Morphological Analysis Of Hybrid Compounds In Urdu Afsanas (Short Stories)

Abstract

One of the significant morphological processes in a language is the way separate lexemes combine to form compound words. This process gives birth to Hybrid compound. Hybrid compounds are the compounds which are formed by the combination of one word from the source and one from the target language. As Pakistan and India have been British colonies and English still holds elite status in these regions, Urdu and Hindi have a large number of lexis which borrowed from English.  The paper aims at analyzing the existence and nature of hybrid compounds in Urdu Language resulting from borrowing English words. A qualitative study was carried out by researchers and the selected corpus from Urdu short stories of Saadat Hussain Manto, Intazar Hussain, Shafeeq-ur-Rahman, Patras Bukhari, and Nimrah Ahmed was used to explore hybrid compounds in Urdu Literature. Fifty compound words were identified out of which 20 Hybrid compounds were observed. Partial borrowing was observed in short stories which provides evidence of hybrid compounding. Endocentric attributive, coordinative and subordinative and Exocentric attributive and subordinative compounds were observed and analyzed. Semantic transparency has been detected in all endocentric compounds where semantic opacity appears in exocentric compounds with some cultural schema at work.