Various ways of word-building

The English vocabulary is constantly changing. Some words drop out of it, new words appear.

Word-building is a process of creating new words from the material available in the language after certain structural and semantic patterns.

e.g. "driver" is formed after the pattern V+er, (i.e. a verb stem + the noun-forming suffix -er)

Under the term "word-building" many types of enriching the English Vocabulary are combined.

І. The most important among them is morphological type, in which a new word is formed by means of uniting morphemes. The morphological type is subdivided into such ways of word-formation:

1. Affixation (or derivation) - which is the creation of new words by means of affixes.

e.g. luck – lucky - unlucky - unluckily

2. Composition - a very ancient but still productive way of forming new words by means of combining two or more root morphemes together.

e.g. inkpot, text-book, black-board

3. Shortening (abbreviation) in which the word loses one or more sounds.

e.g. vacation – vac, telephone – phone

4. Reduplication with the repetition of the stem

e.g. shilly-shally, walky-talky, murmur

ІІ. A very productive type of forming new words in English is so called morphologo-syntactic conversion.

e.g. paper – to paper

ІІІ. Lexico-semantic type.

Rather productive type of word-formation of a new word without any morphological or syntactic changes but when only the semantic structure of the word is changed.

e.g. film – плёнка

film - картина

Affixation – such a way of word-building when we form new words by adding suffixes or prefixes. Once affixes were separate independent words. What is now a suffix was at some period of time a separate word.

e.g. dom – a state, condition

ship – to create, to shape

hood – the state of being

Affixes can be viewed from three points: etymology, functions and productivity.

As to their etymology affixes are subdivided into 2 groups:

1. Native or Germanic (affixes created in English language itself at different periods of its development – under, out, er, hood, dom, ness)

2. Borrowed from Latin, Greek, French (pre, anti, age, ation)

As to their function affixes are subdivided into:

1. Form – building affixes (inflexious)

2. Word – building affixes (derivational)

To the first belong –en (oxen), -s, -es (boys, books, classes), -s, -es (sits, teachers, drivers)

To word – building affixes belong those by means of which new words are formed easi-ly, boy-hood.

As to their productivity affixes are subdivided into:

a) productive affixes (they form new words in Modern English).

b) non – productive affixes (which don’t form new words but are available in many existing).

e.g. disharmony, hostage, continuous

c) dead – affixes (which don’t look like affixes at the 1^st sight, but are understood as such after diachronical analysis)

e.g. seduce, bishopric, wedlock, hatred, twinkle, clatter, blubber

We should remind here again of the term allomorphs – which are used to denote elements of a group which constitute the structural unit of the language. Thus, e.g. ion, tion, ation – are the positional variants of the same suffix. They don’t differ in meaning or function but show a slight difference in sound form depending on the final phoneme of the preceding stem. They are considered as variants of one and the same morpheme and called its allomorphs. Allomorphs will also occur among prefixes. Their form then depends on the initials of the stem with which they will assimilate.

A prefix such as im occurs before bilabials (impossible), its allomorphs ir before r (irregular), il before l (illegal). It is in before all the other consonants and vowels (indirect, inability).

It should be noted that the word-building capacity of the affixes may change in the course of time, some affixes remain productive while others become non-productive. The process may continue so that in the long run some affixes become "dead", i.e. they can not be segregated by analysis into IС's and the words containing them are morphologically indivisible.

The productivity of an affix should not be confused with its frequency which is the synchronic characteristic and means the existence in the vocabulary of a great number of words but if it is not used to form new ones, it is not productive. It is interesting to note that such non-productive suffixes as al (ial), ical, ve, ancy, ency, ant (ent), ive are among the 32 most frequent suffixes of the English vocabulary.

e.g. labial, formal, logical, attentive, frequency, important, independent