COMPOUNDS

A word composed of two or more separate words is a compound.

Endocentric compounds are compounds that have head. The head gives the
core meaning of the compound and determines the compounds category
(eg. goldfish, spoon-feed).

1. Co-ordinate both roots co-ordinate as head of a compound (eg. Boyfriend)

2. Sub-ordinate (eg. arm-chair)
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Exocentric compounds are compounds in which none of the elements gives

the core meaning (eg. pick-pocket, blue-nose).

The word class of the compound is determined by the category of the last
element.
Any root + Noun Noun Compound
Noun + Noun (modifier + head) eg. textbook
Verb + Noun (verb + object) eg. pick-pocket
Adjective + Noun (modifier + head) eg. blackbird
Adverb + Noun (not syntactic) eg. after-thought
Any root + Verb Verb Compound
Noun + Verb (object + verb) eg. brain-wash
Verb + Verb (co-ordinate) eg. drop-kick
Adjective + Verb (not syntactic) eg. dry-clean
Any root + Adjective Adjective Compound
Noun + Adjective (not syntactic) eg. earth-bound
Adjective + Adjective (co-ordinate) eg. blue-green
Adverb + Adjective (modifier + head) eg. near-sighted
Verb + Adverb Noun Compound

- There are two types syntactic relations of the roots in a compound:

1. Constituents are put together according to syntactic rules
2. Association of constituents violates syntactic rules

AFFIXATIONS
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Process of creating new words out of existing ones by adding affixes.

According to where the affix is attached, there are three sub-processes:

prefixation, infixation and suffixation.

BLENDINGS
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Process of creating new words out of portmanteau or telescope words in such

way that the constituents are easily identifiable.
Blendings are formed by combining parts from two or more words (eg. smog,
branch, spork).

WORD COINAGE
1. Brand names are used for something that has been accustomed (eg. xerex,
cleenex, frigdaire, brillo, vaseline, paloma, nylon, kodac)
2. Conversion is a word belonging to one word class that is transferred to
another word class without any change of form either in pronunciation or
spelling. It is a highly productive source for the production of new words
because there is no restriction of the form that can undergo conversion in
English.
Noun Verb eg. to bottle, to commission, to network, to download, to copy
Verb Noun eg. a call, a command, a guess, a spy
Adjective Verb eg. to better, to worse, to empty, to wrong
Adjective Noun eg. the poor, the rich, a daily, a double
3. Shortenings and clippings are type of word formation in which only part of
the stem is retained (eg. lab- laboratory, plane- airplane, phone- telephone)
4. Back formation is making new word from an older word which is mistakenly
assumed to be its derivative
5. Initialisms are an extreme kind of clippings as only the initials letter of
words or initials symbols are put together and are used as words
- Alphabetisms, where initials are pronounced with the names of the letters
of the alphabet. (eg. AI- Amnesty International, Artificial Intelligence, BPBritish Petroleum, Beautiful People)
- Acronym is an initialism pronounced like individual lexical item (eg. LASERLight wave Application by Simulated Emission of Radiation, SCUBA Self
Contained Under Water Breathing Apparatus, NATO - North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, UNESCO - United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural
Organization)
6. Aphetic form is a special form of shortening characterized by the omissions
of the main syllable (eg. fender-defender, fence- defense)
7. Abbreviation is a short form, clipping used as a whole word (eg. narcnarcotics, telly-television, tec-detective, professor-prof, gymnasium-gym)

8.

Words from Names (eg. sandwich fourth Earl of Sandwich, robotmechanical creatures, dumbo- big elephant, denim- material for overall
carpeting )

INFLECTIONAL LANGUAGES
1.

2.
3.
4.

Languages that add inflectional morphemes to words are sometimes called

inflectional languages. Morphemes may be added in several different ways:
Affixation adding morphemes to the word, without changing the root. (eg.
accuse-accused, apply-applies)
In affixation we also have:
- Apophony - internal change (eg. foot-feet, see- saw)
- Suppletion a complete change in form (eg. go-went, is- was)
- Partial suppletion a partial change in form (eg. think-thought)
Reduplication - doubling all or part of a word to change its meaning (eg.
rumah-house,
rumah-rumah houses)
Alternation - exchanging one sound for another in the root (eg. vowel
sound, ablaut process German, strong verbs, umlaut- nouns, verbs)
Suprasegmental variations - stress, pitch of tone, no sound are added or
changed.
An Inflectional affix is an affix that expresses a grammatical contrast that is
obligatory for its stem word class in some given grammatical context. It is
typically located further from the root than a derivational affix. Produces
predictable non-idiosyncratic change of meaning.
Agglutinative languages are languages in which the grammatical
markers are directly added to the word (eg. Latin, Irish, Latvian, Finnish,
Lithuanian)
Analytic languages are languages that do not have inflections. African
languages are considered like young languages and they are almost
uninflected (eg. Slavic-> Macedonian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Slavish, Belarus.
Russian, Croatian, Polish)
Middle and Modern English lost progressively more of the old English
inflectional system. Modern English is consider as weakly inflective language
since its nouns have only vestiges of inflection (plurals) and its regular verbs
have only four forms:
1. An inflected form for the past indicative (mood) and subjunctive (if I were
you...) Looked
2. An inflected form for the 3th person singular, present indicative Looks
3. An inflected form for the present participle- Looking
4. An uninflected form for the everything else - Look
The English possessive indicator is a remain of the old English genitive case
suffix it is consider a clitic.

