Lecture Notes in Psychology of Language

Topic: Words/ Morphology/ The Internal Lexicon

The English language abounds with terms ranging from the simplest or
commonest to the most unfamiliar and technical. As enormous as it already
is, it continues to evolve and welcomes new items, making it more difficult
for non-native speakers to broaden their vocabulary knowledge. It is
estimated by psycholinguists that the average English-speaking six-year-old
knows 10,000 words, and the average high-school graduate around 60,000
words. If this were a sound estimation, it would seem that an individual
knows a lot about the words in his/her language. But why is it that so many
ESL/EFL learners experience difficulty in putting across their thoughts in
written or spoken language? One good reason points to their very foundation
for vocabulary acquisition or learning. Their limited knowledge on vocabulary
building may be attributed to their also inadequate understanding of word
structure and formation. Vocabulary building is of paramount importance
because it provides unlimited access to new information and that it improves
all areas of communication — listening, speaking, reading and writing. In this
lesson, you will get familiarized with the notion of word, the field of
morphology, and the internal lexicon.

Discussion
What is Morphology? The term morphology, according to Yule (2017);
Aronoff & Fudeman (2011), is generally attributed to the German poet,
novelist, playwright, and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–
1832), who thought it up early in the nineteenth century in the context of
biology. Its etymology is Greek: morph- means ‘shape, form’, and
morphology is the study of form or forms. In biology, morphology refers to
the study of the form and structure of organisms, and in geology it refers to
the study of the configuration and evolution of land forms. In the field of
linguistics, morphology refers to the mental system involved in word
formation or to the branch of linguistics that deals with words, their internal
structure, and how they are formed. Lieber (2009) defines morphology as the
study of word formation, including the ways new words are coined in the
languages of the world, and the way forms of words are varied depending on
how they’re used in sentences. As a native speaker of your language, he
sustains, you have intuitive knowledge of how to form new words, and every
day you recognize and understand new words that you’ve never heard
before.

Psychology of Language Prepared by: Michael B. Lavadia, Ph.D.

 Spencer & Zwicky (2001) shed light on the very role of morphology in
any language in their handbook of morphology. They claim that “…
morphology is at the conceptual center of linguistics. This is not
because it is the dominant sub-discipline, but because morphology
is the study of word structure, and words is at the interface
between phonology, syntax and semantics. Words have
phonological properties, they articulate together to form phrases
and sentences, their form often reflects their syntactic function,
and their parts are often composed of meaningful smaller pieces. In
addition, words contract relationships with each other by virtue of
their form; that is, they form paradigms and lexical groupings. For
this reason, morphology is something all linguists have to know
about.”
Generally, morphology is aimed at describing the structures of words
and patterns of word formation in a language. Specifically, its goals are to (a)
pin down the principles for relating the form and meaning of morphological
expressions, (b) explain how the morphological units are integrated and the
resulting formations interpreted, and (c) show how morphological units are
organized in the lexicon in terms of affinity and contrast. The study of
morphology uncovers the lexical resources of language, helps speakers to
acquire the skills of using them creatively, and consequently express their
thoughts and emotions with eloquence (Hamawand, 2011).

What’s a Word?
Central to the discussion of morphology, being the “grammar of
words,” is the notoriously troublesome concept of ‘word’. There are two
relevant understandings of “word” share Arkadiev & Klamer. “On the one
hand, he avers, we have to distinguish word forms from phrases and parts of
words (i.e. morphemes), while on the other, we need to identify lexemes, i.e.
sets of word forms sharing lexical meaning and differing in the values of
inflectional features only (2016, p.4).” What deduction can be made from this
distinction by Arkadiev & Klamer? It tells us that while we can treat words as
basic units or building blocks of language, such a characterization is simply
inadequate for there is so much that can be said about what indeed a word is
and what is not.
Fortunately, morphologists have the luxury of being more precise. A
word is a symbolic unit which is a combination of meaning and sound
(Hamawand, 2011). A word like cat, for instance, operates on two levels
which cannot be disconnected: the phonemic representation or the sound
image /kæt/, and the concept of <cat>, a domesticated animal/pet. More

Psychology of Language Prepared by: Michael B. Lavadia, Ph.D.

precisely, we can define a word as a sequence of one or more morphemes
that can stand alone in a language. Linguists define a morpheme as the
smallest unit of language that has its own meaning. Simple words like giraffe,
wiggle, or yellow are morphemes, but so are prefixes like re- and pre- and
suffixes like -ize and –er (Lieber, 2009). Words may be simple, composite or
compound (Hamawand, 2011). If a word consists of only one morpheme or
lexical structure such as in (a), it is termed
simple/simplex/monomorphemic. Such words are morphologically
indivisible.
a) cloud
smile
mammal
age
A composite word, also known as complex or polymorphemic, is
composed of two or more substructures which is morphologically divisible,
one of which is a word such as in (b).
b) oppressive
rebounder
emphasize
perishable
A compound word is composed of two substructures, namely words,
which is morphologically divisible.
c) fingerprint
doorknob
bookstore
playground
Simple, composite and compound words are subsumed under the general
term morphological expression.
Word types and Word Tokens and Lexemes
Consider the sentences below. Can you tell how many words are there?
“Students of the university are apprehensive about the upcoming semester.
They consider the upcoming semester to be financially burdensome because

Psychology of Language Prepared by: Michael B. Lavadia, Ph.D.

classes will be held online. Online classes, they claim, are only for the rich.
Students claiming such come from underprivileged background.”
Basing your answer on spelling convention of setting off words with a
space or by counting the words individually, you will be inclined to saying
that there are forty-one (41) words. One can argue, however, that since the
words students, of, the, are, upcoming, semester, they, online, classes, and
be, are repeated, the answer should be twentynine. Still, one might have
even thought about whether to count claim and claiming as different words:
after all, if you were not a native speaker of English and you needed to look
up what they meant in the dictionary, you’d just find one entry for each pair
of words. When counting words, therefore, you can count them in different
ways.
If your answer is forty-one (counting every instance of a word
regardless of how many times it occurred), then you are counting word
tokens. If, however, you are counting a word once, no matter how many
times it occurs in a sentence, you are counting word types
(CarstairsMcCarthy, 2002).
A still different way of counting words would be to count what are
called lexemes. Lexemes can be thought of as families of words that differ
only in their grammatical endings or grammatical forms; singular and plural
forms of a noun (class, classes), present, past, and participle forms of verbs
(walk, walks, walked, walking), different forms of a pronoun (I, me, my, mine)
each represent a single lexeme. One way of thinking about lexemes is that
they are the basis of dictionary entries; dictionaries typically have a single
entry for each lexeme (Lieber, 2009). So, if we are counting lexemes in the
sentence above, we would count claim and claiming as single lexemes; the
sentence then has 40 lexemes.

