Academic Communication Form 5 – Topic Two: Crafting Meaning
Crafting meaning involves the process of forming, using and interpreting words in order to understand the meaning they are conveying. In this chapter you will learn how to form words, how to pronounce words correctly, the importance of stress and intonation in oral communication and how to interpret literal meanings of words and sentences in various contexts.
Word formation
Word formation is referred to as the process of creating new words. It involves simple and complex processes. New words are always created to address communicative needs. Sometimes, a new concept may be brought about by technology, or there may be a situation where a word for a new concept or item may not exist in a given language. Certain ideas could be lengthy and require time to express. Thus, human beings can simplify them by creating acronyms.
A new understanding, or a more focused understanding of a concept, can also be formed by certain words. Mastering word formation is crucial in academic communication because it facilitates vocabulary expansion, expression of ideas in writing and oral communication contexts and easy understanding. People with word formation skills can easily infer the meanings of texts. There are several types of word formation processes.
Types of word formation processes
Affixation
Affixation is a morphological process in which affixes are added to a word to form a new word or change the meaning of the existing one. There are two major types of affixes: prefixes and suffixes. Prefixes are affixes attached to the beginning of a word, such as re- in “rewrite”, neo- in “neonatal” or anti- in “anticorruption,” multi- in “multimedia”. Suffixes are attached to the end of a word, such as -ing in “walking” or -ly in “mechanically”.
Affixation can be applied to:
1. Create new words (derivation), such as kindness from kind.
2. Change the meaning of an existing term, such as rewrite from write. 3. Change a word’s category (part of speech); for example, kind from adjective to noun kindness.
Compounding
Compounding is a process of combining two or more words to create a word with different meaning. There are three types of compounds namely open compound, closed compound and hyphenated compound. With open compounds two distinct words combined but with space between them.
For example, words data and base are combined to form the word data base. Closed compounds is a result of combining two distinct words and writing them as one (i.e., without space between them). For example, words fire and fighter form the term firefighter. With hyphenated compounds, two distinct words are written by connecting them with hyphens. For example words type and writer are written as type- writer.
Compound words can acquire new meaning, which are distinct from their original meaning. Compounding has become a common word formation technique which can significantly increase the size of a lexicon. As technology and society develop, many new vocabulary items emerge in the language to accommodate the inventions and changes.
Conversion
Conversion involves creating new words by giving an existing word a new meaning and word class without altering its structure. Thus, the word’s base does not usually change in this instance. Through meanings, newly created words are functionally distinguished from one another. Examples of word formation through conversion are:
1. I head a meeting every week. (the word head is a verb)
Juma has a big head. (the word head is a noun)
2. I will email you tomorrow. (the word email is verb)
I will send you an email tomorrow. (the word email is a noun)
3. The elegant dress was made of the finest Italian silk. (the word silk is a noun)
She wore a silk dress. (the word silk is an adjective)
Exercise
Use the following words to form new words or create new meaning in sentences and indicate a class for each word.
table – clean – shape – walk – mountain – bottle – design