English Morphology

This article takes a function-to-form approach to word-formation in present-day English and argues that the ecosystem metaphor can help morphologists see competition in word-formation and its resolution in a new light. The analysis first draws correspondences between four lexical functions (transcategorial, transconceptual, evaluative, and compacting) and ten formal operations (prefixation, suffixation, compounding, blending, morphostasis, stress shift, clipping, desuffixation, initialization, and replication) and concludes that there is no across-the-board interoperation competition to encode each function, but rather a fairly complementary distribution of the operations between the four functional subsystems. Each functional subsystem is then reviewed in turn and it is shown that, again, there is no full-scale competition at this level, but rather some fairly pronounced tendencies towards complementariness, and, in one case, also towards combination. The broad division of labor within each subsystem can, remarkably, be accounted for in different terms: the conditioning is primarily semantic (with formal subconsiderations) in the transcategorial and transconceptual subsystems while it is formal in the evaluative and compacting subsystems.

Morphological productivity has become a central issue in present-day English wordformation over the past decade. However, most proposals for assessing productivity have focused on the most productive processes and how to measure them, to the detriment of processes which give rise to fewer items than the ones usually studied in analyses of wordformation productivity. The present paper looks at the major models for productivity measurement and applies them to a BNC-based 5,891-item corpus to test how they account for low productivity. The results obtained highlight significant differences between various productivity counts in an area which, from this point of view, needs further methodological development.

This paper will explore the issue of similar lexical forms (Laufer 1991) as a potential problem in vocabulary acquisition of Serbian EFL learners. Building on previous research (Kocić 2008), we collected data from two groups of undergraduate students at the Faculty of Philology and Arts in  Kragujevac (lower- and upper-intermediate), and attempted to identify the factors that contribute to  synform confusions.

Within the framework introduced by Guierre (1979), this paper challenges the commonly accepted classification of the adjectival suffix -al as a strong suffix through the study of a corpus of pronouncing dictionary data enriched with additional information from other sources such as the Oxford English Dictionary. After a review of the disparities between different analyses and classifications of that suffix in the literature, it is shown that most descriptions previously proposed are problematic. We do find -al in strong endings triggering a direct computation of stress placement, but only in certain specific subclasses. A number of sets ending in -al are highly regular, but -al by itself (i.e. when it is not associated with certain elements preceding it) does not trigger direct computation systematically.

Given that affix knowledge plays a vital role in the development of L1/L2 knowledge, the aim of this paper is to explore Mochizuki and Aizawa’s (2000) notion about the order of affix acquisition in the Serbian EFL context. We will attempt to analyze correlations between the EFL learners’ vocabulary  size and their affix knowledge and postulate the order of affix acquisition.

The role of knowledge on English Morphology for the students of English Language Education (henceforth ELE) cannot be neglected. However, the preliminary observations done by the researcher during the instructional process of English Morphology at the State College for Islamic Studies (STAIN) Kediri Indonesia, for three academic years shows that most of the students still get difficulty in understanding the course content. The researcher, therefore, is of the opinion that the instructional materials used in the classes need to be developed. The adaptation version of Borg & Gall (1983) model of R & D covering preliminary observation, designing preliminary product, expert validation, product revision, field testing or try out, and revision to produce final product is used to develop an instructional material on English Morphology. The products mostly concern on 1) the course content, 2) the exercises, and 3) the level of language difficulty or word choice. The researcher expects that the final product of this study could be used as a handbook for the students in studying English Morphology.

The present study examines the relationship between the students’ awareness on the internal structure of morphologically-complex words (henceforth MCWs) and English vocabulary size of Indonesian EFL learners. The participants are 111 Indonesian EFL learners who had taken English Morphology subject.
Two types of tests are used; Morpheme Identification Test was used to measure the students’ awareness on the internal structure of MCWs and the vocabulary size test is used to estimate their vocabulary size. To know the relationship between the two variables, correlational analysis with Kendall-tau formula is then applied. The result shows that both variables have a positive and significant reciprocal correlation.

Often defined as a marginal word-formation process whose governing principles remain a matter of controversy, lexical blending has been examined from various perspectives over the past fifty years or so. Lexical blends have thus been described as (mostly) ephemeral linguistic creations, playful and witty, that are likely to occur in popular press, advertising, and product naming (Bryant 1974; Lieber 2010). Although we can nowadays understand the key characteristics of blends, in terms of their semantic, phonological and orthographic features, corpus-based studies of blends associated with particular types of discourse remain scarce. Television discourse is no exception. It has been cited as a rich source of blends (Mattiello 2013; Sams 2016), yet few have hitherto conducted their detailed analysis (cf. Andriani, Moehkardi 2019). Having noticed that blends frequently occur in the titles of episodes of animated television shows for children (e.g. Smeldorado in Inspector Gadget, The Three Smurfketeers in The Smurfs, Pinknic in The Pink Panther), we decided to investigate their structural characteristics. For this purpose, we collected a corpus of approximately 420 blends from the titles of animated series episodes, spanning 1950-2020. The analysis has shown that haplology and hyphenation feature prominently in the collected blends, as well as that several splinters are repeatedly used in their formation.

In this world, every living thing has at least one language in order to have a communication with each other. Humans, for example, are able to show feelings and emotions and socialize by using languages. In Indonesia, English learners do not get familiar enough with English sentence patterns. In learning language, studying sentence patterns in song lyrics becomes more necessary as there are often misinterpretations of words when they are combined into sentences in song lyrics in the forms of sentence pattern construction. Considering the issue, the researcher got interested to analyse syntactically the sentence patterns in John Denver’s song lyrics.
This research was conducted to answer one research question: What sentence patterns are used in John Denver’s song lyrics? In order to answer the research question, the researcher employed qualitative approach as the nature of this research since it described about certain phenomena in detail. The method used in this research was content analysis as it analysed the sentence patterns in the John Denver’s song lyrics. Finally, the researcher employed the theory of Quirk and Greenbaum (1973) to analyse the sentence patterns in the lyrics. Additionally, the researcher also employed the theory of O’Grady, Dobrovolsky, and Katamba (1996) to represent the tree diagrams and phrase structure rules of the chosen sentences.
Based on the results, the researcher found out that there were 8 out of 9 patterns which were used in the song lyrics. The sentence pattern which was frequently used was pattern 3: S + Vt + dO. There were 12 sentences which used the pattern in John Denver’s song lyrics. However, there was no sentence which used pattern 6: S + Vt + iO + dO. Finally, the researcher hopes that the results can help English learners to improve their understanding on sentence patterns and phrase structure rules.

This paper discusses word formation in both English and Arabic. Processes of word formation are the bases upon which words are formed in a language. Firstly, the paper introduces word formation as to definition and processes, along with a few previous studies. Secondly, processes of word formation are discussed in English, and then in Arabic. Then, these processes are compared. Finally, certain conclusions, as well as some further areas of research, are proposed. There are different types of these processes. In English, there are eleven processes of word formation; they are acronymy,