Word Formation

For the first part of this section(morphemes, affixation and compounds) I read “An Introduction to English Morphology: Words and their Structure, Andrew Carstairs – McCarthy, Edinburgh University Press” Chapters 3 and 6. I also used the lesson plan on Word formation available on the Cambridge website

https://www.teachers.cambridgeesol.org/ts/teachingresources

 

Morphemes: the smallest possible units of meaning in a language. They must be identifiable from one word to the other  and contribute in some way to the meaning of the whole word. For example helpfulness can be divided into  these three morphemes: help  ful   ness, all three parts are meaningful  and at the same time contribute to the meaning of  helpfulness.

 

Out of the three morphemes help ful ness, help is the morpheme that provides the most precise and concrete meaning to the word helpfulness.  The morpheme help can also stand alone. That is why this type of morpheme is called free. The morphemes ful and ness are called bound  because they cannot stand on their own, they have to be “bound”  to other morphemes.

 

Affixation: There are three kinds of affixation in English: prefixes, infixes and suffixes. Prefixes are attached to the beginning of a word, infixes are added in the middle (to the base morpheme) and suffixes are attached to the end of a word. Affixes can have a grammatical function e.g. plural ‘s’ or the past tense ending ‘–ed’. They may also change a word’s lexical set, e.g. happy-happiness, careful-carefully. Often prefixes and suffixes also have particular meanings attached to them e.g. un-/ il-/ ir-/ re- have a negative meaning when attached to an adjective.

Compounds: These are words formed from two or more words, and the meaning of which comes from both words in the compound. Compounds can only be nouns, e.g. bookshelf, evening meal, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, prepositions.

Here are some examples: old- fashioned, good looking, thereupon, whatsoever, dry-clean, underestimate, overcook.

Acronyms: A word formed from the first letters of several words and that is pronounceable as a normal word, e.g. JPEG or radar. Sometimes it is also used to refer to just a string of initials representing the first letter in a group of words but pronounced as letters rather than as a word, e.g. HTML, ESL, ESOL, ASAP.

Spelling rules: These are rules which govern how words are written in English. They help particularly with knowing when to double letters and the spelling of adverbs. They can also guide the spelling of silent letters i.e. letters in a word which do not contribute to a word’s pronunciation, e.g. climb, knife, sign.

This website has some examples  http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/spelling.htm

Abbreviation: A short form of a word or phrase, e.g. in addresses, Rd is an abbreviation of Road

Again, a great source of examples

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/abbreviations.htm

Word families: These are words which all come from the same base word, e.g. direct, direction, director, directing, undirected

learn, learner, learning, learned, unlearned