The Internal Lexicon

When defining a word, or characterizing an unfamiliar term as a
word, one’s immediate move to ensure accuracy is to consult a dictionary.
Naturally, the dictionary of choice relies on what's in the house or office, or
these days, what's accessible online. Is this, however, the appropriate
response to our query? As morphologists, we must consider the process by
which dictionaries are created and the extent to which we provide them the
power to define what constitutes a word. There is much to be said about the
modern dictionary's production and evolution.

Psychology of Language Prepared by: Michael B. Lavadia, Ph.D.

 There are many different types of dictionaries, each meant for a
different audience. Publishers define the final product's size and audience,
and many market variables influence it as well. Furthermore, lexicographers,
the people who create dictionaries, are naturally human. Throughout history,
the idiosyncrasies of these individuals have influenced the content of
dictionaries, in addition to societal norms.

Nonces
Nonce words are those that are evidently created and employed for a
specific purpose. Although they are not widely utilized, nonce is occasionally
employed separately by various authors and speakers.
Mistakes
Even very large dictionaries, such as the OED, occasionally include
words that they define as incorrect. For instance, the word "ambassady" has
an entry in the dictionary. It appears in a single quotation from 1693 and,
according to the OED, may be a mistranslation where the author may have
meant the word "ambassade" to mean "the mission or function of an
ambassador" (Lieber, 2009).
Mountweazels
A mountweazel is a false entry in a dictionary or other reference work
planted as a trap for plagiarists. Lexicographers occasionally fabricate
entries and include them in order to detect instances in which other
lexicographers utilize their lexicon as a source without giving proper credit
(lexicographic piracy).
Dictionaries, for the most part, represent the terms that native speakers use
rather than correcting or codifying a language's vocabulary. These terms are
contained in the entire corpus of word knowledge that native speakers retain
in their minds, which we will refer to as the mental lexicon or internal
lexicon. The entirety of what a particular speaker understands about the
terms in her language is referred to as mental lexicon. In addition to the
obvious information about pronunciation, category (part of speech), and
meaning, this knowledge also includes details about syntactic qualities (such
as whether a verb is transitive or intransitive), formality level, and what
lexicographers refer to as the word's "range of application," or the particular
circumstances in which we might use it.

Psychology of Language Prepared by: Michael B. Lavadia, Ph.D.

The Acquisition of Lexical Knowledge, and The organization of the
mental lexicon: storage versus rules (adapted from Lieber, 2009, p. 16-
19)
Psycholinguists have devised experiments to try to learn how children
and adults are able to acquire words so easily. You might think that the
learning of new words is a simple matter of association: someone points at
something and says “flurge” and you learn that that something is called a
flurge. This may be the way that we learn some words, but surely not the
way we learn the majority of words in our mental lexicons. For one thing, not
everything for which we have a word can be pointed at. And even if someone
points and says a word, it is often not clear from the context what exactly is
being pointed out. Psycholinguists sometimes call this the Gavagai
problem, following a scenario first discussed by the philosopher W.O. Quine.
To summarize:
Picture yourself on a safari with a guide who does not speak
English. All of a sudden, a large brown rabbit runs across a
field some distance from you. The guide points and says
“gavagai!” What does he mean? One possibility is, of course,
that he’s giving you his word for ‘rabbit’. But why couldn’t
he be saying something like “There goes a rabbit running
across the field”? or perhaps “a brown one,” or “Watch
out!,” or even “Those are really tasty!”? How do you know?
In other words, there may be so much going on in our
immediate environment that an act of pointing while saying
a word, phrase, or sentence will not determine clearly what
the speaker intends his utterance to refer to.
Besides, we are rarely in a situation in which someone is actively
instructing us about the meanings of words; although parents may point to
things in a picture book and name them for a child, or school children may
be asked to memorize a list of vocabulary words, we learn most words
without explicit instruction and seemingly with very little exposure. Although
we do not know nearly enough about this subject, there are several things
that we do know about how word learning occurs. First, it is believed that
both children and adults are able to do what the psycholinguist Susan Carey
has called fast mapping (Carey 1978). Fast mapping is the ability to pick up
new words on the basis of a few random exposures to them. In one
experiment, Carey showed that children who were casually exposed to a new
color name chromium during an unrelated activity (following instructions to
pick up trays of various colors) were able to absorb the word and recall it
even six weeks later. Experiments have shown that adults exhibit this fast
mapping ability as well; while the ability to learn linguistic rules (say, of

Psychology of Language Prepared by: Michael B. Lavadia, Ph.D.

