Selected Word-Formation Processes in Tok Pisin: Compounding, Conversion and Reduplication

The present article scrutinises the linguistic research on word-formation processes in Tok Pisin - the major pidgin language in Papua New Guinea. In the first part of this paper, a few important facts about the very language - Tok Pisin - are given. Then, the article presents selected word-formation processes that are employed in Tok Pisin. The attention is focused only on compounding, conversion and reduplication. Each word formation mechanism discussed in this paper is illustrated by a number of examples. The examples are derived from the corpus of 17 news items written in Tok Pisin and obtained from the official Internet website of ABC Radio Australia, Australian Broadcasting Corporation in November 2004 (http://www.abc.net.au/ra/).