Samoan (Austronesian)

What makes Samoan an interesting contrast to Turkish and Mandarin is that it uses a wide variety of word formation processes without seeming to favor one over another. To pursue our mechanical metaphor, its toolbag is chock-full of different tools. In this language we can find prefixation, suffixation, and circumfixation, both partial and full reduplication, and also to some extent compounding. There’s also even a bit of internal stem change in the form of a morphological process of vowel lengthening. Here are some examples:

The prefix fa’a can be put on either verbs or nouns to make verbs meaning ‘cause X’ or ‘make X’ or ‘put X on’.

Although Mosel and Hovdhaugen say that prefixes are usually mutually exclusive – that is, there can only be one in a word – the circumfix fe- -a’i can occur outside the prefix fa’a-, as you see in the word in (19):

In addition to prefixes and circumfixes, Samoan can also form words by suffixation: 

Suffixing -ga to a verb and lengthening the first vowel of the verb stem forms another kind of derived noun which can be concrete and often, according to Mosel and Hovdhaugen (1992: 195) has a flavor of plurality:

The vowel lengthening that occurs in this process can be considered a form of internal stem change.

Samoan is also rich in processes of reduplication, as we already saw in section 5.4. As we saw there, Samoan has a process of partial reduplication that forms verbs from nouns. To repeat example (10) from chapter 5:

Partial reduplication can also be used to make ergative verbs from nonergative verbs:

In both cases, partial reduplication copies the first consonant and vowel of the base.

New words are also formed in Samoan by full reduplication. We saw one example (9b) in section 5.4, which is repeated in (24), and another example is given in (25):

In (25) we see a process of full reduplication that takes verbs and makes them into frequentatives, that is, forms that mean ‘X repeatedly’, or intensives, forms that mean ‘X a lot’.

Finally, Samoan also has compounding, as the examples in (26) show:

These examples are all left-headed endocentric attributive compounds. As we can see, although compounding in Samoan is possible, this language has nowhere near the richness of compound types that can be found in Mandarin.

Interestingly, although Samoan sentences express case relations (ergative/absolutive) and clauses are marked for tense, aspect, and mood, Samoan has no inflectional paradigms (Mosel and Hovdhaugen 1992: 169). In fact. relations like case, tense, aspect, and mood are expressed by independent particles, rather than by prefixes, suffixes, or reduplication, in this language; hence most of our examples here have been derivational.