‘THE MORPHOLOGICAL PHENOMENA-CLIPPING’

‘THE MORPHOLOGICAL PHENOMENA-CLIPPING’

By: Devani Adinda (SIGPD 605)

                During the preparation for this paper, I became so curious about what is clipping. How we use clippings in everyday language and which form, the original or the clipped word is using more often. Even more interesting is to find out which context is better to say, are clippings still assumed as more colloquial or could same words already are taken over into Standard English and therefore into the academic world? Are clipping restricted to either spoken or written language? To answer those questions, I have read some articles from Http://www.grin.com/en/e-book/150807/the-word-formation-process-clipping, and I found out that clipping is a word-formation process.

·         Clipping

As already mentioned in the first paragraph, ‘clipping’ is a word-formation process, but also the result of the process itself called ‘clipping’. In general it can be said, that ‘word formation is concerned with the process that expands the vocabulary of a language’ (Kortmann 2005: p.94).

‘Clipping is the process of shortening a word without changing its meaning or its part or speech’ according to Laurie Baver.

However, these less productive word-formation processes, especially clipping, continuously get more and more important in our daily life. This is due to the laziness on one hand and the increasing familiarity with the particular subject on the other hand.

This is becomes obvious in the word-formation process ‘clipping’. For the example the clipped words: from ‘advertisement’ is ‘ad’, and ‘demonstration’ is ‘demo’ nowadays.

·         Summary

According to me, clipping is the process of removing some material from a longer word into the simple one, and it doesn’t change the meaning. We used to clip so many words in our daily language to be easy to understand. I will give you one clipped word: Brother, we used to say it like ‘Bro’, we clipped ‘ther’ in that word, and that’s clipping. Most speaker and listener don’t think it’s necessary to use the whole word to identify the topic, but they all know what is the meaning exactly. I think a clipped word is belonging to informal conversation, or you say it is like a spoken language.

                You will never know that you used to clipping words in daily conversation, and I bet you will get ‘A’ if all the number of your Phonology exam was about clipping word, because it’s too easy to understand. Here is the example of Clipping Words:

a.    Hamburger   > Burger                               f. Bicycle     > Bike

b.   Brother          > Bro                                     g. Airplane  > Plane

c.    Sister               > Sis                                       h. Raccoon  > Coon

d.   Examination > Exam                                 i.  Influenza > Flue

e.   Telephone    > Phone                               j.  Congratulation > Congrats