syntax or phonology) is thought to decline after puberty, the ability to learn
new words remains robust.
Psycholinguists have proposed a number of other strategies that both
children and adults seem to use in learning new words. One might be called
the Lexical Contrast Principle. For example, in an experiment similar to
yours, children were asked to point to the zorch (or some other made-up
word), and what they invariably did was to point out the unfamiliar object.
According to the Lexical Contrast Principle, the language learner will always
assume that a new word refers to something that does not already have a
name. A second word learning strategy might be called the Whole Object
Principle. In the experimental condition described above, when subjects are
presented with the word zorch and an unnamed object, they will assume the
whole unnamed object to be a zorch. They will not assume that zorch refers
to a part of the object, to its color or shape, or to a superordinate category of
objects to which it might belong.
A related strategy might be dubbed the Mutual Exclusivity
Principle. In the second experiment above, there are only familiar objects
for which subjects already have names. When asked to point out the plitz,
experimental subjects typically do one of two things: they might first look
around the room for something else that might be called a plitz, or they
might assume that the word plitz refers to a part of one of the familiar
objects or a special type of one of them. Subjects, in other words, will
assume that if an object already has a word for it, the word plitz cannot be
synonymous with those words.
These experiments are of course not just hypothetical. Paul Bloom,
Susan Carey, and many other psycholinguists have conducted them both
with children of various ages and with adults, and have obtained the results
described above. What is perhaps most astonishing about their results is that
their experimental subjects often remember the words they’ve been exposed
to when they are retested weeks after the original experiment. But maybe
we should not be surprised by this: how otherwise could we have learned
60,000 words by the time we’re 18?
Children not only learn individual words, but they learn the rules that
allow us to create and understand new words. Indeed, there is evidence that
English-speaking children as young as 18- to 24-months old are able to
create new compound words (that is, words like wind mill or dog bed) and to
turn nouns into verbs, a process which is called conversion (see chapter 3).
Not too long after this, children will begin to use prefixes and suffixes, both
for inflection and lexeme formation. We know that they have learned the

Psychology of Language Prepared by: Michael B. Lavadia, Ph.D.

rules when they produce words that are novel and therefore that they could
not have learned from the language spoken around them.

The organization of the mental lexicon: storage versus rules

Although linguists like to describe our knowledge of words as a mental
lexicon, we know that the mental lexicon is not organized alphabetically like
a dictionary. Rather, it is a complex web composed of stored items
(morphemes, words, idiomatic phrases) that may be related to each other by
the sounds that form them and by their meanings. Along with these stored
items we also have rules that allow us to combine morphemes in different
ways. Our evidence for this organization comes from experiments using both
normal subjects and subjects with some sort of genetic disorder or trauma to
the brain.
There is a great deal of evidence to support the idea that speakers do
not merely learn and store complex words (although they may store some
complex words which are used frequently), but rather construct complex
words using rules of word formation. We will go into great detail in the
chapters to come on exactly what these rules of word formation look like, but
let us start with a simple example, and use that example to explore what
linguist Steven Pinker calls the “words and rules” theory of the mental
lexicon (Pinker 1999). We will take as our example the rule for forming past
tenses of verbs in English. At this point, if I asked you how to form the past
tense of a verb in English, you would probably say that you usually add an -
ed. And then you might point out that there are a number of verbs that have
irregular past tenses like sing~sang, tell~told, win~won, fly~flew, and the
like. We will look first at the regular past tense rule.
While it is true that in writing we add an -ed to form the past tense of a
verb, in terms of spoken speech, the situation is a bit more complicated.
Consider the next Challenge:

Challenge
Consider how you pronounce the past tenses of these verbs:
1. rap, tack, laugh, sheath, pass, lurch
2. pat, prod
3. rob, rove, bathe, buzz, rouge, judge, warm, warn, bang, roar,
rule, tango
Transcribe the past tenses of these words in the International
Phonetic Alphabet and observe how they differ.

Psychology of Language Prepared by: Michael B. Lavadia, Ph.D.

You pronounce the past tenses of the first set of words in the Challenge box
with a [t] sound, in the second with a sound like [əd], and the third with a [d]
sound.
We do not choose the pronunciation of the past tense at random.
Rather, the choice of which of the three endings to use depends on the final
sound of the verb. Those words that are pronounced with final [t] or [d]
sounds – those in the second list – get the [əd] pronunciation. The words that
end in voiceless (with the exception of [t]) sounds get the [t] pronunciation.
And all the rest get the [d] pronunciation. As for irregular forms like sang and
flew, we must assume that English speakers simply learn them as
exceptions.
We know that speakers of English have an unconscious knowledge of
the past tense rule because we can automatically create the past tense of
novel verbs. For example, if I coin a verb blick, you know that the past tense
morpheme is pronounced [t]. Similarly, the novel verb flurd will have the
past tense [əd], and the verb zove will be made past tense with [d]. We can
even form the past tense of verbs that contain final sounds that do not occur
at all in English, and when we do, we still follow the rule. For example, if we
imagine that there are many composers imitating the style of Johann
Sebastian Bach, and we coin the verb to bach to denote the action of
imitating Bach, we will automatically form the past tense with the past tense
variant pronounced [t], because the final sound of Bach is [x], a voiceless
velar fricative. The important point here is that when we hear this sound at
the end of a verb we know (unconsciously) that it’s voiceless, and apply the
past tense rule to it in the usual way.
Now that we know something about the English past tense rule, we can
return to the question of how the mental lexicon is organized. It might be
plausible to assume that speakers of English use the past tense rule when
they are creating the past tenses of novel verbs, but simply store the past
tense forms of words they have already heard. In other words, we might
assume that once a past tense has been formed, it is entered whole in our
mental lexicon, and we retrieve it whole just as we would the present tense
form. This hypothesis, however, may not be correct.
Evidence from aphasia
Studies of aphasics – people whose language faculty has been
impaired due to stroke or other brain trauma – show that there must be a
past tense rule that speakers use for regular forms – even very frequent ones
– and that irregular forms are stored whole, probably in a different part of the
brain. Badecker and Caramazza (1999) describe how we can know this.

Psychology of Language Prepared by: Michael B. Lavadia, Ph.D.

 Some aphasics display agrammatism; this means that they have
difficulty in producing or processing function words in sentences, but can still
produce and understand content words. Interestingly, agrammatic aphasics
have difficulty producing or processing both regularly inflected forms (like
the English past tenses), and also productively derived words (those with
suffixes that we use frequently in making up new words – for example, -less
as in shoeless or -ly as in darkly), whereas they have far less trouble with
irregular forms like sang and flew.
Other aphasics display jargon aphasia; these aphasics produce fluent
sentences using function words, but have trouble producing and
understanding content words. Instead, they have a tendency to produce
nonsense words. Interestingly, jargon aphasics will use regular inflections
appropriately on their nonsense words, but they have difficulty processing
and producing irregular forms.
We can explain the differential behavior of agrammatical and jargon
aphasics if we postulate that we have rules for producing regularly inflected
and productively derived forms, and only store irregular forms, and that rules
and stored items are located in different parts of the brain. For agrammatic
aphasics, the rule is unavailable, presumably because the part of the brain
has been damaged that apparently allows us to apply morphological rules,
but the irregular forms are still accessible from an undamaged part of the
brain. For jargon aphasics, the irregular forms have been lost because the
part of the brain that apparently allows access to stored forms has been
damaged, but the regular rule is still intact.

