Proses Pemendekan dalam Pembentukan Kata Submorfologi Bahasa Melayu: Satu Tinjauan Awal

Typically, word formation contains the process of combination or fusion of base morpheme with other morpheme(s), such as affixation, compounding, and multiplication. However, there are word formations that do not employ the morpheme as the basis for creating new words, as seen in clipping, blends, acronym, and alphabetism. The processes of word formation that do not show morphological characteristics can be called ‘nonmorphological word formation’, or for this article, the term ‘submorphological word formation’ is used. As has happened in the world of Western linguistic research, Malay language scholars have contradictions and inconsistencies in many aspects of their analysis of submorphological word formation in the Malay language. This article aims to review forms of shortening that exist in the Malay language by applying a taxonomy and approach of submorphological word formation of Lopez Rua. This theory is generally able to categorize the Malay language’s shortening items, thereby becoming a framework for the Malay language submorphological word formation. However, there is a unique type of shortening form in this language that is not covered by the theory of this Western scholar, which in this article is referred to as the ‘representative word-form’