1. Morphological Processes

2. Morphological Processes
What mechanisms are employed by speakers of a language to change or modify the meaning of a particular base-form?
morpheme = function & form: logically, modifications of form will be involved in morphological processes – adding or subtracting material (accompanied by a change in meaning)

3. concatenative morphology: putting morphemes together
non-concatenative: modifying internal structure of morphemes

4. So far, we’ve only looked at one type of word-formation process: affixation
= concatenating morphemes in a row
Prefixation, suffixation, infixation, circumfixation…
There are many different ways to make new words without concatenating morphemes together.
compounding
internal change
reduplication
blending, etc.

5. Compounding
In compounding, two or more free morphemes combine to make a new word
Ex: baseball, blackboard, lightbulb, podcast
Compounding is very common in the world’s languages.
Compounding is the word formation process in which two or more lexemes combine into a single new word. Compound words may be written as one word or as two words joined with a hyphen.

6. Examples:
noun-noun compound: note + book → notebook
adjective-noun compound: blue + berry → blueberry
verb-noun compound: work + room → workroom
noun-verb compound: breast + feed → breastfeed
verb-verb compound: stir + fry → stir-fry
adjective-verb compound: high + light → highlight
verb-preposition compound: break + up → breakup
preposition-verb compound: out + run → outrun
adjective-adjective compound: bitter + sweet → bittersweet
preposition-preposition compound: in + to → into
Compounds may be compositional, meaning that the meaning of the new word is determined by combining the meanings of the parts, or noncompositional, meaning that the meaning of the new word cannot be determined by combining the meanings of the parts. For example, a blueberry is a berry that is blue. However, a breakup is not a relationship that was severed into pieces in an upward direction.

7. Head of a compound
A compound word obtains its syntactic category from one of the words that make it up.
For example, the compound ice-cold is made up of the noun ice combined with the adjective cold and it is an adjective as a whole. We call the morpheme which determines the category of a compound the head (of the compound).

8. Example: nationwide A
N A
| |
nation wide
(a) A nationwide program was established.
(b) *A nationwide exists.

9. In English, as can be expected from the above examples, the rightmost member of a compound is its head. It is known as the right-hand head rule.
The right-hand head rule
The head of a compound is the rightmost member of the compound.

10. Compounding Tests Stress Shifts Adverbs can’t modify compound nouns:
blackbird vs. black bird
lightbulb vs. light bulb
Adverbs can’t modify compound nouns:
*extremely gentleman vs. extremely gentle man
*the very White House vs. the very white house
Note: it’s also possible to form verb and adjective compounds:
Verbs: dropkick, spoonfeed, whitewash…
Adjectives: nationwide, redhot…

11. Inflection
only in a very few cases can the first element in a compound be inflected:
(i) He [drop kick]ed the ball.
(ii) *He [dropped kick] the ball.
(i) [fire truck]s
(ii) * (a) [fires truck]
Exceptions: passers-by, courts-martial, itsy-bitsy (maybe), parks commissioner,

12. Pronominalization
In adjective–noun compounds, the noun cannot be turned into a pronoun.
(i) Ed saw the white hóuse, and I saw the green one.
(ii) *Ed saw the Whíte House, and I saw the green one.
Compositionality
The meaning of a compound can drift from the meaning of its parts, whereas the
corresponding phrases have predictable meanings:
(i) #The white hóuse isn‟t painted white.
(ii) The Whíte House isn‟t painted white.
So we can say that fire truck, drop kick, etc. are words for sure.

13. Linguists distinguish at least three different semantic relations between the head and modifier(s) of compounds.
First, the compound represents a subtype of whatever the head represents. For instance, a traffic-cop is a kind of cop; a teapot is a kind of pot; a fog-lamp is a kind of lamp; a blue-jay is a kind of jay. That is, the head names the type, and the compound names the subtype. These are called endocentric compounds.
Second, the compound names a subtype, but the type is not represented by either the head or the modifier in the compound. For example, Deadhead, redhead, and pickpocket represent types of people by denoting some distinguishing characteristic. There is typically another word, not included in the compound, that represents the type of which the compound represents the subtype.
In the case of Deadhead, redhead, and pickpocket this other word is person, so a Deadhead is a person who is an enthusiastic fan of the band. These are called exocentric compounds.

