-er comparative
Disa has short-er hair than
Karin. -est
superlative Disa has the short-est hair.
57
As can be seen from the inflection affixes above, if we have a third person subject, a present tense verb agreeing with it must take the
–s ending; anything else is forbidden.
58
The application of an inflectional process is automatically triggered if the right syntactic conditions obtain.
Inflection cannot cause a word to change its syntactic category, but derivation does. Derivation is the reverse of the coin of inflection. Same as
inflection, it consists of affixes. Derivational affixes function not to express morphosyntactic categories but to make new words.
59
Derivation is motivated by the desire to create new lexical items using pre-existing
morphemes and words.
60
It is possible to create a new lexical item by recycling pre-existing material. This is derivation; it takes one of three
forms: affixation, conversion, or compounding. Derivation by affixation consists in making up new words by adding
affixes, or endings, to more basic forms of the word.
61
These derivations require no special definition or explanation because they follow regular
rules. For example, the word active in Chambers Dictionary have derived
57
Victoria Fromkin et. al., op.cit., p. 358
58
Francis Katamba, loc.cit.
59
Kirsten Malmkjær, op.cit., p. 359
60
Francis Katamba, op.cit., p. 41
61
Donka Minkova Robert Stockwell, loc.cit.
words: activate, activation, actively, activeness, activity, activism, activist. But sometimes different dictionaries make different decisions.
Derivation enables us to add new lexical items to the open word- classes of noun, adjective, verb, and adverb.
62
Consider the following pairs of sentences in which the same words appear in different functions such as a
noun but also an adjectiveadverbverb, for example:
It‘s no trouble at all. Don‘t trouble yourself.
In these cases the verb or adjective and noun look alike and sound alike. There is reason to believe that the verb is derived from the noun, it derived
without affixation. They are said to be derived by a process of conversion
– the noun is converted into a verb.
63
Conversion that have been around long enough are normally shown with a single entry in many dictionaries, with
the identification n., a., v., meaning that the form occurs as noun, adjective, and verb all three.
64
b. Compounding
Derivation is not the only way of forming new words, of course. In many languages, compounding is the most frequently used way of making
new words. Its defining property is that it consists of the combination of
62
Francis Katamba, loc.cit.
63
Donka Minkova Robert Stockwell, op.cit., p. 8
64
Ibid, p. 9
lexemes into larger words.
65
In simple cases, compounding consist of the combination of two words, in which one word modifies the meaning of the
other, the head. This is a very large, and therefore very important, source of new words. To produce a new word by compounding, what we do is put
together two words in a perfectly transparent way, and then various changes take place which may cause the compound to lose its transparency.
66
When a new compound is formed, we already know the meaning of its constituents, and the only task we face is to find out about the semantic
relation between the two parts. The right constituent of a compound is normally the head. The left constituent of such compounds functions to
modify the meaning of the head constituent.
67
The head is the element that serves to determine both the part of speech and the semantic kind denoted
by the compound as a whole.
68
For example, greenhouse is a noun, as house is, and skyblue is adjective, as blue is. Similarly, the second base determines
the semantic category of the compound – in the former case a type of
building, and in the latter a color. Minkova and Stockwell distinguish compounding into two types,
syntactic compounds and lexical compounds. Syntactic compound is
compounds are formed by regular rules of grammar, like sentences, and they
65
Geert Booij, The Grammar of Words, United States: Oxford University Press In. New York, 2005, p. 75
66
Donka Minkova Robert Stockwell, loc.cit.
67
Geert Booij, op.cit., p. 76
68
Rochelle Lieber, op.cit., p. 46
are no, therefore, listed in a dictionary.
69
For example, birthplace a place of birth, washing machine we wash things with the machine, sunrise the
rising of the sun. Another type of compound is lexical compound which if we do not know the meaning already has to be looked up in a dictionary
like a totally novel word.
70
For example, crybaby is not refers to babies that cry but to people who act like babies that cry. Similarly, girl friend is not
just a girl who is a friend, nor is boy friend just a boy who is a friend. These compounds actually can mean what they appear to mean on the surface, but
usually they mean more than that.
c. Creation
de novo
Though one might think it an easy matter to create a new word without basing it on some pre-existing word or part of a word for some
new idea or new artifact, such creations are rare. The invention of completely new morphs is rare in comparison to the kinds of word
formation described above inflection, derivation, and compounding. Word formation processes are variably productive but constantly in operation to
expand the lexicon as new meanings emerge, social and technological change takes place, and individuals create new forms.
71
69
Donka Minkova Robert Stockwell, op.cit., p. 10
70
Ibid
71
Kirsten Malmkjær, op.cit., p. 361
