Relationship between Form and Meaning- Derivational Suffix of Adjective - Literature review Example

Relationship between Form and Meaning---Derivational Suffix of Adjective Derivational Suffix of Adjective English language practitioners and teachers are now agreeing unanimously that the current challenges in the field lies in the conceptualization and understanding of form and meaning. As a matter of fact, studies that have examined the relationship between form and meaning in English using case studies of derivational suffixes agree that the reconciliation of implicit and explicit approaches to learning and teaching of grammar becomes complex (Schreuderl and Baayem, 2013). Contemporary scholars have been specific in approaching this matter with studies such as Arista (2011) stretching their research from entirely explaining meaning and form with regard to negative prefixes to an understanding of derivational suffixes and specifically, adjective suffixes. While an understanding of adjective suffixes remains an emerging issue among these scholars, teaching of English as grammar has to be recognized to have been subsumed to an extent that recent years have witnessed researchers concentrating their interest in understanding meaning and form with regard to adjective suffixes. As it now recognized through case studies conducted by St. Clair, Monaghan and Ramscar (2009), English remains to be a language that can be seen as highly productive language thus making the processes of word formation to frequently result in the addition of new aspects or items to the English lexicon. One of these processes is the aspect of derivational suffixation. Based on these researches, this paper is specific in its approach by seeking to explain the relationship between form and meaning in English taking derivational suffixes as example and adjective suffixes as a point of concern. This paper begins by acknowledging that lexical items have been derived, blended, borrowed, inflected and compounded into English language and the main aim of these processes is word formation. Studies by Ward and Chuenjundaeng (2009) recognized that the study of English word formation is the process of attaining a division of linguistics of central interest to learners to theoretical linguistics. As already stated, this paper however, is not to discuss finer details that touches on meaning and form but to restrict discussions that brings the meaning of derivational suffixes when dealing with adjectives. As a matter of fact, the pertinence of this paper for English learners and teachers is definite: that making judgment of the meaning of word from dictionary or context definitions has resulted in confusion and as a result, a reasonable and effective learning strategy for form and meaning of adjective is to help decode morphological structures so that word comprehension can be reached (see studies such as Schmitt and Zimmerman, 2002). Before deciphering information and examples of derivational suffixes in adjectives, there are pertinent issues of the topic that will not only contextualize such suffixes but will also provide an understanding on meaning and form to teachers and students dealing with derivational suffixes in adjectives. Just like Plag and Baayen (2009) noted, derivational suffixes is made of a highly productive aspect of word-formation morpheme thus language students and teachers will be required to point out those productive morphemes for better conceptualization. Such conceptualization in turn, is essential in making students to become self-sufficient and freely work towards proper systematic decoding of different morphemes so as to decipher or comprehend meanings. Turning to the relationship between meaning, form and derivational suffixation in adjective, the first understanding is that suffixes remain as the main morphological component that can be used in the derivation of new words from already existing ones. While this is one way of looking at word form and new word meaning, suffixes in adjectives create different meanings to already an existing form of adjective by effecting four possible changes upon such word/adjective and these have been found to be sematic, orthographic, phonologic and changes in classes of words (Pavičić-Takač, 2008). In particular, general examples that have been given in such cases without necessary giving considerations to adjectives include: Sematic: which results to Husband > Husbandry Phonologic: which results to Fuse>fusion or produce which results to >production Orthographic: which results to happy >happiness or commit > committal Word Class: which results to success > successfully or successful Based on the four categories provided above, it is clear that suffixation that produces changes in semantic meaning and class of word is likely to be fused upon it. Dealing with adjectival suffixes, studies have recognized that adjectival suffixes basically form two distinct types of adjectives; qualitative adjectives and relational adjectives (Bertram, Laine and Virkkala, 2000). Beginning with the latter, relational adjectives has the ability to relate or link the noun the adjective qualifies to the word of the base of the adjective derived. Providing specific case examples to exemplify this position, taking expressions or words such as Congregational Election it can be seen that the grammar has added the two sounds ‘—al—‘to the word congress with the aim of modifying the noun election so that the resultant meaning is to show that this form of word is dealing with or is something to do with congress. As a matter of fact, the relationship between the forma and meaning as far as an adjectival derivational suffix is concerned is the context in which ‘congress’ has been put. Studies that have investigated the use of ‘—al—‘in English have noted that this is denominal suffix that remains highly productive as far as English language is concerned, more so when dealing with bases that end with ‘–ation—‘and “—ment--” (Bauer and Huddleston, 2002; Andreou and Ralli, 2015). On the other hand, a case can