THE FORMATION OF WORDS

Poets are often particularly sensitive to the productive properties of morphemes, but all human beings possess and utilize creativity by producing new words.

Three lines from a poem by E. E Cummings represent in a dramatic way this characteristic of human language helves surling out of eakspeasies pertreel)hapsingly proregress heandshe-ingly people trickle curselaughgroping shrieks bubble The nonpoet's creativity is not usually considered artistic, but. pevertheless, it does serve as the basis for the production of words the ináividual has neither produced ror encountered in the past Copynght

1931, 1959, by E. E. Cummings. Reprinted from his volume Poems 1923-1954 by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

infnitive form and add the infectional suffx o after the root Of coue encounter exceptions and further forms, they will modify the generalizatin, ease, once they have arrived at an initial rule, they no longer need to rely on But Fis for most forms Fgure 4.2 I sing canto pinto beboPain cantar to sing piniar o paint beber to drink comer to cat ito live admitirto admit' 1 drink I eat admito live admito a 1 admit Thus, infectional affixes play an important role in foreign language l aduls and native language acquisition by children, as well as in the formation of words by all members of a language community learning by DERIVATIONAL AFFIXES The process of adding a derivational affix to a root is another important method speakers use to create words in their language. Some derivational affixes combine with free forms according to fairly general rules. Given an adjective, familiar or not, English speakers can usually produce an adverb by adding the derivational suffixly, as illustrated in Figure 4.3 The last two adjectives are "nonsense words made up to demonstrate the productivity of ly. created from verbs in English by the addition of a derivational suffix to the verb.

S derivation of nouns from verbs, known as nominalization, is a common process in grammar of English. But the particular suffix used with a particular verb is not predictable and apparently not subject to the type of broad generalization possible Unlike t, some other derivational affixes are only partially productive. Nouns can be uch the fully with productive affixes. As examples of this point, consider the variation exhibited in te derivational suffixes of Figure 4.4. A careful investigation of such nominalizing sufixs in English (i.

e., sufixes that result in nouns) reveal suffix ion commonly is attached to verbs that end in the soun although these are more limited in scope than those for suffixes like ly. For example, e s certain possible generalizations the constructiconstruction, editledition, duplicarelduplication