(Morphological and Syntactic Analysis)

Centre for Linguistics, School of language,

Literature and Culture Studies
JNU, New Delhi-110067
Gopal Ram

Slides Courtesy: Prof PK Das

How new words are being formed in the
language?

Why the process consists of a combination of

morphemes that are rule-governed (when a new
word is formed)?

Why processes are formed frequently or

commonly in the use of the English language?
Nowadays, the terms ‘word formation’ does not have a clear
cut, universally accepted usage.
It is sometimes referred to all processes connected with
changing the form of the word by, for example, affixation,
which is a matter of morphology.
In its wider sense word formation denotes the processes of
creation of new lexical units.
Although it seems that the difference between morphological
change of a word and creation of a new term is quite easy to
perceive, there is sometimes a dispute as to whether blending
is still a morphological change or making a new word.
There are, of course, numerous word formation processes that
do not arouse any controversies and are very similar in the
majority of languages.
Clipping is the word formation process which
consists in the reduction of a word to one of its
parts (Marchand: 1969). Clippings are, also,
known as "shortenings."Clipping mainly consists
of the following types:

a. Back clipping
b. Fore-clipping
c. Middle clipping
d. Complex clipping
Back clipping or apocopation is the most
common type, in which the beginning is
retained. The unclipped original may be either a
simple or a composite. For example:
ad (advertisement), cable (cablegram),
doc(doctor), exam (examination),
gas (gasoline), math (mathematics),
memo(memorandum),
gym (gymnastics, gymnasium)
mutt (muttonhead), pub(public house),
pop (popular concert), trad (traditional jazz),
fax(facsimile).
Fore-clipping or aphaeresis retains the final
part.
For Example:
phone(telephone), varsity (university),
chute (parachute), coon (raccoon),
gator(alligator), pike (turnpike).
In middle clipping or syncope, the middle
of the word is retained.
For Example:
f lu (inf luenza), tec (detective),
polly (apollinaris), jams (pyjamas),
shrink (head-shrinker).
Clipped forms are also used in compounds. One
part of the original compound most often remains
intact. For examples are:
cablegram (cabletelegram),
op art (optical art),
org-man (organization man).