Topic: Morphemes and Affixation

Discussion
As have already been mentioned in Lesson 1 of this chapter,
morphemes, the morphological building blocks of words, refer to the
smallest, indivisible units of semantic content or grammatical function which
words are made up of. A morpheme – the minimal linguistic unit – is thus an
arbitrary union of a sound and a meaning that cannot be further analyzed.
Every word in every language is composed of one or more morphemes. By
definition, a morpheme cannot be decomposed into smaller units which are
either meaningful by themselves or mark a grammatical function like
singular or plural number in the noun. The decomposition of words into
morphemes illustrates one of the fundamental properties of human language
– discreteness. In all languages, discrete linguistic units combine in rule-
governed ways to form larger units (Harsa, n.d).

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 Morphemes have different kinds. There are free morphemes, that is,
morphemes that can stand by themselves as single words, for example, open
and tour. There are also bound morphemes, which are those forms that
cannot normally stand alone and are typically attached to another form,
exemplified as re-, -ist, -ed, -s. So, we can say that all affixes (prefixes and
suffixes) in English are bound morphemes.
Carstairs-McCarthy (2002) helps us understand the distinction between
the two kinds of morpheme (free vs. bound) in his book Introduction to
English Morphology, with the word family help-helpful-helpfulness. He
explains that the process of word-formation, such as in the case of
helpfulness, is not a simple stringing together of the morphemes help, -ful,
and –ness. Instead, the structuring is part of the implicit linguistic knowledge
of all English speakers, whether or not they know anything about the history
of the English language. He labels help as the core for the words helpful and
helpfulness. “There are two reasons for calling help the core of these words,”
he says. One is that help supplies the most precise and concrete element in
its meaning, shared by a family of related words like helper, helpless,
helplessness and unhelpful that differ from one another in more abstract
ways. Second, of the three morphemes in helpfulness, only help can stand on
its own – that is, only help can, in an appropriate context, constitute an
utterance by itself. That is clearly not true of –ness, nor is it true of –ful (p.
26). Therefore, in self-explanatory manner, the morpheme help (having the
ability to stand on its own) is called free, while –ful and –ness (the ones that
cannot stand on their own) are bound.
Moving forward, the free morphemes can generally be identified as the
set of separate English word forms such as basic nouns, adjectives, verbs,
etc. When they are used with bound morphemes attached, the basic word
forms are technically known as stems. The stem or the base is to be
distinguished from root. Whereas a stem, consisting of a root and a bound
morpheme to which a further bound morpheme can be added, can be
decomposed, a root, which Carstairs-McCarthy (2002) labelled as the core of
a word, is a word substructure that cannot be decomposed into further
elements (Hamawand, 2011). Let’s take the word forgetfulness to illustrate
this difference. Forgetful is the stem of the word forgetfulness because it is
the base to which –ness attaches, but forget is the root. Taking forgetful now,
forget is both the stem to which –ful attaches and the root of the entire word.
One important thing to note here is that a root is like a stem in
constituting the core of the word to which other pieces attach, but the term
refers only to morphologically simple units (Aronoff and Fudeman, 2011).

Psychology of Language Prepared by: Michael B. Lavadia, Ph.D.

 Returning now to free morphemes, they are said to fall into two
categories. The first category is that set of ordinary nouns, adjectives and
verbs that we think of as the words that carry the “content” of the messages
we convey. These free morphemes are called lexical morphemes and some
examples are: girl, man, house, tiger, sad, long, yellow, sincere, open, look,
follow, and break. We can add new lexical morphemes to the language rather
easily, so they are treated as an “open” class of words. Other types of free
morphemes are called functional morphemes. Examples are and, but,
when, because, on, near, above, in, the, that, it, them. This set consists
largely of the functional words in the language such as conjunctions,
prepositions, articles and pronouns. Because we almost never add new
functional morphemes to the language, they are described as a “closed”
class of words (Yule, 2017).
The set of affixes that make up the category of bound morphemes can
also be divided into two types. One type is described in terms of the
derivation of words. Derivation is the morphological process of forming a
new word from an existing one by the addition of a bound morpheme. We
use these bound morphemes to make new words or to make words of a
different grammatical category from the stem. For example, the addition of
the derivational morpheme -ness changes the adjective good to the noun
goodness. The noun care can become the adjectives careful or careless by
the addition of the derivational morphemes -ful or -less. A list of derivational
morphemes will include suffixes such as the -ish in foolish, -ly in quickly, and
the -ment in payment. The list will also include prefixes such as re-, pre-, ex-,
mis-, co-, un and many more. Within derivation, there are two branches of
morphological process: derivation by affixation and derivation by non-
affixation. Of the two branches, affixation is what will be tackled here
because it is highly productive in the creation of new vocabulary items in the
language.
Affixation, according to Hamawand (2011), is the morphological
process of deriving a new word by adding an affix, namely a bound
morpheme, to a root or base. As have already been said, affixes are bound
morphemes which never occur on their own; they have semantic holes in
their structure, and so must be joined to other morphemes to fill them.
Affixes can function as derivational morphemes. A derivational morpheme is
an affix by means of which one word is derived from another. All affixes
change the meaning of the derivative, the word which results from
derivation. Some affixes change the word class of the root while others do
not change the word class of the root. Affixation comprises two modes:
prefixation and suffixation. Prefixation is the morphological process of
forming a new word by attaching a bound morpheme to the front of a free

Psychology of Language Prepared by: Michael B. Lavadia, Ph.D.

