Morphological Awareness: The impact of Derivation on the English Lexicon

Villa María

Jornada; Terceras Jornadas de English Language Teaching en la UNVM: Rethinking English Language Teaching; 2015

Universidad Nacional de Villa María

Languages are continuously changing in order to fulfil their users needs. In the ecological field, environmental concerns and new realities have triggered the creation of new words through different processes of word formation. The aim of this work is to analyse the impact of one of the most productive processes of word formation in English, morphological derivation, on the enrichment of the English lexicon related to ecology issues. Following the theoretical tenets of lexical morphology and based on key concepts proposed by Aronoff (2011) and Boij (2005), we focus on lexemes resulting from affixation. The corpus for this study is composed of twenty articles about environmental issues published online on well-known English newspapers during 2013. Our results indicate that English speakers have mainly enriched the lexicon of the ecology field by adding prefixes and affixes to already-existing nouns, adjectives and verbs. From a pedagogical point of view, such results lead us to believe that the development of morphological awareness plays an important role in, at least, vocabulary learning.