WORD FORMATION PROCESSES IN NIGERIAN SHORT-MESSAGE SERVICE
Abstract
One of the features of a living language is that it constantly changes with new words finding their way into the vocabulary of the language. Languages’ vocabularies grow from time to time as a result of new innovations that continuously spring up in different sectors of life and human endeavour; one of which is the Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM), in the recent century. This study, therefore, explores the various processes employed by Nigerian Short-Message Service (SMS) writers in generating new words, by critically sampling and analysing some of these new words to see the processes employed by these GSM users. It is discovered in this paper that these GSM users have the capability of reducing any form of expression to the starkest abbreviation. Generally, the new words analysed are in one way or the other in their reduced forms and this may not be far from the characteristic SMS requirement of limited number of characters.
Index Terms—word formation, GSM, SMS, clipping, alphanumeric and coinages
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
The current computer literacy level in the society has made text-based communication, which comes in various forms; assume a vital position among many people. These text-based communication techniques include chat on-line, text messaging, e-mail, among others. This form of communication (text-based communication) comes with its peculiar style of writing, creating and re-creating new ways of writing. This paper is an attempt in analysing the various word formation processes employed by Nigerians using the Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) in text messaging.
GSM, which is an abbreviation for Global System for Mobile Communication, is a communication system that does not use wires and cables. It rather uses radio waves according to Homby (2001), and as such, it can be carried about and be used anywhere. Though GSM can be used for many purposes, it is majorly used for call making and text-messaging. However, this paper focuses on text massages.
Temple (2013) observes that technical ideas (with respect to GSM) from various numbers of sources are gathered over the period from 1982-1985. According to him, Europe produced the very first GSM Technical Specification in 1987, which marks the birth or the pivotal year of GSM. However, GSM was introduced in Nigeria in 2001following the January 2001 auction for GSM which attracted mobile phone operators like MTN Nigeria, Econet Wireless Nigeria (now Airtel), MTEL, Globacom and Etisalat to operate digital mobile service in the country. Econet Wireless Nigeria and MTN Nigeria launched their GSM on 7th and 8th of August 2001 respectively. Obviously, GSM subscription rate and phone calls were extremely expensive at inception. However, with the advent of days, they have become relatively affordable that an average household in the country can afford to own as many GSM phones as the number of persons in the household. This makes it possible for young people (even children) to have access to GSM. Consequently, from observation there are innovative ways/styles of writing that accompany the use of GSM to compose text messages, especially by the younger generation in order to reflect local colouration and to, save time, space and cost. In this paper, we look at these innovative styles to find out the word-formation processes employed by Nigerian users of this information technology gadget in their text messages.
Short Message Service (SMS) is a text messaging service component of web, phone or mobile communication systems that makes use of standardised communication protocol which makes it possible for fixed lines or mobile phone devices to exchange short text messages. SMS sends and receives messages of up to 160 characters per page to and from GSM handsets. In other words, there is a limited number of characters that can be sent or received through SMS. This may explain the need to create and re-create new words. This study is inspired by this new form of writing and the styles with which it comes.
Language is in constant change with new words coming into it almost on a daily basis. Though not every new word survives, some eventually find their ways into the vocabulary of the language. Word formation is simply the creation of new words in a language. Fromkin, Rodman and Hyams (2011) observe that new words have quite a number of ways by which they can enter the language. Scholars like Fromkin, Rodman and Hyams (2011); Aronoff an Fudeman (2008); Gries (2006); Peña (2010), among others, have identified these various processes of word formation to include: ISSN 1799-2591
Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 4, No. 11, pp. 2215-2222, November 2014
© 2014 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland.
doi:10.4304/tpls.4.11.2215-2222
© 2014 ACADEMY PUBLISHER
compounding, derivation, coinage, acronym, blending, clipping, back-formation, etc. However, the focus of this paper is on how Nigerian mobile phone users employ these and other processes in forming new words as are evident in their test messages.
For clarity of purpose, this paper is divided into five sections, with the first and the second sections bordering on introduction and views of various authors on the topic respectively. In the third section, the methodology adopted in the paper is discussed, while the various word-formation processes, alongside the resulting new words as identified in SMS, are provided and discussed in the fourth section. Finally, the fifth and sixth sections respectively summarise and conclude the paper.
II. WORD FORMATION PROCESSES: AN OVERVIEW
A word-formation process may be either or all about the following: a way in which an entirely new word comes into a language and/or a way in which a speaker creates complex words from already existing simpler word(s). In line with this view, Lieb (2013) defines word formation as forming new lexical words from already existing words using a word-formation process.