morpheme. Suffixation, on the other hand, is the morphological process of
forming a new word by attaching a bound morpheme to the end of a free
morpheme (the list of common prefixes and suffixes can be found below).
The second set of bound morphemes contains what are called
inflectional morphemes. These are not used to produce new words in the
language, but rather to indicate aspects of the grammatical function of a
word. Inflectional morphemes are used to show if a word is plural or singular,
if it is past tense or not, and if it is a comparative or possessive form. English
has only eight inflectional morphemes (or “inflections”), illustrated in the
following sentences taken from Yule (2017, p. 75).
1. Jim’s two sisters are really different.
2. One likes to have fun and is always laughing.
3. The other liked to read as a child and has always taken things
seriously.
4. One is the loudest person in the house and the other is quieter than
a mouse.
In the first sentence, both inflections (-’s, -s) are attached to nouns,
one marking possessive and the other marking plural. Note that - ’s here is a
possessive inflection and different from the -’s used as an abbreviation for is
or has (e.g. she’s singing, it’s happened again). There are four inflections
attached to verbs: -s (3rd person singular), -ing (present participle), -ed (past
tense) and -en (past participle). There are two inflections attached to
adjectives: -er (comparative) and -est (superlative). In English, all the
inflectional morphemes are suffixes.
Noun + -’s, -s
Verb + -s, -ing, -ed, -en
Adjective + -er, -est
There is some variation in the form of these inflectional morphemes.
For example, the possessive sometimes appears as -s’ (those boys’ bags)
and the past participle as –ed (they have finished) (Yule, 2017).
Lesson: Morphological Patterns
Why is the English language so rich in its vocabulary? This affluence in
linguistic items points back to the fact that Modern English is the product of a
long and complex process of historical development. The most important
historical factor in the growth of the English vocabulary has been the ease
with which it has borrowed words from other languages and adapted them to

Psychology of Language Prepared by: Michael B. Lavadia, Ph.D.

its own uses (Denning, Kessler & Leben, 2007). In the words of David Crystal
((2010), as cited in Sipra (2013)), “English has been an insatiable borrower.”
Lexical borrowing or simply borrowing is the process of importing
linguistic items from one linguistic system into another, a process that occurs
any time two cultures are in contact over a period of time (Hoffer, 2002). It
should be noted that that the terms “loan” and “borrowing” are metaphors,
because there is no literal lending process. There is no transfer from one
language to another, and no "returning" of words to the source language.
They simply come to be used by a speech community that speaks a different
language from the one they originated in (Kemmer, 2019).
Below is a list of loanwords in present-day English from different
languages culled from Kemmer (2019):

Language Loanwords
French ballet, cabernet, cachet, chaise longue, champagne, chic,
cognac, corsage, faux pas, rouge, roulette, sachet, salon,
saloon, bastion, brigade, battalion, cavalry, grenade, infantry,
palisade, rebuff, bayonet, bigot, chassis, clique, denim, garage,
grotesque, jean(s), niche, shock
Spanish armada, adobe, alligator, alpaca, armadillo, barricade, bravado,
cannibal, canyon, coyote, desperado, embargo, enchilada,
guitar,
marijuana, mesa, mosquito, mustang, ranch, taco, tornado,
tortilla, vigilante
Italian alto, arsenal, balcony, broccoli, cameo, casino, cupola, duo,
fresco, fugue, gazette (via French), ghetto, gondola, grotto,
macaroni, madrigal, motto, piano, opera, pantaloons, prima
donna, regatta, sequin, soprano, opera, stanza, stucco, studio,
tempo, torso, umbrella, viola, violin
Dutch, Flemish avast, boom, bow, bowsprit, buoy, commodore, cruise, dock,
freight, keel, keelhaul, leak, pump, reef, scoop, scour, skipper,
sloop, smuggle, splice, tackle, yawl, yacht, bale, cambric, duck
(fabric), fuller's earth, mart, nap (of cloth), selvage, spool, stripe,
easel, etching, landscape, sketch, beleaguer, holster,
freebooter, furlough, onslaught, booze, brandy (wine), coleslaw,
cookie, cranberry, crullers, gin, hops, stock fish, waffle, bugger
(orig. French), crap, curl, dollar, scum, split (orig. nautical term),
uproar
German bum, dunk, feldspar, quartz, hex, lager, knackwurst, liverwurst,
loafer, noodle, poodle, dachshund, pretzel, pinochle,
pumpernickel, sauerkraut, schnitzel, zwieback, (beer)stein,
lederhosen, dirndl
Yiddish (most are 20th century borrowings)

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 bagel, Chanukah (Hanukkah), chutzpah, dreidel, kibbitzer,
kosher, lox, pastrami (orig. from Romanian), schlep, spiel,
schlepp, schlemiel, schlimazel, gefilte fish, goy, klutz, knish,
matzoh, oy vey, schmuck, schnook,
Scandinavian fjord, maelstrom, ombudsman, ski, slalom, smorgasbord
Russian apparatchik, borscht, czar/tsar, glasnost, icon, perestroika,
vodka
Sanskrit avatar, karma, mahatma, swastika, yoga
Hindi bandanna, bangle, bungalow, chintz, cot, cummerbund,
dungaree, juggernaut, jungle, loot, maharaja, nabob, pajamas,
punch (the drink), shampoo, thug, kedgeree, jamboree
Dravidian curry, mango, teak, pariah
Persian (Farsi) check, checkmate, chess
Arabic Bedouin, emir, jakir, gazelle, giraffe, harem, hashish, lute,
minaret, mosque, myrrh, salaam, sirocco, sultan, vizier, bazaar,
caravan
African languages banana (via Portuguese), banjo, boogie-woogie, chigger,
goober,
gorilla, gumbo, jazz, jitterbug, jitters, juke(box), voodoo, yam,
zebra, zombie
American Indian avocado, cacao, cannibal, canoe, chipmunk, chocolate, chili,
languages hammock, hominy, hurricane, maize, moccasin, moose,
papoose, pecan, possum, potato, skunk, squaw, succotash,
squash, tamale (via Spanish), teepee, terrapin, tobacco,
toboggan, tomahawk, tomato, wigwam, woodchuck

