1. What is a Word?

The chapter starts by discussing the concept of the "word." It's common to think that we all know
what a word is, but in linguistics, it's more complicated. To understand word formation, we need to
dive deeper into the idea of a word.

Mental Lexicon:
Speakers of a language know thousands of words, stored in our mental lexicon (our internal
vocabulary). But what exactly are these "words"?

Orthographic Definition (Written Form):

The simplest idea is that a word is a unit in writing, surrounded by spaces. For example, in the
sentence "Linguistics is a fascinating subject," there are 5 words because they are separated by
spaces or punctuation. However, this definition isn't perfect because:
• Example (2): "Benjamin’s girlfriend lives in a high-rise apartment building"
o The word "Benjamin’s" could be counted as one or two words, depending on how you
interpret the apostrophe.
o "high-rise" could also be one or two words depending on your definition of
punctuation.
The problem here is that spelling can vary, like "girlfriend" being written as "girl-friend" or "girl
friend."
Additionally, we may count something as one word (like "girlfriend"), but it's actually a compound
made from two words ("girl" and "friend").

Problems with the Orthographic Definition:

• Spelling variation: Words can be written in different ways, but this doesn’t change their
meaning or their status as words.
• Compound words: Some words like "girlfriend" are formed by combining two words, but they
still count as one word.
In short, the orthographic definition has limitations because it’s based on writing rules, which can
vary.

Phonological Definition (Sound Structure):

Instead of focusing on how words are written, we can look at how they sound. In many languages,
words have a single main stress (a prominent syllable) in speech.
For example:
• "carpenter" has the main stress on the first syllable: cár-pen-ter.
• "mother" has the main stress on the first syllable: mó-ther.
Example (4) shows that stress doesn’t always match the orthographic definition:
• "apartment building" is two written words, but phonologically it can be treated as one
because they are pronounced together with one main stress.
• Similarly, "travel agency" and "space shuttle" are compounds that are pronounced with one
main stress, so they function as one phonological word.
But function words like "the" or "and" don’t carry stress, making it harder to apply this criterion in
every case.
Integrity Definition (Indivisibility of Words):
A word is usually indivisible; that is, you can’t insert other elements in the middle of a word. For
example:
• "girls" has the plural -s added to the end.
• "uncommon" has the un- prefix at the start.
But sometimes this rule is violated:
• "son-in-law" doesn’t follow the usual rule because the plural -s is inserted inside the
compound. It becomes "sons-in-law," not "son-in-laws."
• In informal expressions like "abso-bloody-lutely," the word "bloody" is inserted into
"absolutely".
These examples show that while the integrity rule is generally true, there are some exceptions.

Semantic Definition (Meaning):

A word usually expresses a unified semantic concept (a single idea). For example, "dog" represents
the concept of a dog.
However, this definition has limitations:
• Some complex ideas can't be captured by a single word in English. For example, there’s no
single word for "the smell of fresh rain in a forest in the fall."
• Similarly, "the woman who lives next door" is a unified concept, but it takes multiple words
to express it.
Thus, this criterion doesn’t help in distinguishing words from phrases.

Syntactic Definition (Sentence Structure):

Words are often the smallest units in a sentence, belonging to specific parts of speech (nouns,
verbs, adjectives, etc.). Their position in a sentence is determined by grammar rules.
For example:
• "The" is an article, and it usually appears before a noun: "the big house."
• In a question like "Can you read my textbook?", the auxiliary verb "can" is moved to the
beginning, which shows it’s a word.
This syntactic rule helps identify words based on how they behave in sentences.

2. What is Word-Formation?
Word-formation is the process by which new words are created from existing elements. These
elements can be smaller parts of words, like prefixes, suffixes, or even other words.

➢ Examples of Word-Formation:
(7) Examples of Complex and Simple Words:
1. Morphologically Complex Words:
• employee: Composed of "employ" (verb) + "-ee" (suffix meaning "one who").
• inventor: Composed of "invent" (verb) + "-or" (suffix meaning "someone who").
• unhappy: Composed of "happy" (adjective) + "un-" (prefix meaning "not").
• decolonialization: Composed of multiple morphemes: "de-" (prefix), "colony" (root), "-al"
(suffix), "-ize" (suffix), "-ation" (suffix).
2. Compounds:
• apartment building: Two words combined to form one new concept.
• greenhouse: Combines "green" and "house" to form a word referring to a structure for growing
plants.
• son-in-law: A compound word that combines two bases.
• pickpocket: A compound formed from two words that together describe a specific type of
thief.
3. Simple Words (Monomorphemic):
• chair: A simple word with only one morpheme.
• neighbor: A simple word, even though it looks similar to complex words like "inventor." It
cannot be split into meaningful parts.

