Comparative study of compound words in English and Indonesian Fransiska Napitupulu

Inflection 
Inflection is a general grammatical process words and affixes to produce 
alternative grammatical forms of words. For example, the plural morpheme is an 
inflectional morpheme. This implies that the plural form roses, for instance, does not 
represent a lexical item fundamentally different from the singular forms rose, it is simply 
an inflectional variant of the same word. Similarly, the addition of the comparative 
inflection (-er) to the adjective cold gives colder, which is not a different lexical item, but 
an inflectional variant of the same word. 
The above defenitions and examples show that the distinction between inflection 
and derivation is mainly morphological. While the application of inflection leads to 
formation of alternative grammatical forms of the same word, that of derivation creates 
new vocabularies items. This is the basic difference between inflection and derivation.
Compounding 
In some of those example we have just consider, there is a joining of two separate 
words to produce a single form. Compounding is one of the most important word 
information processes that may create and enrich the vocabulary of the English words. 
Conversion 
Conversion may be defined as a process by which a word belonging to one word 
class is transferred to another word class without any concomitant change or form, either 
pronounciation or spelling. In this fact, this word-formation process occurs so regularly 
that many scholars prefer to consider it as a matter of syntactic usage rather than as word-
formation ( by Bauer 1983:227). For example: the use of uncountable nouns as 
countable, ‘some beer / coffe sugar / tea’. Whereas in ‘two beers / coffes sugars / teas’, 
the nouns are countable. As a general rule, if the context is carefully chosen. 
Blends 
A blends may be defined as a new lexeme built from parts of two words in such a 
way that the constituent parts are usually easily identifiable. For instance, brunch ( 
breakfast + lunch), slanguage ( slang + language), infotainment( information + 
entertaiment). 
Shortenings 
Shortening which is notice able in blending, is event more apparent in the process 
describe as shortening. This occcurs when a word of more than one syllable ( for 
example telephone) is reduce to a shorter form (phone), often in casual speech. Other 
example: flu ( influenza), plane ( aeroplane).