Bab 3
In this chapter we have looked at a number of ways in which new words may be formed in
languages. Words formed by affixation have internal structure that may be represented in the
form of trees. Compounds may be classified according to the parts of speech of the elements
that make them up, or according to the semantic relations they display or according to their
headedness.
Affextional.
Some of these requirements concern the phonology of their bases, and others concern the
semantics of their bases – we will return to these shortly – but the most basic requirements
Of course, if we want to be as precise as possible about what native speakers know about
forming words with these affixes, we should also indicate what category of word results from
Examples in English might be prefixes like over- and out- or pre- and post- . In English we
have affixes like -ful and multi- . Another example might be the prefix re-that means
being done more than once. Other quantitative affixes that we have in English denote
The closest we come to augmentative affixes in English are prefixes like mega- . So far we
have been looking at suffixes and prefixes whose meanings seem to be relatively clear.
Compounding So far we have concentrated on complex words formed by derivation, specifically by
affixation.
Compound Structure
two bases can be compounded with another base, and this compounded with still
another base, so that we can eventually obtain very complex compounds like paper
possible to show the internal structure of complex compounds using word trees. The
way we’ve drawn this tree, the compound paper cat has been compounded with the
noun container to make a complex compound. The compound as a whole then must
As we saw above, English has bound bases as well as free bases, and when we put
two of them together, as in the examples in , we might call these forms compounds as
well.
Conversion
possible to form new lexemes simply by shifting categories or parts of existing lexemes
without adding affixes. This means of word formation is often referred to as conversion or
functional shift. In English, we often make new verbs out of nouns, as shown in example
(39a), but we also do the opposite (39b), and sometimes we can even make new verbs out
of adjectives (39c):
Coinage It is of course possible to make up entirely new words from whole cloth, a process called
coinage. However, it turns out that we coin completely new words relatively
rarely, choosing instead to recycle bases and affixes into new combinations.
The verb snorgle, among the words with which we began this chapter, is probably another
example. Why are there so few coinages? Perhaps because the words themselves give no
clue to their meaning. Context often clarifies what a word is intended to mean, but
without a context to suggest meaning, the words themselves are semantically opaque.
Blending
Blending is a process of word formation in which parts of lexemes that are not
Clipping
Clipping is a way of making new words by shortening existing words. For example, we
have info created from information, a blog created from web logs, or a fridge from a
fridge.
Summary
In this chapter we have looked at a number of ways in which new words may be formed
in languages. Affixed words are formed by word formation rules that make explicit the
the categorial, semantic, and phonological properties of the resulting words. Finally, we
have learned some techniques for searching for our own morphological data.
