assignment

Surname 1

Student’s Name

Professor’s Name

Course Details

Date

Inflectional Affixes and Derivational Affixes

Compounding refers to the process of combining two words to come up with a new word. In the context, the resulting word may be a noun, verb, or adjective. Although it commonly involves two words, compounding is never limited to two words. Introducing the concepts to learners would entail myriad practices, one of which would be the identification of compound words. In the context, I would train them on ways of identifying compound words by meaning. Under the category, the variants that I would introduce to them are compound words whose meaning is the sum of individual parts as well as those with figurative sense (Schmidtke 421). The example that I would provide for the former is a light switch, while that of the latter is moonshine. The second method of identification of compound words that I would introduce to learners is word stress (Fromkin et al., 105). In this regard, I would train the students to check for stressed first elements, whereby exampleswould be ‘STONE age’ and ‘HOT dog’. To avoid the potential for confusion, I would introduce the learners to phrasal verbs, whereby the verb is stressed at the expense of the preposition. The example that I would provide is ‘come in,’ where the word ‘come’ is stressed.

The other concept that I would introduce to the learners, on compounding, is the subclasses and semantic classification of the compound words. One type that I would highlight is endocentric compound words. The type entails combining the first word (A) and the second one (B), where the resultant compound word refers to a special type of the second one (B). An example of a word that I would provide is a darkroom. Moreover, I would bring to learners’ attention about the exocentric words, the type of compound words which entail combining two words to come up with a new word that denotes an especial kind of unexpressed semantic head. An appropriate example would be a skinhead. Turning to the copulative type, I would inform the learners that the process involves combining two words to form a word that denotes the sum of the denotation of each individual word (Cui et al., 258). Here, the sleepwalk would serve as an appropriate example. The appositional type, I would inform learners, involves combining two words A and B, wherein each of them offers a different description for the same referent. A suitable example of the variant would be actor-director

To further enhance the knowledge of the learners, I would introduce to them the concept of noun-compounding, which entails combining at least two nouns to form a single noun. An essential aspect that I would teach the learners is the forms of presenting the resulting nouns. In this regard, one of the forms would be the separation of the words as in grapefruit juice (Beyersmann 176). The other form would be the use of hyphens, an example of compound noun that falls into the category being sergeant-at-arms. The third form would be the presentation of the resulting noun as one word. Most importantly, I would insist on having the learners differentiate the contexts in which to apply each of the forms. The structure(s) of a compound noun happens to be different in terms of meaning relations that they exhibit. In the context, the different structures can indicate a person’s occupation or activity(s), an object’s purpose, an item’s purpose, an object’s use procedure, or an event’s occurrence time. Examples of the compound nouns in each meaning category would be science teacher, grindstone, blackboard, immersion heater, and nightfrost respectively. Introducing the learners to a concept that commonly causes confusion would also be of paramount importance. The concept that I would teach is an adjective compound, which involves two or more words that act as a single idea to modify a noun (Gagné et al. 1489). In this case, I would introduce the learners to the general rule that the compound adjective is hyphenated when it appears before a noun. Whenever it appears after a noun, however, the hyphens become unnecessary.

Works Cited

Beyersmann, Elisabeth, et al. "Taking the book from the bookshelf: Masked constituent priming effects from compound words and nonwords." Journal of cognition 1.1 (2018).

Cui, Lei, et al. "Effects of Grammatical Structure of Compound Words on Word Recognition in Chinese." Frontiers in psychology 9 (2018): 258.

Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams. An introduction to language. Cengage Learning, 2018.

Gagné, Christina L., and Thomas L. Spalding. "Effects of morphology and semantic transparency on typing latencies in english compound and pseudocompound words." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 42.9 (2016): 1489.

Li, M. A. N., Nan Jiang, and Kira Gor. "L1 and L2 processing of compound words: Evidence from masked priming experiments in English." Bilingualism: Language and cognition 20.2 (2017): 384-402.

Schmidtke, Daniel, Julie A. Van Dyke, and Victor Kuperman. "Individual variability in the semantic processing of English compound words." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 44.3 (2018): 421.