Sign
language are rich in morphology. Like spoken languages, they have root and
morphemes, free and bound morphemes, lexical and grammatical morphemes,
derivational and inflectional morphemes, and morphological rules for their
combination to form signed words.
Figure
3.1 illustrates the derivational process in one such language, American Sign
Language (ASL), equivalent to the formation of the nouns comparison and
measuring from the verbs compare and measure in English. Everything about the
root morpheme remains the same except for the movement of the hands.
Inflection
of sign roots also occurs in sign languages, which characteristically modify
the movement of the hands and the spatial contours of the area near the body in
which the signs are articulated.
Figure
3.1 Derivationally related sign in ASL. (Source: Howard Poizner, Edward S. Kuma
and Ursula Bellugi, 1987, What the Hands Reveal about the brain, Cambridge MA:
MIT Press.) Copyright 1987 Massachusetts Institute of Morphology. Reproduced by
permission of MIT Press.
WORD
COINAGE
We
have seen that new word may be added to the vocabulary of a language by
derivational processes. New words may also enter a language in a variety of
other ways. Some are created outright to fit some purpose. The advertising industry
has added many new words to English, such as Kodak, nylon, vegemite, and
Dacron. Specific brand names such as as Xerox, Kleenex, Hoover, duco, Ajax and
Vaseline are now sometimes used as the generic name for different brands of
these types of products, Notice that some of these words created from exiting
words: Kleenex from the word clean, for example.
The
qwerty keyboard is so-called because of the particular configuration of the
top-row alphabetic keys for the left hand. In the science of speech processing,
the new words cepstrum and cepstral were purposely formed by reordering the
letters of spectrum and spectral.
Greek
roots borrowed by English have also provided a means for coining new words.
Thermos, ‘hot’, plus metron, ‘measure’, give us thermometer. From akros,
‘topmost’, and phobia, ‘fear’, we get acrophobia, ‘dread of heights’.
Latin,
like Greek, has also provided prefixes and suffixes that are used productively
with both native and non-native roots. The prefix ex- comes from Latin :
Ex-husband,
ex-wife, ex-sister-in-law
The
suffix –able/-ible that was discussed earlier is also Latin, borrowed via
French, and can be attached to almost any English verb, as we noted, and as
further illustrated in:
Writable,
readable, answerable, moveable.
COMPOUNDS
The
Houynhnms have no Word in their Language to express any thing that is evil,
except what they borrow from the Deformities or ill Qualities of the Yahoos.
Thus they denote the Folly of a Servant, an Omission of a Child, a Stone that
cuts their feet, a Continuance of foul or unseasonable Weather, and the like,
by adding to each the Epithet of Yahoo. For instance, Hnhm Yahoo, Whnaholm
Yahoo, Ynlhmnawihlma Yahoo, and an ill contrived House, Ynholmhnmrohlnw Yahoo.
(Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels)
New
words may be formed by stringing together other word to create compound words.
There is almost no limit to the kinds of combinations that occur in English, as
the following list of compounds shows:
Adjective
: bittersweet, headstrong, carryall. Noun : poorhouse, rainbow, pickpocket.
Verb : highborn, spoonfeed, sleepwalk.
Adjective
: bittersweet, poorhouse, highborn. Noun : headstrong, rainbow, spoonfeed. Verb
: carryall, pickpocket, sleepwalk.
When
the two words are in the same category, the compond will be in this category :
noun + noun + girlfriend, fighter-bomber, paperclip, cranedriver, landlord,
milkman : adjective + adjective icy-cold, red-hot, and worldly-wise. In many
cases, when the two words fall into different categories, the class of the
second or final word will be the grammatical category of the compound : noun +
adjective – headstrong, watertight, lifelong; verb + noun –pickpocket,
pinchpenny, daredevil, cutthroath. On the other hand, compounds formed with a
preposition are in the category of the non-prepositional part of the compound :
overtake, hanger-on, undertake, afterbirth, downfall, uplift.
Though
two-word compounds are the most common in English, it would be difficult to
state an upper limit: Consider three-time loser, four-dimentional space-time,
sergeant-at-arms, mother-of-pearl, man about town, master of ceremonies,
bottom-of-the-harbour scheme, and daughter-in-law.
