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Crafting meaning Academic Communication for Advanced Secondary Schools

end of a word to change them to other words. Some words have taken affixes at the end
and in that way get assigned a particular grammatical property such as a tense, number,
possession or comparison. Some suffixes have specific grammatical functions of a new
word, such as comparison, number, tense, or possession but do not change the word
class and some prefixes and suffixes change both the meaning and word class of a word.
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Exercise 1�2
Study the words you have formed in exercise 1.1 and categorise them as:

1. Words changed to other word categories by prefix.
2. Words assigned a particular grammatical property e.g., number, possession,
tense and comparison.

Compounding
Compounding is a process of combining two or more words to create a word with different
meaning. There are three types of compounds namely open compound, closed compound
and hyphenated compound. With open compounds two distinct words combined but with
space between them. For example, words data and base are combined to form the word
data base. Closed compounds is a result of combining two distinct words and writing
them as one (i.e., without space between them). For example, words fire and fighter form
the term firefighter. With hyphenated compounds, two distinct words are written by
connecting them with hyphens. For example words type and writer are written as type-
writer. Compound words can acquire new meaning, which are distinct from their original
meaning. Compounding has become a common word formation technique which can
significantly increase the size of a lexicon. As technology and society develop, many new
vocabulary items emerge in the language to accommodate the inventions and changes.

Exercise 1�3

Complete the table below by forming new words under each given type of compound.
Then, construct a sentence for each word you have formed.

Type of compound Words

Open compounds

Closed compounds

Hyphenated compounds

Student’s Book Form Five
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30-Jun-24 11:02:01 AM
Academic Communication.indd 3
Academic Communication.indd 3 30-Jun-24 11:02:01 AM