(plus thousands of place names, including Ottawa, Toronto,

Saskatchewan and the names of more than half the states of
the U.S., including Michigan, Texas, Nebraska, Illinois)
Chinese chop suey, chow mein, dim sum, tea, ginseng, kowtow, lychee
Malay ketchup, amok
Japanese geisha, hara kiri, judo, jujitsu, kamikaze, karaoke, kimono,
samurai, soy, sumo, sushi, tsunami
Pacific Islands bamboo, gingham, rattan, taboo, tattoo, ukulele, boondocks
Australia boomerang, budgerigar, didgeridoo, kangaroo
Table 4.2.1 Loanwords culled from https://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words/loanwords.html

A special type of lexical borrowing is described as loan-translation or

calque. A calque is a complex lexical unit (either a single word or a fixed
phrasal expression) that was created by an item-by-item translation of the
(complex) source unit (Haspelmath, 2009). The most frequently cited
examples of calques are compounds, such as German herunter-laden
(calqued from English down-load), French presqu’île (calqued from Latin
paen-insula ‘almost-island’), or English loan-word (calqued from German

Psychology of Language Prepared by: Michael B. Lavadia, Ph.D.

Lehn-wort). But calques may also be morphological derivatives, such as
Czech diva-dlo ‘theatre’ (calqued from Greek thea-tron (look-place), or Italian
marcat-ezza (calqued from English marked-ness). And calques may be fixed
phrasal expressions, such as English marriage of convenience (calqued from
French mariage de convenance). The French term grate-ciel (scrape-sky), the
Dutch wolkenkrabber (cloud scratcher) or the German Wolkenkratzer (cloud
scraper) are all calques for the English skyscraper (Yule, 2017).

Reduplication
Reduplication is a morphological process in which meaning is
expressed by repeating all or part of a word (Lieber, 2009; Urbanczyk, 2017).
It is “the systematic repetition of phonological material within a word for
semantic or grammatical purposes” (Rubino, 2005). As for form, the term
reduplicant has been widely used to refer to the repeated portion of a word,
while base is used to refer to the portion of the word that provides the
source material for repetition (Urbanczyk, 2017).
Two types of reduplication are distinguished based on the size of the
reduplicant: full vs. partial.
Full reduplication is the repetition of an entire word, word stem (root
with one or more affixes), or root, e.g. Tausug (Austronesian, Philippines) full
word lexical reduplication dayang 'madam' vs. dayangdayang 'princess';
laway 'saliva' vs. laway-laway 'land snail', or full root reduplication, shown
here with the verbalizing affixes mag- and -(h)un which do not participate in
the reduplication: mag-bichara 'speak' vs. magbichara-bichara 'spread
rumors, gossip'; mag-tabid 'twist' vs mag-tabid-tabid 'make cassava rope
confection'; suga-hun 'be heated by sun' vs. suga-suga-hiin 'develop prickly
heat rash' (Hassan et al 1994 cited in Rubino, 2005).
Partial reduplication may come in a variety of forms, from simple
consonant gemination or vowel lengthening to a nearly complete copy of a
base. In Pangasinan (Austronesian, Philippines) various forms of reduplication
are used to form plural nouns. (1.) too 'man' > totöo CV- 'people'; amigo
'friend' > -CV- amimigo 'friends'; baley 'town' > CVC- balbaley 'towns'; plato
'plate' >CV- paplato 'plates'; manok 'chicken' CVCV- > manomanok 'chickens'
(Rubino 2001 cited in Rubino, 2005).
Reduplicative constructions in Ilocano (a) and Tagalog (b) (two
languages spoken in the Philippines) function to mark plurals (a) and futurity
(b), respectively as can be seen in the examples below by Yule (2017).
(a)

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 Singular Plural
(“head”) Ulo Ululo (“heads”)
(“road”) Dalan Daldalan (“roads”)
(“life”) Biag Bibiag (“lives”)
(“plant”) Mula Mulmula (“plants”)
Table 4.1.1
(b)
Base form of the Future Tense
Verb
(“read”) Basa Babasa (“will read”)
(“call”) Tawag Tatawag (“will call”)
(“write”) Sulat Susulat (“will write”)
Table 4.1.2
Reduplication, Rubino (2005) shares, is very common throughout
Austronesia (Pacific Islands, Philippines, Indonesia, Madagascar), Australia,
South Asia, and many parts of Africa, the Caucasus, and Amazonia.
For an overview of the range of forms and meanings associated with
reduplication in the languages of the world and to know which languages
make productive use of reduplication via a map, see Rubino, Carl. 2005.
Reduplication: Form, function, and distribution.
Blending
Blending is morphological process of combining two separate forms to
produce a single new term (Yule, 2017; Nurhayati, 2016). It is a type of word
formation in which two or more words are merged into one so that the
blended constituents are either clipped, or partially overlap. The newly
created word is called a blend or a portmanteau word. Blending is different
from compounding. Compounding is the joining of two separate words to
produce a single form while blends are formed by using fragments of source
words. These fragments are called splinters. Typically, blending is
accomplished by taking only the beginning of one word and then joining it to
the end of the other word.
The most commonly used examples of blends include smog (smoke
and fog), motel (motor and hotel), brunch (breakfast and lunch) telecast

Psychology of Language Prepared by: Michael B. Lavadia, Ph.D.

