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1. Kanji: Japanese Word Formation Arranged by: Sheryll Rania Faradillah Syauki NIM: 200705088 UNIVERSITY OF NORTH SUMATERA ENGLISH LITERATURE

2. I. Introduction In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Morphology also looks at parts of speech, intonation and stress, and the ways context can change a word's pronunciation and meaning. Morphology differs from morphological typology, which is the classification of languages based on their use of words, and lexicology, which is the study of words and how they make up a language's vocabulary. Morphology studies the patterns of formation of words by the combination of sounds into minimal distinctive units of meaning called morphemes. Morphology is the study of morphemes, which are the smallest significant units of grammar. Morphology is a level of structure between the phonological and syntactic. In order to understand morphology, you need to know the term morpheme, which is the smallest unit of a word with meaning. That meaning is how language conveys messages. Morphemes are more than just letters. When a number of letters are put together into a word part that now has meaning, then you have a morpheme. Morphology studies how these units of meaning, or word parts, can be arranged in a language. The Japanese language is agglutinative; that is, it forms words by putting together basic elements, called morphemes, that retain their original forms and meanings with little change during the combination process. A morpheme is a distinctive linguistic unit of relatively stable meaning that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts. As a rule, each Chinese character represents one morpheme.

3. II.Discussion Kanji (漢字) are the adopted logographic Chinese characters that are used in the Japanese writing system. They are used alongside the Japanese syllabic scripts hiragana and katakana. The Japanese term kanji for the Chinese characters literally means "Han characters". It is written with the same characters as in Traditional Chinese to refer to the character writing system, hanzi (漢字). Although some Kanji will have similar meaning and pronunciation as Chinese, some can have very different meanings and pronunciations as well e. g. 誠, meaning 'honest' in both Chinese and Japanese, is pronounced makoto or sei in Japanese, but pronounced chéng in Chinese. The most important word-formation processes in Japanese are described below. The examples are taken from my dictionary, The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary. 1.Compounding Compounding consists of combining two or more words or word elements having their own lexical meaning (having a substantial meaning of their own) to produce a new unit that functions as a single word. Since the Chinese characters are extremely productive in their ability to generate new words, compounding plays a major role in Japanese word- formation. By combining a stock of a few thousand characters, hundreds of thousands of compound words are created. Traditionally, a compound word is considered to be a combination of two or more free words, such as headwaiter, which consists of head and waiter. In Japanese, a compound may be any combination of free words, combining forms, and affixes that together function as a single word. The resulting compound is distinct from, but related to, its constituent components. For example, the compound 造船所zo_senjo 'shipyard' consists of the free word 造船 'shipbuilding' (造 'make; build' + 船 'ship') followed by the suffix 所 'place'.

4. 2.Derivation Derivation refers to creating a new word by adding to a stem a word element such as a suffix that expresses grammatical meaning but has no lexical meaning. For example, in English the adverb-forming derivational suffix ly is attached to the base form great to form the adverb greatly. In Japanese, the noun 黒kuro 'black' is combined with the adjective- forming suffix いi to form the adjective 黒いkuroi 'black'. It is important to note that words formed through derivation are distinct words in their own right, not merely variants of the word from which they are derived. 3.Inflection Inflection consists of adding word endings or modifying the form of a word in order to indicate various grammatical functions, such as tense (called conjugation,) or number and case (called declension.) The resulting word is another form of the original word, not a new word in itself. For example, worked is the past tense of work and books is the plural form of book. In Japanese, the last syllable of the verb 帰るkaeru 'to return' is inflected to yield 帰れkaere, the imperative form. Inflectional word endings in Japanese are usually written in hiragana. Morphological Functions of Kanji Each character may, in addition to one or more meanings, have various grammatical and syntactic functions. One of the most important characteristics of kanji is their role as word elements; that is, their ability to form countless compound words by being combined with each other. New words can be formed by adding an affix (suffix or prefix) to a base form, or by joining combining forms with each other. For example, the suffix -済- zumi 'completed' is attached to 点検tenken 'inspection' to yield 点済tenkenzumi 'inspection completed'. Another important function of kanji is as a free word, which is any word that can be used independently. Other functions include abbreviations, function words, counters, units, titles, numerals, and phonetic substitutes. Affixes, combining forms, and free words can be combined with each other in various ways.

5. III.Conclusion The word Kanji originated from the Chinese Characters that is used to describe nouns, adjective and all sort of words. The kanji can be followed by Hiragana words or stand alone. Each Chinese character represents one morpheme.For example, in English the adverb-forming derivational suffix ly is attached to the base form great to form the adverb greatly. Which is used in Japanese but replaced by Hiragana words to accompany Kanji. Inflection consists of adding word endings or modifying the form of a word in order to indicate various grammatical functions. Inflectional word endings in Japanese are usually written in hiragana. One of the most important characteristics of kanji is their role as word elements; that is, their ability to form countless compound words by being combined with each other. Another important function of kanji it can include abbreviations, function words, counters, units, titles, numerals, and phonetic substitutes.