A Morphological Analysis of Word Formation Process Used in Mobile Application Names

Abstract

A study of the word formation process, especially in mobile application names is interesting to study since there has not been sufficient research that studies this phenomenon. In this case, the researcher was interested in revealing the word formation process found in mobile application names in Google Play Store. This study was a content analysis that employed word formation process proposed by Yule (2010). Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the word formation process found in mobile application names in Google Play Store with several categories. The findings showed that the word formation process occurred in four processes, namely compounding, blending, derivation, and multiple processes. Here, the multiple processes dominate the other processes which occurred in four application names. The compounding processes occurred in two applications, followed by the blending processes with two occurrences, and the other two appeared in the derivation process. Nevertheless, the clipping, acronym, coinage, and borrowing processes were not found in this study. Hence, the results indicate that the word formation processes in mobile application names also employed capitalization stylistic to raise more appealing brands. Therefore, the researcher suggests that future researchers can fill in the gap on the word formation process in particular scopes such as in game and e-commerce application names.