(television and broadcast), Chunnel (channel and tunnel) infotainment
(information and entertainment), among others.
Mostafa (2013) provides a list of trendy words coined by blending.
Visit
http://article.sciencepublishinggroup.com/pdf/10.11648.j.ijll.20130104.18.pdf
for the meaning of each blend.
a) Framily (n): (Family + Friend)
b) Frienemy/ Frenemy (n): ( Friend + Enemy)
c) Netizen (n): (Internet + Citizen)
d) Netspeak (n): (Internet + Speak)
e) Netiquette (n): (Internet + Etiquette)
f) Netco (n): (Internet + Company)
g) Wasband (n): ( was + husband)
h) Yestertech (n): (Yesterday + Technology)
i) Fluffragette (n): (Fluff + Suffragette)
j) Execubabble (n): (Executive + Babble)
k) Execuspeak (n): (Executive + Speak)
l) Anecdata/ Anec-data (n): (Anecdotal + Data)
m) Robocall/ Robo-Call (n): (Robot + Call)
n) Transgenic (adj): (Transplantation + Genetical)
o) Textpectation (n): (Text + Expectation)
p) Vegangelical (n): (Vegan and Evangelical)
q) Thumbo (n): (Thumb + Typo)
r) Flirtationship (n): (Flirt + Relationship)
Clipping
Clipping, also known as “truncation” or “shortening”, is “the
process whereby a lexeme (simplex or complex) is shortened, while still
retaining the same meaning and still being a member of the same class
form” (Moehkardi, 2016).
Clipping patterns come in four types namely: back-clipping
(apocopation), fore-clipping (apheresis), middle clipping (syncope) and

Psychology of Language Prepared by: Michael B. Lavadia, Ph.D.

complex or median clipping. Below are clipping types as described by Oriabi
(2012) with examples culled from Hosseinzadeh (2014).
1. Back-clipping (apocopation) – It is the most common type of clipping
in English, in which the beginning of the word is retained, i.e.
clipping the final part of the word. The unclipped word original may
be either a simple or a composite one.

Examples are: ad (advertisement), cable (cablegram), doc (doctor), exam

(examination), condo (condominium), fan (fanatic), fab (fabulous)
2. Fore-clipping (apheresis) – It is the second type of clipping in which
it retains the final part of the word, i.e. clipping of the initial part of
the beginning of the word. Fore-clipping is less common then the
back-clipping words.
Examples are: chute (parachute), roach (cockroach), coon (raccoon), gator
(alligator), phone (telephone), pike (turnpike), varsity (university).
3. Middle Clipping (syncope) – In the case of middle clipping, the
middle of the word is retained, i.e. clipping both the initial and the
final parts of the word.
Examples are: flu (influenza), fridge (refrigerator), jams or jammies
(pajamas/pyjamas), polly (apollinaris), tec (detective).

4. Complex or median clipping - Another related though different type

of clipping is called complex or median clipping. This type of
clipping is used within compound words in which one part of the
original compound most often remains intact i.e. clipping often
became the first constituent in the compound.
Examples are: cablegram (cable telegram), op art (optical art), org-man
(organization man), linocut (linoleum cut)
Jamet (2009) observed that “clipped forms rarely exceed two syllables
and therefore play a role in language economy, partaking in the so-called
“least-effort principle”, as they tend to reduce the articulatory and memory
efforts necessary to generate the word. 94.83% of clipped forms are either
mono- or disyllabic. The only three- and four-syllable forms found are
clippings from compounds: agit-prop (<< agitational propaganda); digi cable
(<< digital cable); hetero (<< heterosexual), etc., which explains the
“longer” clipped forms.”

Psychology of Language Prepared by: Michael B. Lavadia, Ph.D.

 For more on the phenomenon of clipping, visit
https://doi.org/10.4000/lexis.884.
Hypocorisms
A hypocorism/hypocoristicon, known as pet name in Australian and
British English, is formed when a person intentionally creates a variant
spelling of a name. The rule often simply involves the addition of a
diminutive suffix. The hypocorism is a shortened or phonetically altered
version of either the given name or sometimes the surname
(https://bdespain.org/S&L/angs/angs316.htm). According to Yule (2017), in
the process, a longer word is reduced to a single syllable then –y or –ie is
added to the end such as in telly (television), Aussie (Australian), hankie
(handkerchief), brekky (breakfast), etc.
Backformation
Back-formation (also called back-derivation, retrograde derivation or
deaffixation) is often described as one of the minor word-formation
processes. It has a special position among the other types of word-formation
for several reasons. Firstly, it is a process directionally opposite in its
character to the most frequent, and possibly most natural way of forming
new words in English – affixation. In back-formation, instead of being added,
an affix (or that part of the source word which is supposed to be an affix) is
subtracted, which thus results in a shorter or morphologically less complex
item of vocabulary (Stašková, 2013).
Examples of words using the process of backformation are provided in
Yule (2017). These words include:
television  televise
donation  donate
emotion  emote
enthusiasm  enthuse
liaison  liaise
option  opt
automation  automate
choreography  choreograph
bulldozer  bulldoze
mixture  mix

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orientation  orientate  orient
editor  edit
sculptor  sculpt
beggar  beg
babysitter  babysit
burglar  burgle
peddler  peddle

Conversion
English is well known for the facility with which it permits words to be
converted from one part of speech to another, without making any visible or
audible change in the word. This is called conversion (Denning, Kessler &
Leben, 2007). Other labels for this very common process are “category
change”, “functional shift” and “zero derivation”.
Most conversion in English, Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman (2007)
explain, takes place when the underlying verb has a very general meaning of
a noun object (direct or prepositional) becomes incorporated into the verb to
show that something has been (1) added, (2) taken away, or (3) used for
something as illustrated in the following examples:
1. He put the butter on his bread.  He buttered his bread.
He poured water on the plants.  He watered the plants.
2. Jo removed dust from the desk.  He dusted the desk.
I took the pits out of the dates.  I pitted the dates.
3. He cut the log with a saw.  He sawed the log.
Sue gathered the leaves with a rake.  Sue raked the leaves.
Different types of conversion can be distinguished below from Plag,
(2002) in particular noun to verb (1a), verb to noun (1b), adjective to verb
(1c) and adjective to noun (1d).