Sometimes both halves of a compound are clipped

as in navicert (navigation certificate). In these
cases it is difficult to know whether the resultant
formation should be treated as a clipping or as a
blend, for the border between the two types is not
always clear
Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations,
such as NATO, laser, and IBM, that are
formed using the initial letters of words or
word parts in a phrase or name. Acronyms
and initialisms are usually pronounced in a
way that is distinct from that of the full
forms for which they stand: as the names of
the individual letters (as in IBM), as a word
(as in NATO), or as a combination (as in
IUPAC). Another term, Alphabetism, is
sometimes used to describe abbreviations
pronounced as the names of letters.
A blend is a word formed from parts of two other words. These parts are sometimes,
but not always, morphemes.
A blend is different from a portmanteau word in that a portmanteau refers strictly
to a blending of two function words, similar to a contraction.
3.1 Formation of Blending: Most blends are formed by one of the following
methods:
a. The beginning of one word is added to the end of the other.
For Example: brunch (breakfast and lunch).
b. The beginnings of two words are combined.
For Example: cyborg (cybernetic and organism)
c. One complete word is combined with part of another word.
For Example: guesstimate (guess and estimate)
d. Two words are blended around a common sequence of sounds.
For Example: Californication (from a song by the Red Hot Chili
Peppers, is a blend of California and fornication)
e. Multiple sounds from two component words are blended, while mostly
preserving the sounds' order. Poet Lewis Carroll was well known for these
kinds of blends. This method is difficult to achieve and is considered a
sign of Carroll's verbal wit. For Example: slithy (lithe and slimy).
Back-formation refers to the process of creating a new lexeme
(less precisely, a new "word") by removing actual or supposed
affixes. The resulting neologism is called a back-formation.
Back-formations are shortened words created from longer words,
thus back-formations may be viewed as a sub-type of clipping.
For Example:
The noun resurrection was borrowed from Latin, and
the verb resurrect was then back formed hundreds of
years later from it by removing the -ion suffix. This
segmentation of resurrection into resurrect+ ion was
possible because English had many examples of
Latinate words that had verb and verb+-ion pairs — in
these pairs the -ion suffix is added to verb forms in
order to create nouns (such as, insert/insertion,
project/projection, etc.).
Borrowing is just taking a word from another
language. The borrowed words are called loan
words. A loanword (or loan word) is a word
directly taken into one language from another
with little or no translation. By contrast, a calque
or loan translation is a related concept whereby it
is the meaning or idiom that is borrowed rather
than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is
itself a calque of the German Lehnwort.
Loanwords can also be called "borrowings".
For Example: Sakul/schakul from School
Coinage is the invention of totally new words.
The typical process of coinage usually involves
the extension of a product name from a specific
reference to a more general one.
For example: Kleenex, Xerox, and Kodak.
These started as names of specific products, but
now they are used as the generic names for
different brands of these types of products.
Process of forming new words either by doubling an entire word
(total reduplication) or part of a word (partial reduplication).
English makes use of reduplication very sporadically (rarely). Total
reduplication is extremely rare!
Full and partial reduplication
Full reduplication involves a reduplication of the entire word. For
example, Kham derives reciprocal forms from ref lexive forms by
total reduplication:
[ɡin]'ourselves'→[ɡinɡin]'we (to) us'(ɡin-ɡin) [jaː]'themselves'→[jaːjaː]'they (to)
them'(jaː-jaː)(Watters 2002).
Partial reduplication involves a reduplication of only part of the word. For
example, Marshallese forms words meaning 'to wear X' by reduplicating
the last consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) sequence of a base,
i.e. base+CVC:
kagir 'belt'→kagirgir 'to wear a belt‘ (kagir-gir) takin 'sock'→takinkin 'to wear
socks ‘(takin-kin)(Moravsik 1978).
English partial reduplication: Example: Humpty – Dumpty, Hocus - Pocus,
In linguistics, inf lection or inf lexion is the
modification of a word to express different
grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical
mood, grammatical voice, aspect,
person, number, gender and case.
An inf lection expresses one or more grammatical categories with
an explicitly stated prefix, suffix, or infix, or another internal
modification such as a vowel change.
For example: The Latin word ducam, (I will lead),
Includes: an explicit suffix, -am,
expressing person (first),
number (singular),
and tense (future).
For example: The English word “cars" is a noun
Inf lected for: number, specifically to express the plural
“-s” is a inf lectional suffix
Whereas: “car” is not an inf lection.
 In linguistics, derivation is the process of forming a
new word on the basis of an existing word.
Example: happi-ness and un-happy from happy,
or determination from determine.
 Derivation stands in contrast to the process
of inf lection, which uses another kind of affix in order to
form grammatical variants of the same word, as
with determine/determine-s/determin-ing/determin-ed.
 Generally speaking, inf lection applies to all members
of a part of speech (e.g., every English verb has a past-
tense form), while derivation applies only to some
members of a part of speech (e.g., the nominalizing
suffix -ity can be used with the adjectives
modern and dense, but not with open or strong).
 Derivation is the process of forming a new words by
means of Affixation (Prefix, Infix and Suffix).
A derivational suffix usually applies to words of
one syntactic category and changes them into words of
another syntactic category.
For example: the English derivational suffix -ly changes
adjectives into adverbs (slow → slowly).
Examples of English derivational patterns and their suffixes:
adjective-to-noun: -ness (slow → slowness)
adjective-to-verb: -ise (modern → modernise) in British English or -
ize (archaic → archaicize) in American English and Oxford spelling
adjective-to-adjective: -ish (red → reddish)
adjective-to-adverb: -ly (personal → personally)
noun-to-adjective: -al (recreation → recreational)
noun-to-verb: -fy (glory → glorify)
verb-to-adjective: -able (drink → drinkable)
verb-to-noun (abstract): -ance (deliver → deliverance)
verb-to-noun (concrete): -er (write → writer)
A compound is a lexeme (a word) that consists of
more than one other lexeme. It can be categorized in
to two i.e. endocentric and exocentric.
An endocentric compound consists of a head, i.e.
the categorical part that contains the basic meaning
of the whole compound, and modifiers, which
restrict this meaning.
For example: The English compound doghouse,
where house is the head and dog is the modifier, is
understood as a house intended for a dog.
Endocentric compounds tend to be of the same part
of speech (word class) as their head, as in the case of
doghouse. (Such compounds were called
karmadharaya in the Sanskrit tradition.)
Exocentric compounds do not have a head, and
their meaning often cannot be transparently
guessed from its constituent parts.
For example: The English compound white-collar
is neither a kind of collar nor a white thing.
In an exocentric compound, the word class is
determined lexically, disregarding the class of the
constituents.
For example: a must-have is not a verb but a
noun.
English language allows several types of
combinations of different word classes:
N + N lipstick , teapot
A + N fast food, soft drink
V + N breakfast, sky-dive
N + V sunshine, babysit
N + A capital-intensive, waterproof
A + A deaf-mute, bitter-sweet
Good Day.