Word formation processes

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1. General Characteristics of the Word and Word Structure

LlanfairpwIlgwyngyUgogerychwyhndrobwIinantysiliogogogoch

(a town name in Wales)

How is it that we can use and understand words in our language that we have never encountered before? This is the central question of morphology, the component of a grammar that deals with the internal structure of words.

As with any other area of linguistic theory, we must distinguish between general morphological theory that applies to all languages and the morphology of a particular language. General morphological theory is concerned with delimiting exactly what types of morphological rules can be found in natural languages. The morphology of a particular language, on the other hand, is a set of rules with a dual function. First, these rules are responsible for word formation, the formation of new words. Second, they represent the speakers' unconscious knowledge of the internal structure of the already existing words of their language.

There are two basic types of words in human language—simple and complex. Simple words are those that cannot be broken down into smaller meaningful units while complex words can be analyzed into constituent parts. The word houses, for example, is made up of the form house and the plural marker -s, neither of which can be divided into smaller morphemes. While many English words consist of only one morpheme, others can contain two, three, or more.

e.g. hunt, boy, gentle, boy-s, hunt-er, hospital-ize, gentle-man, hospital-iz-alion, gentle-man -li- ness

Morphology deals with the internal structure of complex words. The words of any language can be divided into two broad types of categories, closed and open, of which the latter are most relevant to morphology.

The closed cate­gories are the function words:

pronouns like you and she;

conjunctions like and, if, and because;

determiners like a and the;

and a few others.

Newly coined or borrowed words cannot be added to these categories, which is why we say that they are closed. The categories of words that are open are the major lexical categories:

noun (N), verb (V), adjective (A), and adverb (Adv).

It is to these categories that new words may be added. Because the major problem of mor­phology is how people make up and understand words that they have never en­countered before, morphology is concerned largely with major lexical categories.

When we perceive the continuum of speech in a language with which we are familiar, we do not hear a string of individual sounds: we automatically associate groups of sounds into meaningful words.

Everyone will feel that he or she knows exactly what the word is and it is true that in our native language we seem to have a very clear intuitive idea of what constitutes a word. This is not necessarily connected with the notion of letters between spaces in the written languages, because even speakers of a language which has no written form can separate utterances into ‘words’. In spite of the fact that everyone is certain of what constitutes a word, the definition of such a unit has presented and still presents many problems for the linguist. In the written language it would perhaps be possible to define a word as ‘a form written between spaces’ but in speech we do not necessarily make pauses between words and in any case our division of the written language into words is very inconsistent. Other methods of defining ‘word’ have been tried with recourse for example to semantics, defining the word as a ‘unit of meaning’, but this is doomed to failure because many ‘units of meaning’ consist of more than one word:

e.g. an automatic dish washer or a blow on the chin.

Furthermore, we can have ‘units of meaning’ which are not words. For example, we all recognize the meaning of re- in retell, reorganize etc, but we can’t call it a word. A syntactic definition of a word as a unit which can add an inflectional ending will not take us very far because we can say “The King of England’s throne”, where the inflection ‘s is added to something which is certainly more than a word.

Perhaps the most famous definition of ‘word’ is that of L. Bloomfield who defined it as a ‘minimum free form’, which really means that it is the smallest unit which can be used alone to constitute a sentence. But even here, however, there are difficulties with marginal cases such as the or a in English or je in French, all of which we should probably want to label as words but none of which can stand alone.

Agglutinating languages also present special problems here since they contain many units which cannot stand alone. In Japanese,

for example, I must go can be translated by ikenakercbanarimasen which consists of the word go – ‘ ik’ and several particles to give the meaning of obligation.

Even in speech we can recognize that words are made up of parts which have meaning and which can be used in different combinations to build different words.

Cf: happy – happiness; loud – loudness; slow – slowly.

We do not recognize such elements as –ness, -ly; -s as words. Units which are used to form words are called morphemes, the study of the way phonemes are combined into morphemes and morphemes into words is called morphology or morphemics.

We have already recognized –ness, -ly, -s as units of word formation but we can see that they do not constitute words in the same way as the units dog (s), quick, loud. This distinction tells us why morphemes are usually divided into two categories:

- free morphemes

- bound

Free morphemes are meaningful units of language structure which can be used independently or in combination with other morphemes. A word which consists of only one morpheme must consist of a free morpheme.

Bound morphemes are meaningful units with language structure which can only be used in conjunction with another morpheme, which can be either free or bound.

home – home + s – home + work

We can categorize different types of words according to the way in which they are formed from their constituent morphemes.

A simple word consists of a single morpheme (which must, of course, be a free morpheme)

e.g. cat, dog, elephant, sorry

A compound word is made up of usually two free morphemes used together to form a single lexical unit e.g. headline, blackbird, toothbrush.

A complex word consists either of a free morpheme together with a bound morpheme, or of two bound morphemes.

Free + bound

e.g kingdom, happiness; return, befriend, untie

Bound + bound

e.g. resist, conclude, invest

2. Morphemes and Morphs: Boundaries

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