English -o Clipping as Social Morphology

We discuss a word formation rule that goes beyond ‘logical content’ or truth- conditional semantics in its meaning. This rule is a rare instance of social morphology. Most linguistic analysis is rooted in the view that language is for conveying the truth. Other functions of language include the expressive and social functions, but these have been seen as lying outside grammar. While expressive syntax has recently been subject to formal analysis, the only expressive morphological phenomena that have received much attention are evaluatives (diminutives and augmentatives), which also lend themselves to expressive use. Purely social morphology has long been thought to lie outside the realm of language. The most extensive social morphology in English involves clipping, including the use of clipping to form hypocoristics (e.g., Will from William). Here we present a detailed analysis of a related phenomenon, a trochaic template ending in /o/ that has two distinct uses. In one, longer nouns are mapped onto this template to convey an attitude of casual familiarity. The earlier cases of this mapping use a base, often a neoclassical compound, whose second syllable already ends in /o/ (e.g., photo from photograph). More recently, the rule has been extended to other bases (e.g., ammo from ammunition and convo from conversation). A possibly related rule adds -o to a monosyllable (either a noun or an adjective) to produce words like boyo and weirdo and carries a similar familiar or casual tone.