Spelling
does not tell us what sequence of words constitutes a compound; whether a
compund is spelled with a sppace between the two words, with a hypen, or with
no separation at all is idiosyncratic, as shown, for example, in blackbird,
silver-eyes, and smoke-screen.
MEANING
OF COMPOUNDS
One
of the interesting thing a compound is that you cannot always tell by the words
it contains what the compund means. The meaning of a compound is not always the
sum of the meanings of its parts; a blackboard may be green or white.
Everyone
who wears a red coat is not a Redcoat, either. The difference between the
sentences She has a red coat in her wardrobe and She has a Readcoat in her
wardrobe could be highly significant under certain circumstances.
Other
similarly constructed compounds show that, underlying the juxtapposition of
words, different gramatical relation are expressed. A jumping bean is a bean
that jumps, a falling star is a ‘star’ that falls, and a magnifying glass is a
glass that magnifies; but a looking glass is not a glass that looks, nor is an
eating apple an apple that eats, and laughing gas does not laugh.
In
all these examples, the meaning of each compound includes, at least to some
extent, the meanings of the individual parts. However, the ere are other
compounds that do not seems to the relate to the meaning of the individual
parts at all. A highbrow does not necessarily have a high brow, nor does a
bigwig have a big wig, nor does an egghead have an egg-shaped head.
As
we pointed out earlier in the discussion of the prefix un-, the meaning of many
compounds must be learned as if they were individual simple words. Some of the
meanings may be figured out, but not all. If you had never heard the word
hunchback, it might be possible to infer the meaning; but if you had never
heard the word flatfoot, it is doubtful you would know it means ‘detective’ or
‘policeman’ even though the origin of the word, once you know the meaning, can
be figured out.
Therefore,
the words as well as morphemes must be part of our mental grammars. The
morphological rules also are in the grammatical, revealing the relations
between words and providing the means for forming new words. Dr Scuss uses the
rules of compounding when he explains that ‘when tweetle beetles battle with
paddles in a puddle, they call it a tweetle beetle puddle paddle battle’(5).
The
pronunciation of compounds differs from the way we pronounce the sequence of
two words forming a noun phrase. In a compound, the first word is usually
stressed (pronounced somewhat louder and higer in pitch) and in a noun phrase
the second word is stressed. Thus we stress black in blackbird but bird in
black bird. Other languages have rules for conjoining words to form compounds,
as seen by French cure-dent, ‘toothpick’; Spanish tocadiscos, ‘record player’.
In the Native American language Papago the word meaning ‘thing’ is haʔichu,
and it combines with doakam, ‘living creatures’, to form the compound haʔichu
doakam, ‘animal life’.
In Akan, by combining the word meaning ‘son’ or
‘child’, ɔba, with the word meaning ‘chief’, ɔhene, one derives the compoun ɔheneba,
meaning, ‘prince’. By adding the word ‘house’, ofi, to ɔhene, the word meaning
‘palace’, ahemfi, is derived. The other changes that occur in the Akan
compounds are due to phonological and morphological rules in the language.
In Thai, the word ‘cat’ is mEEw, the word for ‘watch’
(in the sense of’ to watch over’) is faw, and the word for ‘house’ is baan. The
word for ‘watch cat’ (like a watchdog) is the compound mEEwfawbaan—literally,
‘catwatchhouse’. Compounding is therefore a common and frequent process for
enlarging the vocabulary of all languages.
(5) Dr Seuss, 1965, For in Sox, New York: Random
House, p.51.
ACRONYMS
Acronyms are words derived from the initials of
several words. Such words are pronounced as the spelling indicates : AISO from
Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. Radar from ‘radio detecting and
ranging’, laser from ‘light amplification by simulated emission of radiation’,
and scuba from ‘self-contained underwater breathing appartus’, show the
creative efforts of word cointers, as does snafu, which was coined by soliders
in Word War II and is rendered in polite circles as ‘situation normal, all
fouled up’. A new acronym which has recently been added to the English language
and which is sadly used very frequently these days is AIDS, from the initials
of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. When the string of letters is not
easily pronounced as a word, the acronym is produced by sounding out each
letter, as in AFL for Australian Football League; these forms are commonly
called initialisms.
