Background of the Study

1

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the Study

Language is an important part of people’s life. They used it to communicate, to study, to express the ideas in their daily life. It is better for us not only know many things about our language but also other languages such as English. English is a universal language and it has many things to learn especially in linguistic system. According to Akmajian, Demers, and Harnish 1984: 4, phonology the study of the sounds of language and the patterning, morphology the study of words and word building, semantics the study of meaning and reference, and syntax the study of the structure of sentences and phrases are the subfields of linguistic system. The linguistic system which is studied in this thesis is morphology or morphological study. A morphological study is the study of the relation between the meaning and the form of the words. In a morphological study, it has so many processes to analyze the meaning and the form of the words like compound, affixation, reduplication, and so on. Actually, English has three kinds of affixes; they are prefixes, suffixes, and infixes. The writer only focuses on the study of suffix so the writer choose suffix –ion to make specific in this thesis. There is an important component in a morphological study, namely morpheme. Morpheme is a smallest unit of language that carries information about meaning or function. The word builder consists of two morphemes, they are build the meaning of construct and –erindicates as a noun with the meaning ‘one who builds’ O’Grady, Archibald, Aronoff, and Rees-Miller, 2005: 113. As we know, morphemes have two types; they are free and bound morpheme. A morpheme that can be a word by itself is called a free morpheme, whereas a morpheme that must be attached to another element is a bound morpheme. For example, the word boy is a free morpheme because it can be used as a word on its own when the word boy attached by plural –s become boys so the word boys is a bound morpheme O’Grady and Et al, 2005: 113. The writer chooses suffix –ion as the main point to discuss because in English, suffix –ion is a common suffixes which is always used in daily conversation. Besides, suffixes can produce the variation of the word with different part of speech and meaning by adding the word with suffix. Part of speech is very important because the word itself can be placed in the correct position of the sentence structure. On the other hand, some people still do not know yet about nominalization process especially the students of English Department. The writer will give deeper explanation about nominalization by using suffix –ion. It will make people easier to learn about morphological process in a morphological study because from nominalization process we can find the other process like morphophonemic. So, the students of English department should know about nominalization because nominalization is also the part of the morphological process. Nominalization is a process of transformation from an adjective or a verb into a noun. In other words, this study is about identifying and analyzing the verb forms which can be transformed into noun by using suffix –ion, and also analyzing the morphophonemic process in the nominalization.

B. Problem Formulation