PROPER WORDS TO COMMON WORDS CONVERSION: THE FAMOUS, THE INFAMOUS AND THE GROWTH OF INFORMAL LEXICON

Abstract

This paper seeks to describe the conversion (one of word formation processes) from proper words to common words in Indonesian. By the time this paper was written, JONRU ‘to lie’ and TEDJO ‘to be reckless’ were quote infamous: the frequency of occurrence was quite productive especially in social media. In terms of the morphological forms, the word formation follows the affix formation in Indonesian. The semantic features of these words refer to the negative prosodies that these words carry, which seem to root from how people assess their quality. I argue that the conversion is aimed at performing evaluation on personal quality regardless of its morphological forms. The trigger of this phenomenon seems to be the events where mass media mostly pay attention to; and this is commonly negative in meaning. Consider also di-munirkan ‘to be assasinated’ and di-gusdurkan ‘to be impeached’ where MUNIR (a human right activist) was assassinated and GUSDUR (4 th Indonesian President) was impeached. There are some other cases when they do not specifically relate to the evaluation but using the person’s fame to make it widely used such as SUDOMO, which is an acronym of Susu Doi Montok (sexy breasts). However, it is important to realize that the objects of the research in this paper 1) are not used in formal situation 2) are productive in a short span of time and 3) are understood in condition that the knowledge is shared among speakers.