Background of the Study

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the Study

People tend to modify their own languages. They keep modifying words or introducing the new words to their languages. The more people use the language, the more changes will occur. They modify the language in order to fit in to the development of the society that uses the language. English also has changed for many centuries. The modification and the creation of words cannot be avoided because they are proofs that a language is still alive. One factor that creates the changes is the influence of the mass media, such as magazine. A magazine has been a tool of word spreading to the people since it was first published. A magazine also often introduces new words and it often influences the people who read it. When the new words become popular and are generally accepted by most people, it means that the changes occur in a language There are some ways to create or modify words. Some of them are compounding, clipping, backformation, acronym, affixation, and blending. Those forms hold the responsibility of the enrichment of vocabulary of a language. One of new words are the brand names. The study focuses on the morphological processes of the brand names found in Readers Digest magazine February 2014 . The brand names refer to the name of products or trademarks created by companies. For example, the words Samsung, Honda and Xerox. The brand names are usually used in cases where industry requires a new and attractive name for a product O’Grady and de Guzman, 1997: 159. The aim to coin a word is to help to differentiate, attract and personify a brand. Other purpose is to make the product become unique and memorable. The study of the form of word formation of the brand names is interesting to study because many people often use these names in daily life. Some brand names are created through certain process of word creations or formations. For example, Blackberry is created from a compounding process. One of aims of this research is to analyze the word creation process of those names found in the magazine and to categorize words based on their morphological processes. Noun itself has two classes, countable and uncountable Quirk et. al, 1980: 76. Countable noun is a noun which we can count. There are many examples on this category, such as pen, book, table, ladder and chair. Uncountable nouns are something that we cannot divide into separate elements, for example substances, concept, and idea. We cannot count milk but we can count bottles of milk or liters of milk. One aim of this research is to find out whether the data that are found are categorized as a countable or uncountable noun since many people use these names in the conversation and they are not enlisted in the dictionaries that makes people confused to categorize those names whether they are countable or not. There are some brand names which are modified to the non-standard English words. Because of the modification, the pronunciation of words may be changed. For example, Orbitz, an international travel agency, which comes from the word orbits. Dictionary.com states that Orbits is pronounced ˈɔrbɪts, meanwhile Orbitz is pronounced ˈɔrbɪtz. There are also cases of pronunciation changes of stems because of the attachment of a morpheme morphemes. For example, the word close kloʊz is attached with suffix -ure, the consonant z is replaced by the consonant ʒ. It is then pronounced ˈkloʊ.ʒɚr Hornby, 2000: 212. Based on the example above, the writer takes interest about the changes of pronunciation of brand names because of the word creation process. In some cases, there are brand names that are intentionally produced and they bring particular meanings. For instance, the Kleenex, a tissue brand, comes from existing word, clean. Fromkin, et. al, 2000: 79. This creates the analogy in the meaning, that Kleenex is used for cleaning. Based on the explanation above, the writer takes interest on the meaning of the brand names. The writer is interested in using the magazine as the field to collect the data because the magazine uses simple words and sentences that many people can understand. Other reason is because the magazine always provides new words and terms. This topic is worth studying since it can identify the forms of brand names, analyze the change of pronunciation in the brand names and analyze the meaning of the brand names.

B. Problem Formulation