Morphological patterns Flashcards
affixation
Affixation is the process of adding affixes to words to create new words. The
affixes can be prefixes or suffixes.
government (with the suffix ‘-ment’)
abbreviation
Abbreviations are formed by writing or pronouncing shorter forms of a word or string of words.
VCAA (where ‘V’ is said as a letter and CAA is pronounced like ‘car’)
St (either denoting street or Saint, depending on context)
shortening
Shortenings are constructed by cutting words down to smaller forms
noob (from ‘newbie’, a person new to an activity or game)
all caps (‘caps’ is a shortening of ‘capitals’)
compounding
The process of compounding refers to the addition of two or more words in their entirety, creating a word that carries meaning from both elements. For compounds, there will be a stem word that is the main element of the meaning, with the added free morpheme functioning as a derivational affix.
bookcase (book tells us what the case is designed for)
swimsuit (swim tells us what kind of suit)
blending
Blending is the process of adding together parts from two different words or
adding part of one word to another full word.
glitterati (glitter + literati)
kidult (kid + adult)
backformation
Backformation refers to the process of removing what are mistakenly thought to be affixes. This process is similar to shortening but the basis for removing parts of the word is to convert it to a different part of speech, or alter meaning by
targeting clusters of letters that look like derivational morphemes.
televise (backformed from ‘television’ in 1927, twenty years after ‘television’
came into English)
typewrite (a backformation from ‘typewriter’)
conversion of word
class
Conversion is the process of using a word in the role of a different part of speech,
but without adding any affixes to mark it as such.
email (originally a noun, but now also used as a verb. It does not take on ‘-ise’
or ‘-ate’ to indicate its shift from a noun to a verb.)
initialism
Initialisms are formed by taking the first letters of words in a string of words and pronouncing them as letters or a combination of letters and other symbols.
VCE (Victorian Certificate of Education)
Q&A (question and answer)
acronym
Acronyms are formed by taking the first letter of each word in a string of words and pronouncing them as a new word.
ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps)
lol (laugh out loud)
contraction
Contractions are formed by removing some letters from words and marking the missing letter/s with an apostrophe
She’s (from ‘she’ and ‘has’)
It’s (from ‘it’ and ‘is’)
Purpose Of Morphological Patterning
Can give a text an element of morphological sophistication and memorability
