Morpheme and Word English Word Formation

the example before, but also in thousands of other words. Usually morphemes are used again and again to form different words. 32 The linguists have divided morpheme into two basic parts, free morpheme and bound morpheme. A morpheme which can also stand as a word is called a free morpheme. 33 Some morphemes can occur only if attached to some other morpheme. Such morphemes are called bound morphemes. 34 Bound morpheme unable to function as a free-standing words, it cannot stand alone. There is also a book which has two types of morphemes they are roots and affixes. 1 Roots Any sound identified as a word by a speaker has at least one root. Roots are the center of word-derivational processes. They carry the basic meaning from which the rest of the sense of the word can be derived. 35 Morpheme such as fair is root; its meaning carry over into unfair. Root like fair also happens to be free form with identifiable word-class properties or called free root morphemes the one that are also independent words; the one that cannot stand alone as words are called bound root morphemes. 36 2 Affixes All morphemes which are not roots are affixes. Mainly affixes have the effect of slightly modifying the meaning of the base – a base is a root or a root plus an affix, or more than one root with or without affixes – to which more 32 Francis Katamba, loc.cit. 33 Andrew Radford et. al., op.cit.,p. 140 34 Ingo Plag, op.cit., p. 13 35 Donka Minkova Robert Stockwell, English Words History and Structure, Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 69 36 Ibid affixes be attached. 37 In English, affixes which attached at the end of the base called suffixes, or at the front of the base called prefixes. 38 The examples of prefixes are re +turn means ‗turn back‘, or un+filled means ‗not filled‘, and the examples of suffixes act+or means ‗person who acts‘, and another example child+ish means ‗like a child‘. Affixes have two quite different functions. The first is derivational affixes and the second is inflectional affixes. Derivational affixes are to participate in the formation of new words, to change the word-class, the part of speech. 39 Inflectional affixes do not participate in word-formation at all. Here are the examples of derivational and inflectional affixes: Figure 2.1 Derivational and Inflectional Affixes 40 37 Ibid, p. 71 38 Ibid, p. 72 39 Ibid, p. 71 40 Ibid, p. 73 Affixes Derivational Prefixes an- mis- trans- un- Suffixes -ity -less -ment -ous Inflectional -s -ed -er -ing For example of a word in derivational affixes such as treat+ment which have changed the word classes by added the suffix –ment from treat Vverb into treatment Nnoun, and for inflectional affixes such as play+ed which describe the tense without change the word class. The next discussion is about word. As we can see in the beginning paragraph of this subtopic, word is the main thing in this discussion. As we all think that words are a basic unit of language and also the important one. We cannot imagine how a language without words. We all know thousands of word that we always use while speaking or making interaction with others. But people sometimes hard to describe the meaning of the term word. Leonard Bloomfield, one of the greatest linguists of the twentieth century, in 1926 has stated that ‗a minimum free form is a word‘. 41 By this he meant that the word is the smallest meaningful linguistic unit that can be used on its own. It is a form that cannot be divided into any smaller units that can be used independently to convey meaning. 42 As the definition above, however, it seems that Bloomfield‘s statement have been disputed by the structuralists with the term morpheme. Therefore, the linguists try to fix the definition of the term word by explaining it into several types of word to avoid the ambiguity. First, a word-form i.e. a particular physical manifestation of one or more lexemes in speech or writing; second, a vocabulary 41 Francis Katamba, op.cit., p. 6 42 Ibid item i.e. lexeme; third, a unit of grammatical structure that has certain morphological and syntactic properties. 43 We can also simply conclude the definition of word from the previous subtopic ‗Morpheme‘ that word can build by adding a root and affixes, or only a root, or twothree roots which will be a one word with meaning or new meaning with grammatical function or word class. That also can be said words are a fundamental unit out of which phrases and sentences are composed. 44 For example, help consist of one root. Then, helpful consist of two roots help as the free root morpheme and –ful is the bound root morpheme or suffix. Another example is the word helpfulness which consist of three roots help, -ful, and –ness. Help as the free root morpheme or free morpheme, -ful and –ness as the bound root morphemebound morphemesuffix. It is sometimes not easy to decide whether a given string of sounds or letters should be regarded as a word or not. To help us recognize what the term word is, also to avoid the ambiguity of the meaning of words, Ingo Plag 2002 have given a summary the properties of words. First, words are the syntactic atoms, the smallest elements in a sentence. Second, words usually have one main stress. Spoken in isolation, every word can have only one main stress. 45 The main stressed syllable is the syllable which is the most prominent one in a word. Prominence of a syllable is a function of loudness, pitch and duration, with 43 Ibid, p. 17 44 Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, op.cit. 2002a, p. 146 45 Ingo Plag, op.cit., p. 6 stressed syllables being pronounced louder, with higher pitch, or with longer duration than the neighboring syllables. 46 Third, words are usually indivisible units no intervening material possible. If some modificational element is added to a word, it must be done at the edges, but never inside the word. For example, plural ending –s in girls, or negative elements such as un- in uncommon or endings that create verbs out of adjectives such as -ize in colonialize never occur inside the word they modify, but are added either before or after the word. However, there are some cases in which word integrity is violated. For example, the plural of son-in-law is not son-in-laws but sons-in-law. 47 The last, words are entities having a part of speech specification. Words belong to certain syntactic classes nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, etc which are called part of speech, word classes, or syntactic categories. 48 The position in which a given word may occur in a sentence is determined by the syntactic rules of a language. These rules make reference to words and the class they belong to. 49 We can therefore test whether something is a word by checking whether it belongs to such a word class.

