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A Brief Introduction to Methods of Word Formation in English

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A Brief Introduction to Methods of Word Formation in English
A Brief Introduction to Methods of Word Formation in English
I. Introduction Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context. The earliest known activities in descriptive linguistics have been attributed to Panini around 500 BCE, with his analysis of Sanskrit in Ashtadhyayi. The first subfield of linguistics is the study of language structure, or grammar. This focuses on the system of ruled followed by the users of a language. It includes the study of morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the formation and composition of phrases and sentences from these words), and phonology (sound system). Phonetics is a related branch of linguistics concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds and nonspeech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived. This paper is going to concentrate on part of morphology word formation, of the English language. Generally, in linguistics, word formation is the creation of a new word. Word formation is sometimes contrasted with semantic change, which is a change in a single word’s meaning. The boundary between word formation and semantic change can be difficult to define: a new use of an old word can be seen as a new word derived from an old one and identical to it in form. Word formation can also be contrasted with the formation of idiomatic expressions, although words can be formed from multi-word phrases. There are various mechanisms of word formation and this paper is going to present them in detail with necessary explanations and examples.

II. Methods of Word Formations
1. Agglutination. In contemporary linguistics, agglutination usually refers to the kind of morphological derivation in which there is a one-to-one correspondence between affixes and syntactical categories. Language that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages.

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