixes Category Category Examples
selected derived
de- V V demagnetize, decompress
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dis- V V disentangle, dislocate

mis- V V mismatch, mismanage
pre- V V preview, predigest
re- V V reappear, repossess
un- A A unhappy, unproductive
un- V V unwrap, unzip

Suffixes
-able V A bearable, washable
-al V N approval, rebuttal
-ant V N applicant, inhabitant
-ate A V activate, validate
-en A V redden, shorten
-er A A singer, gambler
-ful N A plentiful, beautiful
-ian N N magician, musician
-ify A/N V purify, beautify
-ion V N detection, discussion

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-ist N/A N artist, activist
-ity A N sensitivity, portability
-ive V A oppressive, instructive
-ize N V vaporize, magnetize
-ment V N management, settlement
-ness A N happiness, fullness
-y N A watery, snowy

Inflectional Morphology
Function words like to, it, and be are free morphemes. Many languages,
including English, also have bound morphemes that have a strictly grammatical
function. They mark properties such as tense, number, person and so forth. Such
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bound morphemes are called inflectional morphemes. Unlike derivational

morphemes, they never change the grammatical category of the stems to which
they are attached. Consider the forms of the verb in the following sentences:
1. I sail the ocean blue.
2. He sails the ocean blue.
3. John sailed the ocean blue.
4. John has sailed the ocean blue.
5. John is sailing the ocean blue.

In sentence (2) the -s at the end of the verb is an agreement marker; it signifies
that the subject of the verb is third person and is singular, and that the verb is in the
present tense. It doesn’t add lexical meaning. The suffix -ed indicates past tense,
and is also required by the syntactic rules of the language when verbs are used
with have, just as -ing is required when verbs are used with forms of be.
Inflectional morphemes represent relationships between different parts of a
sentence. For example, -s expresses the relationship between the verb and the third
person singular subject; -ing expresses the relationship between the time the
utterance is spoken (e.g., now) and the time of the event. If you say “John is

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dancing,” it means John is engaged in this activity while you speak. If you say “John
danced,” the -ed affix places the activity before you spoke.
English also has other inflectional endings such as the plural suffix, which is
attached to certain singular nouns, as in boy/boys and cat/cats. In contrast to Old
and Middle English, which were more richly inflected languages, modern English
has only eight bound inflectional affixes:
English Inflectional Morphemes Examples
-s third-person singular present She wait-s at home.
-ed past tense She wait-ed at home.
-ing progressive She is eat-ing the donut.
-en past participle Mary has eat-en the donuts.
-s plural She ate the donut-s.
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-’s possessive Disa’s hair is short.

-er comparative Disa has short-er hair than Karin.
-est superlative Disa has the short-est hair.

In Summary:

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The Hierarchical Structure of Words

We saw earlier that morphemes are added in a fixed order. This order reflects
the hierarchical structure of the word. A word is not a simple sequence of
morphemes. It has an internal structure. For example, the word unsystematic is
composed of three morphemes: un-, system, and -atic. The root is system, a noun,
to which we add the suffix -atic, resulting in an adjective, systematic. To this
adjective, we add the prefix un- forming a new adjective, unsystematic.
In order to represent the hierarchical organization of words (and sentences),
linguists use tree diagrams. The tree diagram for unsystematic is as follows:

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Rule 1 attaches the derivational suffix -atic to the root noun, forming an adjective.
Rule 2 takes the adjective formed by rule 1 and attaches the derivational prefix un.
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The diagram shows that the entire word—unsystematic—is an adjective that is

composed of an adjective—systematic—plus un. The adjective is itself composed
of a noun—system—plus the suffix -atic.
Hierarchical structure is an essential property of human language. Words
(and sentences) have component parts, which relate to each other in specific,
rule-governed ways. Although at first glance it may seem that, aside from order, the
morphemes un- and -atic each relate to the root system in the same way, this is not
the case. The root system is “closer” to -atic than it is to un-, and un- is actually
connected to the adjective systematic, and not directly to system. Indeed,
*unsystem is not a word.
Further morphological rules can be applied to the given structure. For
example, English has a derivational suffix -al, as in egotistical, fantastical, and
astronomical. In these cases, -al is added to an adjective—egotistic, fantastic,
astronomic—to form a new adjective. The rule for -al is as follows:

3. Adjective + al - Adjective
Another affix is -ly, which is added to adjectives—happy, lazy, hopeful—to
form adverbs happily, lazily, hopefully. Following is the rule for -ly:

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4. Adjective + ly - Adverb
Applying these two rules to the derived form unsystematic, we get the following
tree for unsystematically:
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How new words are born - Andy Bodle

English speakers already have over a million words at our disposal – so why
are we adding 1,000 new ones a year to the lexicon? And how?
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 sliver 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

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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:
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1 Derivation
The commonest method of creating a new word is to add a prefix or suffix to an
existing one. Hence realization (1610s), democratize (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 lexicalization, 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

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(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,
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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 recognize 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 isa 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-

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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 its 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).
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Calques (flea market, brainwashing, loan word) are translations of borrowings.

9 Onomatopoeia
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

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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.
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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

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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?

Exercise
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Exercise 1: Divide the following words by placing a + between their morphemes.

Example: replaces = re + place + s
a. retroactive
b. befriended
c. televise
d. margin
e. endearment
f. psychology
g. unpalatable
h. holiday
i. grandmother
j. morphemic
k. mistreatment
l. deactivation
m. saltpeter
n. airsickness

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Exercise 2: What parts of speech are formed with the following derivational
affixes?
Give an example with each affix.
1) – ful 6) in -
2) – able 7) re -
3) – ize 8) ex -
4) – ly 9) im -
5) – en 10) un –

Exercise 3: Indicate prefixes and suffixes in the given words.

1) implant (V) 9) controllable (Adj)
2) verbal (Adj) 10) preschooler (N)
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3) thoughtful (Adj) 11) reschedule (V)

4) slowly (Adv) 12) thirsty (Adj)
5) co-star (N) 13) stuffing (N)
6) cookie(N) 14) disobey (V)
7) cooker (N) 15) underground (N)
8) cookery (N) 16) uncontrollable (Adj)

Assessment

Assessment 1:
a. Draw tree diagrams for the following words: construal, disappearances,
irreplaceability, misconceive, indecipherable, redarken.
b. Draw two tree diagrams for undarkenable to reveal its two meanings:
“able to be less dark” and “unable to be made dark.”

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Research project: Consider what are called “interfixes” such as -o- in English jack-
o-lantern. They are said to be meaningless morphemes attached to two
morphemes at once.
1. What can you learn about that notion?
2. Where do you think the -o- comes from? Are there languages other than English
that have interfixes?

Reflection

3-2-1 Reflective Essay: Complete the following statement.

3. I learned __________________________________________

2. I need to study more on __________________________________

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1. The most interesting part ________________________________________

Resources and Additional Resources

Anderson, S. R. 1992. A-morphous morphology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Aronoff, M. 1976. Word formation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bauer, L. 2003. Introducing linguistic morphology, 2nd edn. Washington, DC: Georgetown
University Press.

Jensen, J. T. 1990. Morphology: Word structure in generative grammar.

Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing.

Katamba, F. 1993. Morphology. New York: Bedford/St. Martins.

Matthews, P. H. 1991. Morphology: An introduction to the theory of word structure, 2nd edn.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Stockwell, R., and D. Minkova. 2001. English words: History and structure. New York:
Cambridge University Press.

Winchester, S. 2003. The meaning of everything (The story of the Oxford English dictionary).
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

______. 1999. The professor and the madman. New York: HarperCollins.

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