ALLOMORPHS AND MORPHEMES

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Sometimes one or two morphemes which have the same meaning are in a
complementary distribution. This means that the two can never occur in
precisely the same environment or context and between them they exhaust
the possible context in which the morpheme can appear. There are two are
two morphs in English which can be characterized as indefinite article a and
an.
A morpheme like the lexeme and the phoneme is realized in a different way.
Morphemes are abstract units (like lexemes and phonemes). Morphs which
realize a particular morpheme and which are conditioned (whether
phonetically, lexically or grammatically) are allomorphs of that morpheme.
Every allomorph is a morph. Allomorphs are more informative than morphs.

INFLECTION AND DERIVATION

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Criteria 1: New lexeme or a form of an old lexeme. This means this criterion is
not enough to make a distinction.
Criteria 2: Derivation may cause a change of category.
Generally, affixes can change category.
Criteria 3: Inflectional affixes can have regular meaning. Not all derivational
affixes do have. Difficulty is that many derivational affixes have perfectly
regular meaning productive suffixation er and - able show regular
meaning.
The suffix ette brings three different meanings when attached to a word:
1. Small kitchenette
2. Feminisan brunette
3. Material beaverette
Inflection is productive; Derivation is semi-productive.

NOUNS
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The part of speech that is used to name a person, place or thing is a noun.
Nouns can be simple and compound.
Compound nouns can be:
1. Closed -written together
2. Open consist of separate words
3. Hyphened - written with a hyphen

Common nouns- general group

Proper nouns - capitalize in writing refer to specific entity (items).

Concrete nouns
Abstract nouns
Countable
Uncountable
Collective nouns

Nouns form is characterized by 3 dimensions that represent its form: number,

gender, case.
Connection between nouns and inflections is possessive case.

ADJECTIVES
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Adjectives are important class of word and serve as the descriptors of the
language. They provide information about nouns and pronouns. Very often
adjective can be named modifiers or adjectival modifiers. They are narrowing
down the qualities and properties of the nouns or pronouns to which they
refer.
Syntactically, adjective is a word whose main syntactic rule is to modify a
noun or a pronoun because an adjective gives more information about what
the noun or pronoun refers to. In English, adjective forms are an open class of
words. Adjectives are the third largest group of words.
Qualitative or descriptive adjectives
Classifying adjectives
Connection between adjectives and inflection is comparative and superlative,
and infinitive of adjectives is called absolute form.
The inflections identify two steps in the expression of the higher degree.
First step adding -er to create the comparative form. Second step is adding
est that produces the superlative form. There is no inflection way of
expressing the same or lower degree in English. These notions are express
syntactically as..as, for the same degree..(X is a big as Y) and for the lower
degree less or least..(X is less interested than Y), (Z is the least interested of
a U).
A large number of adjectives can be recognized by the presence of a suffix.
Several of the most frequent adjectival suffixes are: ese- Chinese,
Portuguese, an- Republican, Parisian, ist-Socialist, loyalist, it-socialite.

VERBS
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A verb is a word belonging to the part of speech that usually denotes an

action or a state of being. A sentence may contain a single verb or it may use
a cluster of verbs which work together as a verb phrase.
There can be up to four auxiliary verbs, all going in front of the main verb.
Classes of verbs that occur within a verb phrase.

Lexical verbs, they are also called full verbs, they are those which with
meaning can be clearly and independently identified-main verbs.
Nine modal verbs: can, could, may, might, should, shall, will, would, must,
ought to, need.
Another class is the class of primary words. They can function either as main
verbs or as auxiliary verbs. There are three: HAVE, DO and BE.
Depending on the kind of contrast in meaning verbs can express finitenessfinite forms, the verb can be limited in some way and this is in fact what
happens when different kinds of endings are used. The finite forms are
those which limit the verbs to a particular number, tense, person or mood exinflectional s form is used when the verb is limited to the 3 rd person singular,
like goes, walks.
The non finite forms do not limit the verbs in there forms. The -ing form is
used to the verb and it refers to any number, tense, person and mood.

ADVERBS
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Adverbs are easily recognizable. Adverbs like adjectives serve to modify

elements in a sentence and they are also considered modifiers.
Adverbs modify verbs. They provide information about manner (well, quickly,
particularly), place (outside, near, here), time (once, before, immediately),
degree (very, nearly, more), number (first, secondly, seventh).