14. Third, there are compounds in which both elements are heads; each contributes equally to the meaning of the whole and neither is subordinate to the other, for instance, bitter-sweet. Compounds like these can be paraphrased as both X and Y, e.g., “bitter and sweet.”
Other examples include teacher-researcher and producer-director. These can be called coordinative compounds.

15. First Sister Principle
All verbal compounds are formed by incorporation of a word in first sister position of the verb (where first sister position means that the non-head of the verbal compound must be a word which can appear immediately after the verb in a corresponding verb phrase).
This principle is intended to account for (i) the relationship between he drives a truck, truck driver, and driver of trucks, (ii) the difference in well-formedness between truck driver, on the one hand, and *quick driver (next to drive a truck quickly), and *child driver (next to a child drives a truck) on the other.

16. Coinange or Neologism
Coining is the creation of new words without reference to the existing morphological resources of the language, that is, solely out of the sounds of the language.
This is a morphological process of creating new words to name previously non-existent objects or phenomena that result from cultural contact. The coined word, with the passage of time, gains currency within a speech community. Invented trade names such as Xerox and Kleenex are recent additions to the English language. They have quickly become everyday words in the language. The word Xerox used to refer only to a company that produces a type of photocopying machine. Recently, the word has come to be used to refer to the process of photocopying in general. Also the Kleenex used to refer to a brand of facial tissue, but now it has come to denote facial tissue in general.

17. Abbreviation / clipping
Abbreviation involves the shortening of existing words to create other words, usually informal versions of the originals. There are several ways to abbreviate. We may simply lop off one or more syllables, as in prof for professor, doc for doctor.
Usually the syllable left over provides enough information to allow us to identify the word it’s an abbreviation of, though occasionally this is not the case: United Airlines’s low cost carrier is called Ted.

18. Clipping
Clipping or abbreviation, as a morphological process, is very productive; not only in the English language but also in many African languages. It involves some element of reduction in the length of a word. It can also be seen extracting a shortened form of a word from its longer morphological from.

19. We can identify two types of clipping in the English language.
These are back clipping and fore-clipping.
In fore clipping, an element or elements are taken from the beginning of a word. Some of the examples in this category include (ham) burger, (omni) bus, (alli) gator, (tele) phone, (heli) copter and many more. This type of clipping also occurs with personal names in the English language. Some of these examples include, Becky for Rebecca, Drew, for Andrew, Grinny for Virginia. In the case of fore clipping, an element or elements are taken from the end of a name. What we then have is an abridged version, which can still stand in its place. In English for instance, the following have undergone various back-clippings as can be seen from the following examples; chimp (panzee), deli (catessen), hippo (potamus), lab(ratory); gas (oline), Pro(fessor) and many more. Many names in the language have been clipped to the extent that some native speakers cannot relate the full version of the name with the clipped version.

20. Acronyms
Alternatively, we may use the first letter of each word in a phrase to create a new expression, an acronym, as in UN, US, or SUV. In these instances the acronym is pronounced as a sequence of letter names. In other instances, such as UNICEF from United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, the acronym can be pronounced as an ordinary English word. Advertisers make prolific use of acronyms and often try to make them pronounceable as ordinary words.

21. Eponyms
Eponyms are a word form by the word formation process in which a new word is formed from the name of a real of fictitious person. For example:
atlas – Atlas
boycott – Charles C. Boycott
cardigan – James Thomas Brudnell, 7th Earl of Cardigan
cereal – Ceres
dunce – John Duns Scotus
guillotine – Joseph Ignace Guillotin

22. Blending
Blending involves taking two or more words, removing parts of each, and joining the residues together to create a new word whose form and meaning are taken from the source words. Smog derives from smoke and fog and means a combination of these two substances (and probably lots of others); motel derives from motor and hotel and refers to hotels that are convenient in various ways to motorists; Prevacid derives from prevent acid; eracism derives from erase and racism and means erase racism or, if read against the grain, electronic racism (cf. , ecommerce, E-trade); webinar derives from (worldwide) web and seminar. In November2007, an interviewee on an NPR news item created the blend snolo to refer to playing bike polo in the snow.