be given of a less productive suffix studies such as Marelli and Baroni (2015) have argued to forming relational adjectives as –ary--, that can be regarded as productive only when dealing with noun bases that end with –ion— Contrariwise, qualitative adjectives have been found to be assigning certain aspect of qualities to the words they tend to modify. Studies from scholars such as Bauer and Huddleston (2002) argued in their presentation of derivational suffixes that relational adjectives basically take place in the attribute position. On the other hand, qualitative adjectives are found to be largely predictive and as such, predict a given position of a clause thus creating uniqueness in form and meaning of the word. Taking a case of statement such as, “That statement was ridiculous,” from this statement it is apparent that English is dealing with a highly productive suffix that can form what Bauer and Huddleston (2002) found to be qualitative adjectives and as such there is –ish— which to some extent or somewhat means X or put vaguely, X. Such can attach to other adjectives, with examples such as “a yellowish pallor”, to a given numerals such as “we will arrive around sevenish”; to a given noun or nouns, thus forming foolish or bookish and even to syntactic phrases such as out-of-the-wayish (see studies such as Heine, Narrog and Long, 2016). From these examples, and particularly, out-of-the-wayish the suffix –ish— in the word way creates a different form to generate a unique meaning that Heine et al. (2016) discuss. Further details that provide such understanding can be –ful--, --able--, -- less--, --ous-- and –al--. Examples of these include: Magical: formed from magic + al (derivational suffix –al- to the adjective) Dangerous: formed from danger + --ous (derivational suffix –ous- to the adjective) Serviceable: formed from service + able (derivational suffix –able- to the adjective) Boneless: formed from bone + less (derivational suffix –less- to the adjective) Purposeful: formed from purpose + ful (derivational suffix –ful- to the adjective) A particular case that has been described in the five examples given above is the suffix –less—. One can take an example of ‘end’ and less to form adjective ‘endless’ as described in the figure below: Figure 1: Derivational Suffix of Adjective From figure 1 above, the word endless is a formation from the base morpheme “end” thus the bound morpheme suffix of “-less.” From this example, the category of the word/form “end” remains to be a noun however; “less” becomes the suffix. Therefore, to bring the relationship between form and meaning in this case is that “less” changes the grammatical meaning or form from the noun to adjectives thus creating different meaning or what Ahmed (2016) terms as adjectival suffixes (derivational suffix of adjective). Basically, this is what can be termed as relational adjectives as the role of the adjective is to relate the noun (end) the adjective has qualified to the base word of the adjective that has been derived. Contrariwise, --ful—as it has been given in the example above can be formed from the base morpheme “purpose” and the suffix that bounds “-ful.” The category of “purpose” remains to be verb but “ful” remains as suffix. As it is seen in the figure 2 below suffix “ful” changes the grammatical category from verb to adjective creating another case for adjectival suffixes (derivational suffix of adjective). Figure 2: Derivational Suffix of Adjective Similarly, the word serviceable has been formed from the base morpheme which is “service” and that the bound morpheme suffix in such a case is “—able— and as it has been the case in figure 1 and 2 above, the category of service remains to be a verb but “able” takes the suffix thus the suffix transmutes the form from the verb to adjective when the two words are brought together. Just like the cases above this is what makes adjectival suffixes (derivational suffix of adjective). Figure 3: Derivational Suffix of Adjective References Ahmed, A. M. A. A. M. (2016). Investigating the Use of English Language Affixes as a Problem Facing Third Year Secondary School Students (Doctoral dissertation, Sudan University of Science and Technology). Andreou, M., & Ralli, A. (2015). Form and Meaning of Bahuvrihi Compounds: Evidence from Modern Greek and Its Dialects. In Semantics of Complex Words (pp. 163-185). Springer International Publishing. Arista, J. M. (2011). Adjective formation and lexical layers in Old English. English Studies, 92(3), 323-344. Bauer, L., & Huddleston, R. (2002). Lexical word-formation. In Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum. (eds.) The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bertram, R., Laine, M., & Virkkala, M. M. (2000). The role of derivational morphology in vocabulary acquisition: Get by with a little help from my morpheme friends. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 41, 287–296. Heine, B., Narrog, H., & Long, H. (2016). Constructional change vs. grammaticalization: From compounding to derivation. Studies in Language, 40(1), 137-175. Marelli, M., & Baroni, M. (2015). Affixation in semantic space: Modeling morpheme meanings with compositional distributional semantics. Psychological review, 122(3), 485. Pavičić Takač, V. (2008). Vocabulary learning strategies and foreign language acquisition. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Plag, I., & Baayen, H. (2009). Suffix ordering and morphological processing. Language, 85, 109-152. Schmitt, N., & Zimmerman, C. B. (2002). Derivative word forms: what do learners know? TESOL Quarterly, 36 (2), 145-171. Schreuderl, R., & BaayemE, R. H. (2013). Modeling Morphological 6 Processing. Morphological aspects of language processing, 131. St. Clair, M. C., Monaghan, P., & Ramscar, M. (2009). Relationships between language structure and language learning: The suffixing preference and grammatical categorization. Cognitive Science, 33, 1317-1329. Ward, J., & Chuenjundaeng, J. (2009). Suffix knowledge: acquisition and applications. System, 37, 461-469. Read More