Bryson (1990) cited in Peña (2010) identifies six ways of creating new words which include: by adding to them, by subtracting from them, by making them up, by doing nothing to them, by borrowing from other languages and by mistake. This paper is not interested in the mechanism of doing nothing to them because it is an aspect of historical semantics. Moreover, in addition to the six mechanisms identified by Bryson (1990), Peña (2010) adds another which is: by combining them. Peña (2010) further explains that when we talk of adding to existing words, we mean the use of processes like derivation and compounding. Scholars like Peña (2010); Fromkin, Rodman, and Hyams (2011); Aronoff and Fudeman (2008); etc posit that derivation and compounding are the more productive ways of adding new words into English. Subtracting from them refers to word formation process as clipping; then borrowing and mistake refer to backformation or misspelling while combining them has to do with acronyms and blending or portmanteaus.
Peña (2010) asserts that blending is a word formation process that involves the removing and joining of residues of two or more words in order to create a new word that has form and meaning, which have resemblance with the source words. The meanings and sounds of the two words combined; and the combination may or may not be in their full forms. Little wonder, Gries (2006) and Aronoff and Fudeman (2008) while observing that blending is a highly creative word-formation process explain that this is so, because it is a process that does not adhere to any specific productive rule. In the same vein, Bauer (1983) opines that the blender is actually free to take either as little or as much as he deems necessary to form a blend. Consequently, one can rightly say that blending is the most unpredictable process of word formation.
Peña (2010) also defines borrowing as a process that involves the copying of a word from one language (to which it originally belongs) to another. For there to be a case of borrowing, the two languages involved must have come in contact with each other. Borrowed words often do not remain the way they are in the original/source language. However, they are modified to adhere to the phonological, morphological and syntactic patterns of the borrowing language. Languages that are in contact with one another tend to take-on terms they lack from each other.
In the case of compounding, Olsen (2007) calls the process of forming compounds, composition and posits that two stems from the vocabulary are combined to form a new word. On the other hand, Katić (2013) notes that initialisms and acronyms are shortenings which are derived from the initial letters in a phrase or name, explaining that
… while acronyms are pronounced as “single words” (NASA, AIDS), initialisms are pronounced “as a sequence of letters” (DNA, USA). The difference between these two types lies in how the resulting word is pronounced in spoken language, namely letter by letter or without intermission, (p. 3).
In essence, Katić (2013) is saying that initialisms (also called alphabetisms by Zapata 2007), and acronyms are words that are formed from the initial letters of words, (usually names of organisation or a scientific term, etc), which are pronounced as sequences of letters and as words respectively.
Clipping as another word-formation process, according to Peña (2010), is a process that involves the deletion of a part (usually, one or more syllables) of a word and leaving a certain part of the said word. In clipping, the deletion may take place at any position, initial, final or medial. In other words, any part of the word can be clipped off. Shahla and Amir (2013) posit that it involves abbreviating an already existing word.
In back formation, which is another word-formation process, Shahala and Amir (2013) say that it is a word-formation process where a shorter word (base) is being formed by deleting a supposed/imagined affix from an already existing word in a language. This type of word-formation process is, for instance, used to create verbs from nouns ending in ‘-tion/-sion’ or ‘-or/-er’. Kwary (nd.) says it is a creative reduction of a word due to wrong morphological analysis. This is a process of forming a new word by deleting what looks like a typical affix in the language. Shahla and Amir (2013) later summarise their view by saying that back formation is a process that is motivated by analogy.
Furthermore, Gries (2006) studies the underlying mechanisms for the coining of intentional morphological blends and complex clipping where he asserts that the two word-formation processes are clearly different in relation to the extent to which the source words they involve relate to the output. While the absolute magnitude of this effect is specifically strong in speech, complex clipping behaves nearly like a random word pair when it comes to writing. He states that:
2216 THEORY AND PRACTICE IN LANGUAGE STUDIES
© 2014 ACADEMY PUBLISHER
(i) the formation of blends is in fact substantially correlated with corpus-derived SPs (Selection Points) and that
(ii) a superficially very similar word-formation process, complex clipping, does not exhibit such a tendency, (p. 549).
Furthermore, Gries (1989) opines that this is an indication that “the intentional creation of blends at least suggests that their coiners make use of a general mechanism involved in the comprehension of words when they form a neologism, as if trying to anticipate comprehenders’ strategies” (p. 549).
As it concerns the empirical findings of other scholars, Peña (2010) carries out a contrastive study of word-formation processes in the English and Spanish languages with a view to contrasting the mechanisms used by the two languages in coining new words. She does this by describing each of the processes with examples in order to determine the frequency and productivity of the mechanisms in each of the languages. The work shows that both languages have corresponding coinage mechanisms which vary in frequency and productivity. Peña (2010:408) goes on to state,
These processes are derivation, compounding, clipping, borrowing, backformation, acronyms and blending. Derivation and borrowing are highly prolific mechanisms in both languages; compounding is very much used in English but not so common in Spanish; the rest are less prolific and more or less equally frequent in both languages.
