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Mention and discuss various types of word formation processes.

      

Mention and discuss various types of word formation processes.

  

Answers


Merick
a) Coinage: it involves invention of new words or new terms in a language. Some of the words that have been coined in English are nylon and aspirin.

b) Borrowing: it is the taking over of words from other languages. English has adopted a number of words from other languages. For example, it has borrowed ugali and leso from kiswahili, tycoon from Japanese and crotchet from French.

c) Blending: it involves combining two forms to produce a single new term. Blending involves taking only the beginning of a word and joining it to the end of the word. For example; smog_ smoke + fog. It has taken (sm) from smoke and (og) from fog.

d) Compounding: this includes joining of two separate words to produce a single form. For example; girlfriend, sunshine, breakfast and shopkeeper.

e) Back formation: a word of one type is introduced to form another word of different types. A noun can be reduced to a verb. For example; editor_edit, donation_donate, emotion_emote.

f) Derivation : this process is facilitated by use of affixes.
i) prefixes_ these are placed
before a word to form new
words.
For example precolonial is
derived
from colonial.
ii) suffixes_ they come at the end
of the word. For example
freedom from free.

g) conversion: this is a process which involves a change in the function of a word. One word can be used to mean two different things. For example the word bottle can be used as a noun or a verb.
This is a bottle (noun)
Bottle the juice for me (verb).

h) Clipping: it includes shortening words without changing their meanings. The beginning of a base word is usually maintained as a word. For example, advert from advertisement and fan from fanatic.

i) Acronyms: these are words formed from the initial letters of a group of words in a tittle or a phrase. For example NGO_ Non Governmental Organizations.

j) Multiple processes: This is where we have words whose formation is not pinned down to a particular word formation because it is formed out of more than one word formation. For example, the word FORD. FO_ clipped out of the word
forum.
RD_ comes from acronyms.

Merick answered the question on January 24, 2018 at 13:32


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    1.
    Two weeks before the fateful examination began; I was indiscreet enough to fight the principal’ s son. He was a fellow fifth former with whom, up till then , I had no quarrel at all. He was inclined to be a little overbearing at times ;but then a flint needs contact with another flint in order to spark, and I had been forced to develop from the start an easy-going and tolerant disposition . I suppose as the examination drew nearer, our nerves became tauter and our tempers shorter .When, during a discussion in our classroom about careers Samuel declared unnecessarily loudly that he believed all persons who came from North should return to it to find employment , I suddenly felt my anger rising like a column of mercury. I asked him why, in as calm a voice as I could assume. He replied with a sneer by quoting a Sagroson proverb whose meaning was roughly that even a man who does not know where he is going to ought, at least, to know where he has come from: and the gentle laughter, which greeted it brought my temper to boiling point. I was tall and well built, but so was he. Three strides took me beside him and by the time the class prefect succeeded in separating us, Sagrosan blood and Lokko blood had mingled on the floor. Moreover, as is the custom with us, the fight was as much verbal as physical and a torrent of abuse directed mainly against the other's antecedents was flowing out of each battered mouth.

    We were bloody, sweaty, and dusty when it was over but still only partly through our respective stocks of abuse. Nothing more than a heighted respect each for the other might have come out of the fight, had Samuel been a boarder. Unfortunately for both of us, however, he lived very much under his august father's eye and the marks I had succeeded in leaving on his face were too distinctive to be hidden by any sort of artifice. I prepared for the worst (prepared in spirit that is, for physical preparations were known to be unavailing at such times). The summons to the principal's office duly came after lunch the same day. He was quite impartial, I'll say that for him. We were both arched over his desk and inscribed across our rumps with two dozen strokes of a bamboo four-footer. Then we were made to shake hands with each other and sent off for walk together along the beach and back (this was the principal's usual way of dealing with a pair of fighters, and one which usually made bosom friends of them).That thrashing and the walk which followed, gave me the moments of deepest mortification I have experienced, and drove home to me the utter futility and wastefulness of making issue of tribal divisions, in a land where much else required our attentions and our energies. Having heard from us how the fight started, the principal might so early have wasted our time and his reading us along patriotic sermon on the essential brotherhood of all the people of Songhai. Such a theme would have made him appear to me hypocrite and to Samuel a traitor -for we both knew only too well that the difference between us were real, if not deep. Instead, we were made to share a fellowship of misery and humiliation which linked us together more effectively than any half – believed fiction about cultural or ethnic affinities could have succeeded in doing.

    QUESTIONS:
    a) What was the cause of the fight? (2marks)

    b) Show how the statement “A flint needs contact with another flint in order to spark”
    is applicable to this story? (2marks)

    c) With illustrations, show the difference in character between the narrator and his classmate? (4marks)

    d) What is the narrator’s attitude towards the head teacher? (3marks)

    e) Identify three phrases in the passage to describe the fierce nature of the fight? (3marks)

    f) Identify two images that are used to show the extent of the narrator’s anger? (2marks)

    g) Explain the punishment that was meted to the by their principal. (2marks)

    h) Explain the meaning of the following phrases as used in passage: (2marks)
    i) Bosom friends

    ii) Patriotic sermon

    Date posted: January 23, 2018.  Answers (1)