It is not the case that processes, or words meanings, are either compositional or non-compositional. However, we should note that compositionality is not an absolute matter. If emailer is a noun, then emailers is its plural. It is also compositional, in that it consistently contributes the meaning ‘more than one ’ to the new word. For example, the – s is extremely productive, in that new nouns in English can be made plural by using it. Morphemes must occur in certain positions within a word.Whether the word will ever become accepted in English is another matter. Speakers of English will have no difficulty understanding what this new word means, even if they have never heard it before, given their knowledge of the meaning and the grammar of the morphemes making up this newly-minted word. Knowing that a morpheme – er means ‘someone who Vs’, as we saw in the previous chapter, we can safely create a brand-new noun emailer to mean ‘someone who emails’, and use it straight away to say that My friend Janice is a compulsive emailer. A third way of creating new words in a language involves manipulating not just their meaning but also their grammar, by disassembling the morphemes from the words in which they appear, and reassembling them into new words. In this new use, a sad joke is not a joke that makes you cry, but a joke that doesn’t make you laugh. The English word sad, for example, is currently used to mean something similar to ‘pathetic‘, besides keeping its meaning of ‘unhappy’. Secondly, language users can change the meaning of words already in the language, to make them mean different things. Words that are circulated in this way among languages are called borrowings. This is how an Italian word like pizza or a Japanese word like karaoke became English words. One way is to simply import a useful word from another language, just like people import useful products from other countries. Language users do this in three major ways.
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