Shahla and Amir (2013) have carried out a comparative study of the different word-formation processes used in Ilami, a dialect of Kurdish and that of the English language to see if there are similarities or differences in the ways these two languages form new words. By looking at different strategies of word formation like derivation, compounding, blending, abbreviation, etc, they discover that Kurdish makes use of compounding more than English. They also observe that Ilami makes less use of derivation to form new words. In addition, other processes of word formation were discovered to be rarely or never used in Ilami. Shahla and Amir (2013:83) believe that “Kurdish (as a whole and Ilami as a dialect of it), unlike English does not have a written form and is not an official language; these factors remarkably decrease the level of word-formation productivity in this language (and dialect).” Therefore, they are of the view that since word- formation processes have some kind or relation with written language, it should not be surprising that these processes are rare in Ilami.
Plag (2002) writes on word formation processes in English computer mediated communication (CMC and SMS). The summary of his findings show the following:
a. that native languages/dialects influence patterns of writing in CMC and SMS
b. that pronunciation spelling (which usually manifests in SMS/CMC) is not considered as a method of creating new words, but non-standard orthographic representation of words motivated by mother tongue interference
In conclusion, there are various ways by which new words find their ways into the vocabulary of a language – by adding to them (through the use of a processes like derivation and compounding); by subtracting from them (through the use of process like clipping); borrowing; mistakes (which involves a process like back-formation) and combining them (through processes like blending and acronyms). We can also have outright coinage, where an entirely new word is coined. In this case, it does not involve an already existing word. On this basis, as we can see above, linguists have carried out researches on word-formation processes in different languages of the world and also in various aspects of language.
III. METHODOLOGY
This study is a descriptive survey. The researchers engaged the assistance of six field assistants. Two persons each were appointed for the three locations that serve as the areas of the study. Moreover, the youths (within the age bracket of 15-35) make up the population of the study. The youths are purposely chosen because they are more involved in the use of ICT. The researchers observe that these ‘new words’ in Nigerian SMS are common among the youths and do not necessarily cut across the entire GSM users. With the use of purposive cluster random sampling method, the researchers sampled two urban and one rural area within the southern, northern and western parts of the country. Data were collected from these locations viz: Enugu (for the South) and Kano and Lagos (for North and West respectively), with SMS from mobile phones serving as the primary source of data. The respondents were approached and they granted the researchers and field assistants access to the text messages they sent out within a period of two weeks. Additionally, library and the internet serve as secondary sources from where books, articles and papers relating to the topic were reviewed.
Within the selected locations, five respondents were randomly selected; making a total of fifteen respondents in each area. Eight hundred and ten messages (messages in the English language) were extracted from their phones. This number gives an average of about ten messages per respondent. However, only one hundred and forty (140) items were seen to contain the kind of words the paper is interested in, (i.e. words that are not in normal Standard English forms). Consequently, 140 words were used for this study. The data so collected were descriptively analysed, viz.: clipping, sound reduction involving deletion, alpha-numeric, and initialisms involving abbreviations. In the analysis, emphasis is on what actually happens to the source word (the words from which the new ones emanate). In other words, the analysis focuses on the patterns adopted by the respondents in creating the ‘new words’ from the already existing ones.
IV. WORD FORMATION PROCESSES IDENTIFIED IN NIGERIAN SMS
A. Clipping
THEORY AND PRACTICE IN LANGUAGE STUDIES 2217
© 2014 ACADEMY PUBLISHER
1. cred credit 12. coz/bcos because
2. oft often 13. takia/tkia take care
3. sis sister 14. bhind behind
4. val Valentine 15. bday birthday
5. gen generator 16. pple people
6. esp especially 17. lil little
7. moro tomorrow 18. hols holidays
8. ope hope 19. abt about
9. ave have 20. pix picture
10. api happy 21. bros brother
11. xtian (clipping involving sound deletion) Christian
A look at items 1 – 19 above suggests that there is a pattern by which some letters are laid off and others retained for the respective clips to be formed. 1 – 6 above show that what is clipped off are letters that are at the end of the words with the consequent clip coming from the remaining part of the word-initial letters, back-clipping/apocopation; while in examples 7 - 10, what are clipped off are letters that are at the beginning of the respective words, fore-clipping/aphaeresis, retaining the final part. It is important to note here that example 10 does not adhere strictly to this rule. Apart from reducing the double ‘p’ to a single one, the letter ‘y’ is also substituted for ‘i’, depicting its sound. In examples 11 - 16, clipping takes the form of the first letter of the first syllable (or a letter that sounds like it as in example 11 above) and the whole of the subsequent syllable or a representation (what sounds like it as in 12-13 above) of the syllable. However, in examples 17-19 above, clips are formed by taking letters partly from the beginning as well as the ending of the words. On the contrary, there is no exact pattern involved in forming clips in examples 20-21 above except that the first, second as well as the first, second and third letters in the respective words are retained. It is also noteworthy to point out that ‘pix’ and ‘bros’ in the context of SMS in Nigeria can be used for both singular and plural. Summarily, in all the instances, words are reduced to some of their parts.
B (i) Sound reduction involving deletion of letters
22. wit with 43. dis this
23. wat what 44. dat that
24.