2. Types of English Word Formation

There is broad, but not complete, agreement as to how the field of word formation should be divided up. The linguists have divided word formation into five until six kinds of word formation, but Donka Minkova and Robert Stockwell 46 Ibid, p. 6-7 47 Ibid, p. 7 48 Ibid, p. 8-9 49 Ibid, p. 9 have stated more complete kinds of word formation. There are at least eight word formations which have divided by them. They also categorize the word formation into two groups: regular word formation and new word creation. There are two kinds of regular word formation based on Minkova and Stockwell, they are derivation and compounding. But the writer also adds inflection into this group. Another group has six kinds of word formation which are creation de novo, blending, clipping, back-formation, abbreviations: acronyms and initialisms , and eponyms.

a. Inflection and Derivation

Bloomfield 19331935 as quoted by Malmkjaer, referred to inflection as the outer layer of the morphology of word forms, and derivation as the inner layer. 50 In other words, inflection is added when all derivational and compositional processes are already complete. 51 For the clear example of that explanation is the plural form of motorbike is motorbikes , not motorsbike. Aronoff 1976 and Corbin 1987 explicitly omit inflectional morphology from consideration, so they do not address the issue of whether any or all inflected word-forms should be lexically listed. 52 But Halle 1973 saw no reason not to list inflected forms as well as derivatives; the only difference between them was that inflected forms were grouped in the 50 Kirsten Malmkajaer, op.cit., p. 358 51 Ibid 52 Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, op.cit. 2002b, p. 44 dictionary into paradigms. 53 The notion of inflection rests on the more basic notion of lexeme. A lexeme is a unit of linguistic analysis which belongs to a particular syntactic category, has a particular meaning or grammatical function and ordinarily enters into syntactic combinations as a single word; in many instances, the identity of the word which realizes a particular lexeme varies systematically according to the syntactic context in which it is to be used. 54 Since inflected forms are just variants of one and the same word, inflecting a word should not cause it to change its category. 55 Typically inflection contributes a morpheme that is required in order to ensure that the word has a form that is appropriate for the grammatical context in which it is used. 56 English is a language which has less number of inflections. Fromkin have described eight inflection affixes in English with the examples: -s third-person singular present She wait-s at home. -ed past tense She wait-ed at home. -ing progressive She is eat-ing the donut. -en past participle Mary has eat-en the donuts. -s plural She ate the donut-s. - ‘s possessive Disa’s hair is short 53 Ibid 54 Andrew Spencer Arnold M. Zwicky, loc.cit. 55 Andrew Spencer, Morphological Theory, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1991, p. 9 56 Francis Katamba, op.cit., p. 40