MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF CONTENT AND FUNCTIONWORDS FROM ENGLISH SLANG

Abstract

Content words and function words are important linguistic units under the field ofmorphology, 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 sourceobtained from the Internet. This study used a qualitative approach with the method of contentanalysis and descriptive analysis for its findings. In this paper, the researchers selected a datasource of 100 slang words for the analysis, and those 100 slang words were categorized intodifferent morphological processes, namely 'Content Word', and 'Function Word'. Content wordis a category in this research, and Function word is the other category for putting in the resultsof identification on particular words under analysis. Upon the identifying and categorizinganalysis, the researchers then selected the two categories as the points of findings as well asdiscussions upon them. This study proved that the changes in the meaning of slang words wereinfluenced by certain morphological processes by adjusting the original word categories. As aresult, some terms in slang words retained their original meanings even though their spellingchanged. Meanwhile, some other slang words changed the meaning by changing the wordcategory. In addition, certain slang words changed their meaning depending on the usage ofthe word within sentences. Upon the results of the findings, it is hoped that content word andfunction word linguistic behaviors can be learned more easily, and the model of analysis canbe applied to other contexts of similar research.