Word Formation

In linguistics, word formation is the creation of a new word. Word formation is sometimes contrasted with semantic change, which is a change in a single word's meaning. The boundary between word formation and semantic change can be difficult to define: a new use of an old word can be seen as a new word derived from an old one and identical to it in form (see conversion). Word formation can also be contrasted with the formation of idiomatic expressions, although words can be formed from multi-word phrases (see compound and incorporation).

Morphological word formation

There are two subcategories; words created by derivation, words created by compounding, and words created by conversion.

Derivation

Derivation is the process of forming new words from existing ones by adding affixes to them, like shame + less + ness → shamelessness. In cases in which there is a one-to-one correspondence between affixes and syntactical categories, this is known as agglutination, as seen in agglutinative languages.

Conversion

This also known as zero-affixation, In case the class of the word is change from one word class to the other without any change in the form of the word. for instance, "water" as in " give me aglass of water and "water" as in "Selorm will have to water the garden this evening".

Blending

A blend is a word formed by joining parts of two or more older words. An example is smog, which comes from smoke and fog, or brunch, which comes from 'breakfast' and 'lunch'.

Sub-categories of blending are:

• Acronym (a word formed from initial letters of the words in a phrase, like English laser from light amplified by stimulated emission of radiation)
• Clipping (morphology) (taking part of an existing word, like forming ad from advertisement)

Taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_formation

Five signals of syntactic structure

1. word-order—the linear of time sequence in which word appear in an utterance, or the positions of words relative to each other in time.
2. prosody—musical pattern of stress, pitch and juncture in which the words an utterance are spoken, or combination or patterns of pitch, stress and juncture.
3. function word—words with little or no lexical meaning which are used in combining other words into larger structures.
Words largely divide of lexical meaning that used to indicate various functional relationship among the lexical words of an utterance (doesn’t have meaning in grammatical but in lexical), e.g. Does she go there?
There are nine types of function word:
• noun determiner; all, twice, one, third, a, an, this, that, these, those, etc.
• auxiliaries; verb, is, am, are, has, have, do, does, did, will
• qualifiers/ compare; fairly, merely, very, pretty, quite, etc.
• preposition; in, on, at, of, over, etc
• conjunction/ coordinator; and, but, nor…or, not only…but also, etc
• interrogator; who, which, what, etc
• includes; when, like, that, whatever, etc
• sentence linkers; consequently, accordingly, however, even though, as a result
• miscellaneous/ interjection
There are two kinds of meaning:
a) lexical meaning : the meaning of morphemes and words considered in isolation (dictionary meaning).
b) Grammatical/structural meaning: the meaning of the way words are combined in larger structures (sentence)
* the word “am” does not has meaning if stand alone, but has meaning if we combine with other words or we put in a sentence.
e.g. I am being interviewed
4. inflection—suffixes, always final, which adapt words to fit varying of structural positions without changing their lexical meaning or part of speech.
Morphemic changes without changing the lexical meaning, e.g. – ed, plural (s/es)
• work — worked (change in the form of word to show a past tense)
• book — books ( to show a plural)

5. derivational contrast—derivational prefixes and suffixes which change words from one part of speech to another. In short, addition of the prefixes or suffixes that change the world class.
e.g. manage—management—manager
lead—leader—leadership
test—pre-test