Acronyms and initialisms are being added to the
vocabulary daily with the proliferation of computers and widespread use of the
internet, including RAM (random access memory), FAQ (frequently asked
questions), WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) and POP (post office
protocol) among many more.
BLENDS
Two word may be combined to produce blends. Blends are
similar to compounds but part of the words that are combined are deleted and so
they are ‘less than’ compounds. Smog, from smoke + fog ; motel, from motor +
hotel ; and breath-alyser, from breath + analyser, are examples of blends that have attained full lexical status in
English. Brunch, from breakfast and lunch, is a blend that has found its place
in the language, as has Lewis Carroll’s chortle, from chuckle + snort. Carroll
is famous for bot coining and the blanding of words. In Through the
Looking-Glass he describes the ‘meanings’ of the made-up words in his nonsense
poem ‘Jabberwocky’ (see p. 177) as follows :
‘Brillig’ means four o’clock in the afternoon—the time
when you begin broiling things for dinner ... ‘Slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy’
... You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one
word ... ‘Toves’ are something like badgers—they’re something like lizards—and
they’re something like corkscrews ... To ‘gyre’ is to go gimlet. And ‘the wabe’
is the ggrass-plot round a sun-dial ... It’s called ‘wabe’ ... because it goes
a long way before it and a long way behind it ... ‘Mimsy’ is ‘flimsy’ and
miserable’ (there’s another portmanteau ... for you).
Carroll’s ‘portmanteaus’ are what we have called
blends, and such words can become part of the regular lexicon.
BACK-FORMATIONS
Ignorance sometimes can be creative. A new word may
enter the language because of an incorrect morphological analysis. For example,
peddle was derived from peddler on the mistaken assumption that the er wa the
‘agentive’ suffix. Such words are called back-formations. The verbs hawk,
stoke, swindle, and edit all came into the language as back-formations—of
hawker, stoker, swindler, and editoe, Pea was derived from singular word,
pease, by speakers who thought pease was a plural. Language purists sometimes
rails against back-formations and cite enthuse (from enthusiasm) and ept (from
inept) as examples of language corruption; but language cannot be corrupt
(although the speakers who use it may be), and many words have entered the
language this ways.
Some word coinage, similar to the kind of wrong
morphemic analysis that produces back-formations, is deliberate. The word
bikini is from the Bikini atoll of the marshall Islands. Because the first
syllable bi- in other words, suc as bipolar, means ‘two’, some clever person
called a topless swimsuit a monokini. Historically, a number of new words have
entered the English lexicon in this way. Based on analogy with such pairs as
act/action, exempt/exemption, revise/revision, new words resurrect, pre-empt,
and televise were formed from the exiting words resurrection, pre-emption, and
television.
ABBREVIATIONS
Abbreviations of longer words or phrases also may
become ‘lexicalised’; nark for narcotics agent, tec (or dick) for detective;
telly for television, prof for professor, piano for pianoforte, and gym for
gymnasium are only a few examples of such ‘short forms’ that are now used as
whole words. Other examples are ad, bike, maths, phone, bus, and van. This
process is sometimes called clipping.
WORD FROM NAMES
The creativity of word coinage (or vocabulary
addition) is also revealed by the number of eponyms in the English vocabulary,
word that derive from proper names of individuals or places.
Willard R. Espy has complied a book of 1500 such
words(6). They include some old favourites :
sandwich : Named for the fourth Earl of Sandwich, who
put his food between two slices of bread so that he could eat while he gambled.
robot : After the mechanical creatures in the Czech
writer Karel Caplek’s play R.U.R., the creature with a huge appetite created by
Rabelais.
jumbo : After a large US circus elephant. (‘Jumbo
olives’ need not be as big as an elephant, however.)
Espy admits to ignorance of the Susan, an unknown
servant, from whom we derived the compound lazy susan. He does point out,
however, that denim was named for the material used for overalls and carpeting,
which originally was imported ‘de Nimes’) in France, and argyle from the kind
of socks worn by the chiefs of Argyll of the Campbell clan an Scotland.
(6)
W.R Espy, 1978, O Thou Improper, Thou Uncommon Noun: an Etymology of Words That
Once Were Nmes, New York Clarkson N. Potter.
