English compounds<\/a>. <\/p>\nAnother way of classifying compounds is into endocentric and exocentric groups.cMost of the examples above are endocentric compounds, that is, they contain the head within the compound itself. Thus, a bedroom<\/em> contains the word room<\/em> in it, and describes a room that has a bed in it. On the other hand, a redneck<\/em> is not describing a neck that is red. This is an exocentric compound, because the \u201chead\u201d of the compound is a person, who (figuratively) happens to have a red neck. Compounds like this are more commonly called bahuvrihi<\/em> compounds, after a Sanskrit word that means \u201cmuch rice,\u201d meaning a rich man (i.e., one who possesses much rice). Other examples in English are blueblood<\/em>, redhead<\/em>, blockhead<\/em>, white-collar<\/em>.<\/p>\nEnglish also has many compounds whose elements were at one time free morphemes but which are no longer identifiable as such due to changes in the language. Thus, we have the following words in Modern English, which were originally compounds in Old English: orchard<\/em> (plant-yard), lady<\/em> (bread-kneader), lord<\/em> (bread-guardian), nostril<\/em> (nose-hole), window<\/em> (wind-eye), hussy<\/em> (house-wife), warlock<\/em> (oath-breaker), gospel<\/em> (good-story), garlic<\/em> (spear-leak), and so on. Today, each of these would be considered simplexes rather than compounds.<\/p>\nPortmanteau words and blends<\/h3>\n
A portmanteau<\/strong> is a word that blends two morphemes into a single morpheme. Common examples are brunch<\/em> (breakfast<\/em>+lunch<\/em>), ginormous<\/em> (giant<\/em>+enormous<\/em>), and motel<\/em> (motor<\/em>+hotel<\/em>). Newer examples are manscaping, mansplaining, spork, jeggings, brony, Brangelina, sexting<\/em>, etc. Sometimes these are also called blends, and some linguists distinguish between blends and portmanteaux. <\/p>\nSome people consider the following morphemes under the category of portmanteaux rather than suffixing: –thon, -gate, -lympics, -mageddon<\/em>. This may be partially correct, but they may be on their way to becoming suffixes. With portmanteau words there is a blending of phonemes from each word into a single morpheme. Consider the word marathon<\/em>, originally a place name, but introduced into English in 1896 to describe a long race. We can add the end of this word to the beginning of a word such as television to get telethon<\/em>, describing an especially long television program. But many words to which –thon<\/em> can be added are not truncated: consider walkathon<\/em> or Toyotathon<\/em>. In these examples, -(a)thon acts more like a suffix than a blend. In fact, the word walkathon<\/em> was first used in 1931, 18 years before telethon<\/em> was first used. Similarly, –gate<\/em> no longer indicates any connection with the Watergate hotel, but simply means \u201cpolitical scandal,\u201d and is usually added to complete morphemes. <\/p>\nThe morpheme \u2013lympics<\/em> also seems to act midway between a portmaneau and a suffix, since the primary use is in the word paralympics<\/em>, a clear blend of paraplegic<\/em> and olympics<\/em>. We also have the Laff-A-Lympics<\/em> and something called the E-lympics<\/em>, both of which are based on Olympic-style contests. Its use in these newly-created words suggests a productive quality that is not usually found in other portmanteau words (i.e., we have the word brunch, but we don\u2019t find *brinner or *brupper, let alone *bridnight-snack). <\/p>\nReduplication<\/h3>\n
English does not currently use reduplication, but it used to. Reduplication was a primary method of creating the past tense of verbs, as you might know if you happen to have studied Greek, Sanskrit, Latin or an early Germanic language like Gothic. In Gothic the verb slepan<\/em> “to sleep” formed its past tense sai-slep<\/em>, by reduplicating the initial s- into a new syllable at the front of a word. The only word in (sort of) modern English which preserves a trace of reduplication is the very old-fashioned word hight<\/em>, meaning \u201cto be named,\u201d which you will see if you read Chaucer or Spenser or some particularly archaic-sounding 19th-century poetry. If you know German you will recognize it as the very common word hei\u00dfen<\/em>. The in the middle of the word was originally the beginning of the word, and the initial hi- was the reduplicating syllable. Otherwise all traces of reduplication have been erased from English.<\/p>\nMorpheme Internal Change (also called apophony)<\/h3>\n
Although most English nouns and verbs add inflectional suffixes to the end of the root morpheme to signify different grammatical functions, there are many that make internal changes to the morpheme instead. There are two types of morpheme internal change in English. <\/p>\n
\n- Umlaut<\/strong> or mutation<\/strong>: We discussed mutation briefly at the end of the section on phonology. These words are produced by a front mutation of the vowel. For example, while most nouns make their plurals by adding the inflectional morpheme \u2013s, others change the vowel within the base morpheme: foot\/feet, tooth\/teeth, goose\/geese<\/em>; mouse\/mice, louse\/lice<\/em>; and man\/men, woman\/women<\/em>. <\/li>\n
- Ablaut<\/strong> or Gradation<\/strong>: While most verbs make the past tense by adding an \u2013ed morpheme, there are a large number that make vowel changes to form tenses: drive\/drove\/driven<\/em>, bite\/bit\/bitten<\/em>, ring\/rang\/rung, steal\/stole\/stolen<\/em>, etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Suppletion<\/h3>\n
Suppletion<\/strong> is not so much the creation of a new morpheme as the substituting of one morpheme for another. So, while most adjectives make comparative and superlative forms by adding the inflectional morphemes \u2013er and \u2013est, such as tall, tall-er, tall-est<\/em>, others simply use an entirely different, unrelated morpheme. The comparative and superlative forms of good<\/em> are not *gooder<\/em> and *goodest<\/em> but better<\/em> and best<\/em>. These morphemes are not formed from good<\/em> at all but from an archaic adjective bet<\/em> that we no longer use. Some verbs do this too. The past tense of go<\/em> is went<\/em>, originally the past tense of the somewhat obsolete verb wend<\/em>. The verb to be<\/em> has three originally different verbs in it: the be<\/em> forms, the am\/is<\/em> forms and the was\/were<\/em> forms. One tends to find suppletion in only the most common of words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The standard method of creating words is to take a root morpheme and add affixes to it: (derivational morpheme) + root morpheme + (derivational morpheme) + (inflectional morpheme). The root morpheme is of course necessary while the morphemes in parentheses are optional. There are, however, other ways of creating words. Here is a brief discussion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":164,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-170","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":171,"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/170\/revisions\/171"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}