About Phonology

Phonology is the study the smallest units of speech sounds that make a difference in meaning.
Morphology is the study of meaningful form or the smallest meaningful units of language.
There are two basic divisions in morphology :
(1) lexical or derivational morphology; studies word formation which produces new words such as nation — national.
(2) inflectional morphology; studies word formation related to grammatical affixes: prular, past tense and possession.
A word is a unit which is a constituent at the phrase level and above.
A morphene is the smallest unit of language that has meaning. For example Cats has to morphemes- cat (singular) and cats (plural). Uneventful has three morphemes. event, eventful, and uneventful. Each morpheme changes the meaning of the word.
Morphemes are defined as the smallest meaningful elements in a language.
There are two types of morpheme. They are free morpheme and bound morpheme.
Free morpheme is the one that can stand alone such as: cat, dog, horse, car, bike, bus etc.
Bound morpheme is the one that cannot stand alone such as in affixation namely prefix, infix and suffix. Prefixes occur before the base, e.g. (un)tidy, pre(school), (dis)like. Suffixes occur in the middle of the base, e.g. kind(ness), angri(ly), judge(ment), teach(er).
Inflection is modification of words in accordance with their forms.
English verbs consists of five forms, namely: infinitive (see), the third singular present (sees), past form (saw), past participle (seen) and gerund or present participle (seeing).
eg.: I love a peaceful life. “love” is a verb.
Love is blue. “love” is a noun.
Do you like love potion? “love” is an adjective.
Analysis of inflections.
We must determine (1) the patterns of selection, (2) the arrangement of inflected elements and (3) any modifications involved.
Selection means parts of speech. These are classified by word patterns of inflection.
e.g: The verb “live” (regular) and “give” (irregular).
“live” is inflected by means of suffix: lives [z], lived [d], living [iŋ] while “give” is inflected by means of patterns underlying forms, namely irregular verbs. give, gives, gave, given, giving.
Derivation is the process of adding derivational morphemes, which create a new word from existing words, sometimes by simply changing grammatical category (for example, changing a noun to a verb).
Paradigmatic
A dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for the thing of which the value is to be determined
Syntagmatic
Similar things that can be compared with the thing of which the value is to be determined
PARADIGMATIC AND SYNTAGMATIC. Contrasting terms in (structural) LINGUISTICS. Every item of language has a paradigmatic relationship with every other item which can be substituted for it (such as cat with dog), and a syntagmatic relationship with items which occur within the same construction (for example, in The cat sat on the mat, cat with the and sat on the mat). The relationships are like axes, as shown in the accompanying diagram.
syntagmatic
The cat sat on the mat.
paradigmatic His dog slept under that table.
Our parrot perched in its cage.
Paradigmatic contrasts at the level of sounds allow one to identify the phonemes (minimal distinctive sound units) of a language: for example, bat, fat, mat contrast with one another on the basis of a single sound, as do bat, bet, bit, and bat, bap, ban. Stylistically, rhyme is due to the paradigmatic substitution of sounds at the beginning of syllables or words, as in: ‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night.’

On the lexical level, paradigmatic contrasts indicate which words are likely to belong to the same word class (part of speech): cat, dog, parrot in the diagram are all nouns, sat, slept, perched are all verbs. Syntagmatic relations between words enable one to build up a picture of co-occurrence restrictions within SYNTAX, for example, the verbs hit, kick have to be followed by a noun (Paul hit the wall, not *Paul hit), but sleep, doze do not normally do so (Peter slept, not *Peter slept the bed). On the semantic level, paradigmatic substitutions allow items from a semantic set to be grouped together, for example Angela came on Tuesday (Wednesday, Thursday, etc.), while syntagmatic associations indicate compatible combinations: rotten apple, the duck quacked, rather than *curdled apple, *the duck squeaked.

The social interaction source

Another proposal involving natural sounds has been called the “yo-he-ho” theory. The idea is that the sounds of a person involved in physical effort could be the source of our language,  especially  when  that physical  effort involved  several  people and the inter- action had to be coordinated. So, a group of early humans might develop a set of hums, grunts, groans and curses that were used when they were lifting and carrying large bits of trees or lifeless hairy mammoths.

The appeal of this proposal is that it places the development of human language in a social context.  Early people must  have lived in groups,  if only because  larger groups offered better protection from attack. Groups are necessarily social organizations and, to maintain those organizations, some form of communication is required, even if it is just grunts  and curses.  So, human sounds, however they were produced, must have had some principled  use within  the life and social interaction of early human groups. This is an important idea that may relate to the uses of humanly produced sounds. It does not, however, answer  our question regarding the origins of the sounds  produced.

Apes and other primates live in social groups and use grunts and social calls, but they do not seem to have developed the capacity for speech.

Taken from The Study of Language (George Yule).

Linguistic

Derivation without affixation

Example:
to call -> a call

This post is all about language.