23. Borrowing
Borrowing involves copying a word that originally belonged in one language into another language. For instance, many terms from Mexican cuisine, like taco and burrito, have become current in American English and are spreading to other English dialects. Borrowing requires that the borrowing language and the source language come in contact with each other.
Speakers of the borrowing language must learn at least some minimum of the source language for the borrowing to take place. Over its 1500 year history English has borrowed from hundreds of languages, though the main ones are Latin (homicide), Greek (chorus), French (mutton), Italian (aria), Spanish (ranch), German (semester), and the Scandinavia languages (law). From Native American languages, American English has borrowed place names (Chicago), river names (Mississippi), animal names (opossum), and plant names (hickory).

24. The borrowed word never remains a perfect copy of its original
The borrowed word never remains a perfect copy of its original. It is made to fit the phonological, morphological, and syntactic patterns of its new language. For example, the Spanish pronunciation of burritos is very different from the English pronunciation. At the very least, the two languages use different /r/s and /t/s, and the plural marker {-s} is voiced in English but voiceless in Spanish.

25. There are different forms of borrowing
There are different forms of borrowing. They are loan-word, loan blend and calque or loan-translation.
A loan-word is that which “a recipient language has lifted from a donor language to mean the same object and practice to which it originally referred in the donor language” (Donwa-Ifode 1995:135).

26. Calque
A calque (/ˈkælk/) or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word translation.
It means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components so as to create a new lexeme in the target language.

27. Calquing is distinct from phono-semantic matching
Calquing is distinct from phono-semantic matching. While calquing includes semantic translation, it does not consist of phonetic matching (i.e. retaining the approximate sound of the borrowed word through matching it with a similar-sounding pre-existing word or morpheme in the target language).

28. Examples Piano (from Italian), Alcohol (from Arabic),
Zebra (from Bantu),
Tycoon (from Japanese),
Angel (old French and E

29. A loan-blend is a hybrid word created by combining morphemes of two or more languages in its creation. The process of forming a word by combining morpheme of different languages is known as hybridization.
Examples of hybrid words in Igbo include
Ite pootu ‘metal pot’
tekinuzu ‘technology’
uzo moto ‘tarred roa
The morphemes in bold face in the above examples are of English origin, while others in the normal type-face are of Igbo origin.

30. A claque or loan-translation is a word created by using the morphemes of a recipient language to represent all the senses in a donor language.
Below are examples of calques in Igbo:
Ugbo elu ‘aeroplane’
(literally: a vessel that flies in the air)
ugbomniri ‘boat’
(literarlly: a vessel that moves on water)
ugbo ala ‘vehicle’
(literally: a vessel that moves on land)
mmo ozi ‘Angel’

31. Back Formations
Back-formation is the word formation process in which an actual or supposed derivational affix detaches from the base form of a word to create a new word. For example, the following list provides examples of some common back-formations in English:
babysitter – babysit
donation – donate
gambler – gamble

32. Conversion
Conversion, as a morphological process, involves neither the addition nor subtraction of any morpheme. This derivational process simply involves a change in the function of a word. For example, a verb may be used as a noun or vice-versa, without adding any suffix. Examples include verbs changing into nouns, e.g.:
Talk The talk was lengthy.
Cheat The boy is a cheat.
Guess He made a guess.
Nouns too may be converted into verbs, e.g. bottle (she bottles up her

33. In general, he proposes four principal types of relation out of which three are relevant to our discussion on conversion – (1) Derivation, (2) Replacement, (3) Figurative Extension and (4) Peripheral Clustering. All are relevant except ‘Replacement’.