4. Morphemes: The Building Blocks of Words

• A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in a word.
• Complex words can be broken down into smaller meaningful units (morphemes). For example,
employee can be split into "employ" + "ee."
• Some words, like neighbor, can't be split further into meaningful parts and are considered
monomorphemic.

5. Bound vs. Free Morphemes

• Free morphemes can stand alone as words (e.g., "cat," "book").
• Bound morphemes must attach to another morpheme (e.g., -ing in "running," un- in
"unhappy").
o Prefixes (e.g., "un-" in "unhappy") appear at the beginning of a word.
o Suffixes (e.g., "-ed" in "walked") appear at the end of a word.
o Some morphemes, like -al in "colonial," are suffixes.
• Some bound roots are only found with other morphemes, often of Latin origin (e.g., circul- in
"circulation").

6. Root, Base, and Stem: Clarifying Terms

• The root is the central part of a word, and it's usually indivisible. For example, in "colonial",
"colony" is the root.
• The base is the form to which affixes (prefixes or suffixes) attach.
• Stem refers to the part of a word to which an affix is added, but this term is used less
frequently in this chapter.

7. Affixes and Infixes

• An affix is a morpheme added to a word (prefix, suffix, or infix).
• A prefix is added at the beginning (e.g., un- in unhappy).
• A suffix is added at the end (e.g., -ness in happiness).
• An infix is inserted inside a word. This is rarer and involves inserting a morpheme inside
another morpheme, as in abso-bloody-lutely.

8. Types of Word Formation Processes

➢ Concatenation:
• Words can be created by adding morphemes together in a sequence, like "unhappy" (prefix +
root + suffix).
➢ Compounding:
• Two or more words are combined to create a new word, like "greenhouse" (green + house).
➢ Conversion (Zero-Suffixation):
• A word changes its grammatical category without changing its form. For example, the noun
water can become the verb "to water" without adding any suffix.
Truncation (Clipping):
• A part of a word is dropped, creating a shorter form, like "Mike" from "Michael" or "demo"
from "demonstration."
➢ Blends:
• Two words are combined to create a new one, like "smog" (smoke + fog) or "modem"
(modulator + demodulator).

9. Diminutives (Affixation and Truncation Combined)

• Diminutives express smallness or intimacy, often by shortening the base word and adding an
affix. For example:
o Mandy (from Amanda)
o Andy (from Andrew)

3. Word-formation and the Problem of ‘New Words’:

• The chapter begins by questioning if certain words like kicks, drinking, and students are
considered "new words." These words are made up of two parts (morphemes), but they are not
considered new words in the same sense as kicker (formed from the verb kick).
• The key distinction here is between word-forms and lexemes. A word-form is a specific
grammatical variation of a word (e.g., kicks is a form of kick), while a lexeme refers to the
base form or the root idea (like kick itself).
Inflection vs. Derivation:
• Inflection and derivation are both morphological processes, but they serve different
purposes:
o Inflection changes a word to express grammatical features like tense, number, or
person (e.g., works, students, kicked). It doesn’t create new lexemes but rather
changes the form of existing ones.
o Derivation, on the other hand, creates new lexemes (new words) by adding affixes
(prefixes or suffixes). For example, adding -er to kick creates kicker, a new word with a
different meaning.
Key Differences between Inflection and Derivation:
1. Grammatical Categories:
a. Inflection changes grammatical features, like plural (e.g., workers) or past tense (e.g.,
picked).
b. Derivation can change the meaning or part of speech (e.g., worker is a noun formed
from the verb work).
2. Suffix Position:
 a. Inflectional morphemes always come at the end of the word.
b. Derivational morphemes can appear at the beginning or the end of the base word.
3. Part of Speech:
a. Derivation can change the part of speech of a word (e.g., -ness turns an adjective like
happy into a noun happiness).
b. Inflection does not change the part of speech (e.g., plural workers is still a noun).
4. Semantic Opacity:
a. Derivational words often have meanings that can’t be guessed from their parts (e.g.,
interview doesn’t mean “to view between”).
b. Inflection tends to maintain a transparent meaning (e.g., dogs is simply the plural of
dog).
5. Productivity:
a. Inflectional morphemes are highly productive, meaning they can be added to nearly
any word in the appropriate class (e.g., adding plural -s to any noun like dog, cat, or
book).
b. Derivational morphemes are less productive and can’t be applied to every word (e.g.,
you can’t make the adjective -ive from every verb like walk or read).
Summary of Differences:
• Derivation: Creates new words, changes meaning, may change part of speech, and is often
less predictable in meaning. It is less productive and can be non-suffix-based.
• Inflection: Changes grammatical features, doesn’t change meaning, is syntactically
important, and is highly productive with suffixes only in English.
Morphological Processes:
• Inflection is part of grammar, while derivation is part of word-formation.
• Derivation includes processes like prefixation (adding a prefix), suffixation (adding a suffix),
and other non-affix processes like conversion (changing part of speech without adding an
affix).