Introduction to our study sparked by the word <automatic>

Some of what happened in our first session of the current WordWorks Teacher course is described below. It may sound complicated, but in the context of an organic conversation with people putting their heads together to check theories with references, and word sums on black boards, the concepts discussed in the account below helped us understand the structures and connections of words in a way that is not possible without the exact language we need to use.

While I would not go this speed through concepts in a student classroom, these terms and concepts that came up in our conversation are all important to help children make sense of words they work with every day. When introduced in an appropriate way, concepts like combining form, connector vowel and clip are tools that students use happily in their own word investigations. The account below is simply a quicker version of the kind of investigations I did with my own grade 4 class.

Part of the orthographic investigation in session 1 of the current WordWorks Teacher Course:

The word web illustrated below (minus a couple of small details) was just one of the pieces of evidence of the intellectually engaged classroom environment that Skot Caldwell nurtures in his grade 5 class at Rideau Heights. This fine example greeted the first session of the second WordWorks Teacher course on Tuesday, January 23 that Skot was hosting. As the teachers began arriving, discussion about this web had already begun. In their study of the word <automatic> that had come up in his class, someone opened one of their well used dictionaries and cited the “combining form” <auto-> for ‘self acting’. Skot was asking for some clarification of this term.

This is a term that you will frequently find in dictionaries, and it’s something that I have had a good deal of experience in working with Real Spelling. It turns out that combining forms are common and can cause a bit of confusion because they are not fully analyzed units of spelling, but it is often assumed that they are. Essentially, combining forms are common bound bases together with a structural unit of spelling called a “connector vowel”. A bound base is a base that cannot stand on its own as a word, but that still carries the core meaning of the derivations it builds. For example,  <rupt> is a bound base for ‘break’ in words like <rupture>, <interrupt>, <corruption>. Often these bound bases come together with a separate vowel letter called a “connector” vowel to build a stem that can build various words.

I had never considered whether <auto> was a base in itself, or a bound base with an <-o-> connector vowel before. The fact that Skot’s dictionary called it a combining form made me fairly certain that it was. There is a good reason to determine if <auto> is a single unit, or a combination of two elements. If we leave <auto-> as a combining form without investigating further, then we might be missing members of this word family that do not use the connector vowel. Skot and his students had identified the words <automate>, <automobile> and <autobiography> all of which include the full letter string <auto>. The challenge we had was to find a word that used <aut>, that also carried a meaning related to “self acting”.

Being naturally lazy, I was ready to jump onto the Word Searcher to type in the letter string <aut> to see what came up. Before I fired up the net, Skot had rifled through his dictionary and discovered the word <autism>. We had our answer. The meaning and spelling connection was undeniable. The word structure of <autism> must be the base <aut> with the common suffix <-ism>. Fortuitously, Skot mentioned that he and his class had just been discussing this condition in class the previous week! Being able to add this word to their word web would not only deepen their understanding of this word, it would introduce them to another tool to investigate words in the future. Whenever they ran into the term “combining form” in their dictionary (it will happen a lot in Skot’s class) they know to look a little deeper than their dictionary.

Just to show that my Word Searcher rarely lets me down, I did do a search to see what other words came up. Indeed it found <autism> and many other words only some of which were related to this base. For example <author> contains the <aut> string, but both the unrelated meaning of the word, and the non-existing suffix <*-hor> makes this an easy one to eliminate.

Another important English convention came up in our class as a result of this investigation. We noted that not only is there a “combining form” <auto-> that is recognized as having the structure <aut+o->, but there is a word <auto> that we drive. How do we deal with that? It turns out that <auto> became a base as a result of English speakers getting tired of saying the mouthful <automobile>. It became easier to clip that word into <auto>. When we create a shorter word without paying attention to morphemic boundaries of a longer word, linguists call that word a “clip”. The word <auto> can’t be a combining form because it isn’t combining, and it can’t have a connector vowel because it isn’t connecting. Language use has simply created a new base spelled <auto> that has a clear etymological connection to the base <aut>. Clips are very helpful to understand because they help make sense of spellings that appear not to follow conventions of complete English words. I was introduced to clips when my grade 4 student came up to me with his Goosebumps book and said, “Mr. B. I just noticed this word <revving>. Didn’t you tell us that you are not supposed to use a double <v> in English words?” That sparked our investigation that got us to the concept of a clip, and reminded us that the pattern for <v> needs to be stated more exactly: “No complete English word ends in the letter <v>, or uses <vv>.” I’ll leave you to sort the story of <revving> out yourself.

Another observation was that the word <autobiography> is particularly rich in connector vowels. You will find <bio-> listed in most good dictionaries as a combining form for ‘life’. If you see the word combining form, you should think “where’s the connector vowel?” In this case the bound base for ‘life’ is <bi> with an <-o-> connector vowel. (We need to be careful to separate the base <bi> from the prefix <bi-> for ‘two’). This is actually a useful one to illustrate another problem in working with combining forms without realizing they are complex units. You will also find the combining form <-ology>  in most good dictionaries. If we combined these to combining forms, we would end up with the spelling <*bioology>. I know about the combining form <-ology> because I analyzed it as I was working on the morphology of morphology...

Note the obvious meaning connection between the base <loge> for ‘speech, word, account, reason’ and the meaning of the stem, or combining form that we take for ‘study of’. Also note that if we are tied to the combining form instead of the base and connector vowel, we lose the connection to the word <logic> which is built: loge/+ic --> logic.