A study of the morphological processes of neologisms in the media / Joyes Sheela A/P Subrayan @ Michael

This research report investigates the morphological processes used in forming neologisms found in the Malaysian English media. The morphological processes adopted in this study are based on Murray’s (1995) list: affixation, compounding, reduplication, conversion, borrowing, acronymy, clipping, blending, onomatopaeia and antonomasia. 70 Neologisms are selected from The Edge weekly and their word classes are analysed from a quantitative approach. The classification of the samples is based on their contextual meaning in the source (The Edge weekly newspaper). The morphological processes of the samples collected are analyzed qualitatively. The findings of the study are analyzed to determine the types of processes that are frequently employed to form Neologisms. The results are used to determine which morphological processes are most frequently used in forming Neologisms found in the local media and what word classes they belong to. The results show that the local media seem to be using more words formed through compounding and that most of the new words that are being formed in this era are nouns. The paper concludes that although there are no new or unknown morphological processes that have been introduced as yet, some Neologisms are formed through a combination of at least two morphological processe