Question 1:

Many words are formed from combinations of other

words or from combinations of words and prefixes or suffixes. It is often possible to see a connection between the meaning of a combination and the meanings of its parts. Discuss some of the common processes of word formation in English. Elaborate with examples.

 Morphology is the study of the internal structure of

words (word formation). -deals with words and word structure. Morpheme is a minimal meaningful language unit and carries certain grammatical function. Eg: an English verb forms such as watch, watches, watched and watching consist of one base form write and other smallest unit of grammatical elements such as s, es, ed, and ing.

1. Free morphemes are morphemes that can stand alone as an independent word. Eg: people, man, cat, go, language, in, can, one, share, written, and, quite, understand, gentle and alligator. These words can stand by themselves as single words. Free morphemes can be categorized into two which are the lexical morpheme (open class) and the grammatical morpheme (closed class). The lexical morpheme refers to the set of ordinary nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs that carries the content of the convey messages.

 Bound morphemes are morphemes that cannot

stand alone as an independent word and are typically attached to another form. For instance, the affixes such as ies, es, s, and en. All affixes in English are bound morphemes. It can be categorized into two types of affixes: derivational which include lexical content and inflectional, which are structured words.

 Derivational morpheme is when a root morpheme

is combined with an affix and as a result, it would form either different part of speech or the similar part of speech with a different lexical meaning. For instance, the addition of the derivational morpheme ness changes the adjective good to the noun goodness. Derivational morpheme include prefixes such as re,pre-, un-, mis-, co- and also suffixes such as ish, -ness, -ly, -able and ing.

 In contrast, inflectional morphemes are not used to

produce new words in the language except rather to point out aspects of the grammatical function of a word. It is used to show whether a word is singular or plural, or if it comparative or possessive form and whether it is past tense or not. There are eight inflectional morphemes; -s,-ed,-ing,en,s,-s,er,est. All the inflectional morphemes are suffixes. For example, the word, taller,fans, shocked,chairs, and brightest.

 Word formation is a process of creating new words.

Unlike word formation, inflection can combine a

suffix with some verb to modify its form to subject of the sentence but could not create a new word. Some of the common word formation processes result in the creation of new words in English which are derivation, compounding, blending, back formation, clipping.

 A process in which a derivational affix attaches to

the base form of a word to create a new word is called derivation. Prefixes and suffixes plays vital role in forming the new word. Prefixes such as a- means without, not ; dis- means opposite, negative; ex- means former, previous and remeans again. Examples of new words form by adding prefixes to the words are dis-courage ex-wife, re-do, re-cover, disadvantage and un-do.

 Same goes to suffixes when added to a new word.

Suffixes such as able means sense of being; -ful

means characterized by; -less means lack of and ly means like. The examples of new words form by adding suffixes to the words are understand-able, respect-ful, read-able, exact-ly, and colour-less.

 Compounding is a process of combining two or

more complete words into a single compound form. Homework is a compound word because both home and work are two complete words in their own before the compounding process was applied. As a result, the end product of the process is treated as one form (new word-form). Compounds may be in the same grammatical category or it may not. If the two words are in the same grammatical category, the compound also will be in the same category.

 For example,

a noun word + noun word = noun compound word in such girlfriend, paper clip, landlord, mailman. adjective word + adjective word = adjective compound word in such icy-cold, red-hot, worldly wise, bittersweet. However, when the categories of the two words differ from each other, the class of the second or final word would decide on which grammatical categories the compound would fall. Some of other common used of English compounds are bookcase, black hole, housewife, mother tongue, whitewash, pickpocket, sleepwalk, textbook, wallpaper and wastebasket.

Blending
Blending is the combination of two separate forms to

produce a single new word. Blending is done by combining the beginning of a word with the end of another word. Its meaning is usually a combination of the original words. For example, when someone is going to lunch and late for his or her breakfast, the words are combining to form a new word which is brunch. Brunch is form by taking br- from the word breakfast and blended it with unch from the word lunch. Some other commonly used examples of blending are motel (motor/ hotel), smog (smoke /fog), spork (spoon /fork), bit (binary/digit) and telecast (tevision/broadcast).

 When an actual or supposed derivational affix

detaches from the base form of a word to create a new word, this is when a back-formation process occur. It is also known as a very specialised type of reduction process. Normally, a word of one type (typically a noun) is reduces to form another type of word (usually a verb). For some examples of words created by this process are emote from the word emotion, enthuse from the word enthusiasm and donate from the word donation. Some other common back-formations in English are babysit, gamble, obsess, process, televise and resurrect.

 Clipping is the word formation process in which a

word is reduced or shortened without changing the meaning of the word. Unlike back-formation, clipping retains the meaning of the original word without any modification to its meaning. There are three types of clipping which are back clipping, fore-clipping, and middle clipping.

 Back clipping is when the end of a word is removed

from the original word leaving a new word but has the same meaning. For examples, gas from gasoline, gym from gymnasium, exam from examination and lab from laboratory. Besides, fore-clipping is a process of removing the beginning of a new word as in gator from alligator and coon from raccoon. Middle clipping is retaining the middle of a word as in flu from influenza. Some examples of clipped words are condo from condominium, pub from public house, sitcom from situation comedy and ad from advertisement.

 Acronyms are new words formed from the initial

letters of a set of other words. Usually, acronyms are pronounced as new single words or it may be pronounced by distinctly saying each separate letter. For examples, compact disk is pronounced by saying each letter, CD. Similarly, video cassette recording radar is pronounced VCR by saying each initial letter.

 In contrast, radio detecting and ranging is

pronounced as a single word radar as well as the words zone improvement plan, it is pronounced zip. In some cases, acronyms also includes the name of an organisations such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and Women Against Rape (WAR). More examples of acronyms are

 Knowing a language means to know the morphemes of

that particular language. Language never stops evolve, it develops every single day as it is a part from unconscious knowledge.