Page 310 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics Digvijay Pandya, Lovely Professional University

Notes
Unit 23: Word-Formation: Process and Rules

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
23.1 The Process of Word Formation
23.2 The Inflectional Morphology of English
23.3 Summary
23.4 Key-Words
23.5 Review Questions
23.6 Further Readings

Objectives

After studying this Unit students will be able to:

• Understand the process of word formation
• Discuss the inflectional morphology of English.
Introduction

Morpheme are of sever importance in the formation of words. Morphemes can be both grammatical
and lexical. Examples of free grammatical morpheme could be articles, pronouns, etc. Morpheme
like, plurals, past tenses, are also grammatical morpheme, but they are not free because they
cannot exist independently. It is true that grammatical morphemes have no meaning in themselves
but when they are attached to a lexical morpheme, they modify the meaning of lexical morphemes
and thus produce a new grammatical word. Let us discuss in detail, how morpheme functions in
the formation of words.

23.1 The Process of Word-Formation

In English language we see new words coming into dictionary very frequently. In recent pasts
words like criminalise, and marginalise have been introduced. Such formations of words are
based on fixed rules and not on arbitrary basis. Let us examine these rules of word-formation in
detail.
Simple, Complex, and Compound Words: Words can be cateogorised as simple, complex, and
compound words depending upon the nature of combination of morphemes. If there is just a
realisation of a free morpheme, it can be called as a simple word. A combination of free morpheme
and grammatical or bound morpheme will make up a complex word and a combination of two or
more free morphemes and one or more bound morphemes will make up a compound word. There
are some cases wherein a complex word can be just a combination of two or more bound morphemes.
For examples, word ‘local’. ‘local’ is a combination of loc+al, linguistics consider ‘loc’ as a morpheme,
but there is no independent use of ‘loc’, it must be a realisation of a bound morpheme. Thus a
complex word can be a combination of two or more bound morphemes.
Affixes, Stems, Roots: Morphemes that combine to make a word are also identified as separate
elements. The three categories in which these elements are categorised are affixes, stems and
roots.

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