A morphological analysis of complex nouns in the Malaysian University English Test (MUET) reading comprehension texts

Leong Mi-Chelle,

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The knowledge of vocabulary is one important aspect in reading comprehension. Therefore, various techniques have been introduced by scholars for vocabulary development. One of the techniques extensively recommended by scholars is morphological analysis. The knowledge of morphology of English words proves to go a long way in comprehension as English words are made up of morphemes that contribute meanings to the words as whole. The reading comprehension texts of the Malaysian University English Test (MUET) contain an enormous amount of nouns as these are content words. A brief examination of these content words reveals that most of them are complex nouns. It is deemed important to understand these complex nouns as the texts are made sense through the understanding of these complex nouns. Therefore, this study is carried out to examine the morphology of the complex nouns to obtain some knowledge on the nature of the complex nouns and the word parts of the complex nouns. The findings of this study reveal that suffix is the most common type of word part. The way the complex nouns are formed can generally be classified into eight groups according to the number of affixes in a complex noun. However, the results generated from this study indicate that most of the complex nouns are formed with one suffix through the process of affixation.

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