Language users have a remarkable ability to create, produce, and comprehend complex words. Words such as 'undercut' and 'bakery' appear to be composed of units, traditionally called morphemes, that recombine in rule-like ways to form other words, such as 'underline' and 'cannery'. However, morphological systems are quasi-regular; they are systematic and productive but admit many seemingly irregular forms. Thus, 'bakery' is related to bake and 'cannery' to can but what is the groce in 'grocery'? There is no liver in 'deliver', corn in 'corner'. Such words exhibit partial regularities concerning the correspondences between form and meaning, the treatment of which has important implications for linguistic and psycholinguistic theories. This article describes an approach to morphological phenomenon called the convergence theory, in which morphology is a graded, inter-level representation that reflects correlations among orthography, phonology, and semantics. Our goal in this opinion piece is to articulate an approach to think about complex words rather than exhaustively review the literature or propose a specific model and so some disclaimers are in order. The article emphasises the phenomena concerning derivational morphology in English; issues concerning other types of morphology and cross-linguistic variation are discussed only briefly
Research Scholar, Dept. of English Ranchi University, Ranchi
