Coinage and eponyms Borrowing

19 terminology. One example of acronyms is radar. Not many people know that it is actually not an independent word. Radar stands for radio detection and ranging. Other examples of acronyms are computer terms LAN, which stands for Local Area Network and DOS, which stands for Disc Operating System. The use of acronyms which is more widely spread will make people get accustomed to the acronyms and ignore what they stand for. Therefore the researcher is also interested in the morphological process. Referring to the fact that English speakers admit the new product as independent, the researcher is interested in whether affixation can occur in such words. It is quite interesting to analyse whether acronyms can be affixed and transformed into other syntactic categories or they are stuck and any change impossibly occurs in acronyms.

f. Coinage and eponyms

As stated by O’Grady et al. 2010, coinage is a word created from scratch. Also known as word manufacture, this phenomenon is especially common in the case of product names, e.g. kodak, dacron, and teflon. A similar process called eponyms uses people’s name to describe scale or events related to the people’s role, e.g. boycott, watt, and richter. The researcher assumes that the products of coinage and eponyms belong to certain parts of speech. Whether it is possible to derive the words is something the researcher wants to look for. The words diskodak, endacron, and teflonise are not very familiar to the researcher. 20

g. Borrowing

According to Campbell 2004, borrowing is a process in one language to take words from another language and make them parts of its own vocabulary. The product of borrowing is usually called a loanword. All English verbs do not always originate from one language. English verbs could be derived, in a whole word or only a part, from many donor languages. For example, the English verb to surface was derived from French sur and English face McKean, 2005, p. 1700 According to Radford, Atkinson, Britain, Clahsen, and Spencer 1999, new and unfamiliar concepts – new technology, new plants, new animals, and even, new and unfamiliar foods motivate people to develop words. Besides, another reason of using borrowing is prestige. Certain culture will be related to specific terms that other languages do not have. Frequently the certain cultures are prestigious activities, e.g. soup, restaurant French. Campbell 2004 also affirms it by his statement that “languages borrow words from other languages primarily because of need and prestige.” A borrowed word is often gradually changed so that it fits the phonological and morphological structure of the borrowing language or dialect. These borrowings are very often assimilated to the phonological and morphological structure of the new host language Radford et al., 1999, p. 256. Borrowing words can be combined with English affixes. Radford et al. 1999 21 give an example that the plural form of pizza in Italian is pizze. However, English applies its own plural morpheme to the borrowed word, hence pizzas p. 255.

h. Morphophonology