34. Derivation refers to all the essential components of an underlying base which are incorporated into another meaning, belonging to a distinctly different semantic domain. For example, compare man in the following two contexts
(a) I saw a man approaching
(b) They man the house in case of emergency.
The meaning of man is included within the meaning of the first man which refers to a human being and the second man which refers to an activity. The two belong to entirely different semantic domains.

35. Figurative extension of meaning involves a radical shift in semantic domains in which the semantic relations between base and extended meaning depend upon either a ‘supplementary’ or ‘secondary’ component or a reinterpreted diagnostic component. For example, if you hear a wife addressing her husband in a sentence such as “You are a dog”, the meaning of dog obviously does not have as a referent particular quadruped of a canine class. Rather, this meaning of a dog is roughly equivalent to the abstract contemptible, and in this meaning dog belongs to the semantic domain of such words contemptible, base, mean, worthless, despicable with which it overlaps meanings.

36. Peripheral clustering involves linked sets of diagnostic components, which form a semantic chain binding a series together. There may also be certain common components which serve to unite such a set.
Compare, for example, paper in the following contexts:
I know a famous company that manufactures paper.
Fred just bought the paper from the vendor.
Professor Adam’s paper was the first to be presented
at the conference.
Biodun will paper his defaced and cracked walls soon.
What is observable in the four contextual uses of the single English lexical item paper would seem to make it clear that the meanings of the first three italicized items above constitute central - peripheral meanings, while the meaning of the last italicized item is a derivation of the first.

37. Reduplication Reduplication: repetition of all or part of the stem
Indonesian: (total reduplication)
rumah ‘house’ rumahrumah ‘houses’
ibu ‘mother’ ibuibu ‘mothers’
lalat ‘fly’ lalatlalat ‘flies’
Tagalog: (partial reduplication)
bili ‘buy’ bibili ‘will buy’
kain ‘eat’ kakain ‘will eat’
pasok ‘enter’ papasok ‘will enter’

38. Reduplication in English?
There are a few examples of reduplication in English.
Can you think of any?
Individual words/phrases: “bling bling”, “very very”, “teeny weeny”, “a little somethin’ somethin’”…
There is also one reduplicative process in English…
schm- reduplication:
fancy schmancy
tired schmired
football schmootball
Nobel Prize schmobel prize
...etc.

39. The difference between the two elements comprising reduplication may be phonologically: the initial consonants in both elements differ, as in walkie-talkie, or in the medial vowels e.g. criss-cross. Reduplicative forms have certain common uses
(a) to imitate sounds: e.g. tick-tock (‘of clock’), ping-pong (of hitting table or lawn tennis ball), rat-a-tat (knocking on door), bow-bow (of dog).
(b) to suggest alternating movements, for example: seesaw, flip-flop, ping-pong.
(c) to disparage by suggesting instability, nonsense, insincerity, vacillation, etc. higgledy-piggledy, hocus-pocus, hodge-podge, wishy-washy, dilly-dally, shilly-shally, mumbo-jumbo.
(d) to intensify, for example, teeny-weeny, tip-top, willy-nilly.

40. Internal Change
A (slightly) more common word-formation process in English is internal change.
= changing sounds inside a root creates a new word.
Also known as alternations
sing ~ sang present/past
drive ~ drove present/past
foot ~ feet singular/plural
mouse ~ mice singular/plural
import ~ import noun/verb
present ~ present noun/verb

41. Stress – Shift
This is also referred to as functional shift. It is a change in lexis that as a result of change that occurs in stress placement e.g. re’cord (v) and ‘record (noun). Indeed, a change in stress placement on a word may classify two utterances into different category of the units of grammar.
Take a look at the examples below.

42. Nominalization
Words other than nouns or pronouns converted from other word classes and are made to behave as nouns are called nominalizations. They include verbs and adjectives – determiners, ordinals, or genitive phrases.
As converted nouns, they function as headword in the group in which they occur.

43. Verbs
Writing is a lot easier than singing.
Adjectives
Red is his usual colour.
The rich also cry.
All are cordially invited.
Both are acceptable options