(1)a. the bottle to bottle

the hammer to hammer

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 the file to file
the skin to skin
the water to water
b. to call a call
to dump a dump
to guess a guess
to jump a jump
to spy a spy
c. better to better
empty to empty
hip to hip
open to open
rustproof to rustproof
d. poor the poor
rich the rich
well-fed the well-fed
blind the blind
sublime the sublime
Coinage
Coinages are words invented by accident or intentionally mainly from
no evident source. It should be pointed out that many coinages have come
into existence by using brand names instead of the object being referred to.
It is common that coinages are regularly called neologisms (Šomanová,
2017). Some common coinages are:
aspirin
escalator
heroin
band-aid
factoid

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Frisbee
Google
kerosene
Kleenex
Laundromat
linoleum
muggle
nylon
psychedelic
quark
Xerox
zipper

Most of the entries above are trademarks that form what could be
called ‘proprietary eponyms’. But when new words are based on the name of
a person, fictitious or real, they are called eponyms. It is a term formed from
the proper name of a person applied to a city, a geographical area, a
dynasty, a historical period, or an artistic movement. Originally, it referred to
a person, usually mythical, to whom the foundation of a city or lineage was
attributed; for example, Athens was named after the goddess Athena, or
Rome after its founder Romulus, or Europe from the goddess seduced by
Zeus. Overtime, eponyms have acquired other values, indicating inventions,
laws, both juridical and scientific, mathematical theorems, and also honours
and titles such as the Nobel Prize, named after Alfred Bernhard Nobel, or the
Pulitzer Prize after the journalist Joseph Pulitzer (Cipri, 2011).
Alzheimer's disease, boycott, Columbia, stentorian, sandwich, Walt
Disney and Victorian are examples of eponyms.

Suppletion
The term suppletion is typically used to refer to the phenomenon
whereby regular semantic and/or grammatical relations are encoded by
unpredictable formal patterns. Standard illustrations of suppletion in English
include the forms of the verb be: am, is, are, was, were, been, the present

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and past tense forms of the verb go: go, went cf. dance: danced; the degrees
of comparison of some adjectives, for instance good: better: best cf. nice:
nicer: nicest; finally, the non-derived forms of ordinal numerals from
corresponding cardinals such as one: first, two: second, cf. six: sixth

unpredictable alternations such as good∼better or go∼went) stands as the

(Veselinova, 2018). In the words of Bobaljik (2015), “suppletion (wholly

epitome of morphological irregularity.”

Compounding
In many languages, compounding (also called composition) is the most
frequently used way of making new lexemes. Its defining property is that it
consists of the combination of lexemes into larger words. In simple cases,
compounding consists of the combination of two words, in which one word
modifies the meaning of the other, the head. This means that such
compounds have a binary structure (Booij, 2005). In English free bases are
generally used to compose compounds, as in the examples by Lieber (2009):

Acronyms, Abbreviations and Initialisms

Acronyms, abbreviations and initialisms form part of the idiosyncrasy
of everyday language use. They are everywhere, and are rapidly increasing
with the continuous advent of technology. But how are the three different
from one another? Burmeister (2008) defines the three in this way:
Abbreviation: Arbitrary shortening of a word or words using more
than one letter from each word (Television—TV, the German
Elektrokardiogramm—EKG), by substituting letters with an apostrophe
(received—rec’d), by cutting off letters from the end (General—Gen.) or from
the middle (road—Rd.) and adding a period, or, in postal standards, by
eliminating most vowels and some consonants (highway—Hwy, boulevard—
Blvd).
Acronym: An abbreviation formed by combining the first letters
(initials) or syllables of all or select words in a series, resulting in a new
grouping of letters that can be pronounced as a word (North Atlantic Treaty
Organization—NATO, Mobile Army Surgical Hospital—MASH, Hazardous
Materials--HAZMAT).
Initialism (alphabetism): An acronym pronounced by reciting the
individual letters (British Broadcasting Corporation--BBC, Digital Video Disc--
DVD, Portable Document Format--PDF, Hypertext Markup Language—HTML,
Magnetic Resonance Imaging—MRI, Automatic Teller Machine--ATM), or
idiosyncratic pronunciation (N double A C P).

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 Burmeister (2008) notes, too, that “all acronyms and initialisms are
abbreviations, but not all abbreviations are acronyms or initialisms. And
acronyms and initialisms differ only in the way they are pronounced.”
What clearly sets off an acronym from initialism is pronounceability.
Izura and Playfoot (2011) captures this perfectly in saying that “the term
acronym refers to pronounceable abbreviations formed with the initial letters
of a compound term, while initialism is the name for the same type of
abbreviations that are “unpronounceable.”” The line between simple
initialism and pronounceable acronym can however be indistinct since
initialisms are rarely used, while acronyms have extended their meaning to
pronounceable and unpronounceable abbreviations (Izura and Playfoot,
2011; Bloom, 2000).
Bloom (2000), however, thinks that abbreviations are somehow
overused, saying:
“One of the most irritating types of pedantry in modern writing is the
overuse of abbreviations, especially abbreviated names... many writers,
especially technical writers ... allow abbreviated terms to proliferate, and
their prose quickly becomes a hybrid-English system of hieroglyphs requiring
the reader to refer constantly to the original uses of terms to grasp the
meaning. This kind of writing might be thought more scholarly than ordinary
straightforward prose. It isn't. Rather, it's tiresome and inconsiderate writing;
it betrays the writer's thoughtlessness toward the reader and a puerile
fascination with the insubstantial trappings of scholarship (p.3)”
Recognizing its widespread evidence of overuse in technical writing, he
offers simple rules for acronymology:
 An acronym is at least three letters.
 The word must be easily pronounceable.
 It must simplify communication.
 An acronym should have utility beyond a single paper/report.
 Spell out the complete term at first usage.
 More than one new neologism or novel abbreviation per paper burdens
the reader.
There are also what can be termed as anacronyms and pseudo-
acronyms. A description is provided by Burmeister (2008):
Anacronym: Coined to describe acronyms whose original word string
has been widely forgotten (Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus—

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scuba, Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation—laser, Radio
Detecting and Ranging—radar, Geheime Staats-Polizei--Gestapo).
Pseudo-acronym: A catchall for variations and embellishments, such
as creating an acronym from other acronyms (IT Acquisition Center—ITAC) or
mixing abbreviations and acronyms (deoxyribonucleic acid--DNA) and
ignoring words in a series just to make a pronounceable word (Princeton
University Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials--PRISM), or
pronouncing vowels that are not there (Guantanamo—GTMO, pronounced
Gitmo) to coin a word.

Psychology of Language Prepared by: Michael B. Lavadia, Ph.D.