MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF CONTENT AND FUNCTIONWORDS FROM ENGLISH SLANG

Abstract

Content words and function words are important linguistic units under the field of
morphology, as the words make up bigger linguistic units, i.e. phrases, clauses, and sentences.
The present research entitled "Analysis of Content and Function Words from English Slang"
aims to study the morphological processes of slang words in English, with the data source
obtained from the Internet. This study used a qualitative approach with the method of content
analysis and descriptive analysis for its findings. In this paper, the researchers selected a data
source of 100 slang words for the analysis, and those 100 slang words were categorized into
different morphological processes, namely 'Content Word', and 'Function Word'. Content word
is a category in this research, and Function word is the other category for putting in the results
of identification on particular words under analysis. Upon the identifying and categorizing
analysis, the researchers then selected the two categories as the points of findings as well as
discussions upon them. This study proved that the changes in the meaning of slang words were
influenced by certain morphological processes by adjusting the original word categories. As a
result, some terms in slang words retained their original meanings even though their spelling
changed. Meanwhile, some other slang words changed the meaning by changing the word
category. In addition, certain slang words changed their meaning depending on the usage of
the word within sentences. Upon the results of the findings, it is hoped that content word and
function word linguistic behaviors can be learned more easily, and the model of analysis can
be applied to other contexts of similar research.