29. Ways of replenishment of the vocabulary.

Being an adaptive system, the vocabulary is constantly adjusting itself to the changing conditions of human communication. New words, expressions or neologisms are created for new things. The neologism is a newly coined word or phrase or a new meaning for an existing word.

The reasons for neologism origination are:

1) political changes;

2) the sphere of law and police;

3) science and technology;

4) innovations (fast-food).

The ways of forming neologisms are:

1) creating (sound imitation);

2) borrowing (French, German, Spanish);

3) combining (affixation, word composition).

Prefixes: para, intro, maxi, mini.

Suffixes: drive-in, workaholic, eer, st.

Compounding (rhyme compounding - brain - rain).

Shortening (landing) strip.

The Abbreviations are words formed from the initial letters of each of the parts of a phrasal term. There are 2 types of abbreviations: 1) Acronyms (word-combinations pronounced as a word, popular especially in politics and technological vocabulary): NATO — the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, National Organization for Women – NOW. They may be homonyms to ordinary word); 2) Alphabetisms (pronounced as a series of letters, retaining correlation with prototype: B.B.C- the British Broadcasting Corporation, SOS – Save Our Souls). Graphical abbreviations are symbols used instead of words in written English, for economy of space (gvt - government, DC – District of Columbia).

The blend is formed by joining together 2 words. There are 2 types of blends depending upon the prototype phrases with which they can be correlated:

The borrowed words are taken from another language and modified in phonemic shape, spelling, paradigm or meaning according to the standards of English. They came in different times. Early Latin borrowings were adopted in the 1st century BC (butter, chalk, kitchen). In the 5th century AD there penetrated a few Celtic words into English (cradle, London). In the 7th century AD, during the Christianisation, there were adopted many religious terms from Latin (priest, nun). From the end of the 7th century till the middle of the 11th century there penetrated Scandinavian words into the English language (window, husband, law, ugly, weak, call, take, die). The Scandinavian words are similar in pronunciation to the Anglo-Saxon ones. Many Scandinavian words start with the sk-cluster: skill, skin, ski, skirt, sky. In 1066 when the Norman Conquest took place, England became a bilingual country. French was officially introduced into the life of the people. The French words borrowed at that period are of the following layers: administrative, military terms (army, officer), educational (pupil, pencil, library), words of everyday life (dinner, river, uncle). In the Renaissance period there were borrowed numerous words from Latin and Greek connected with science (university, professor), Italian (piano, opera, violin etc.). In the 18th-20th centuries the basis of the words became different due to the colonial expansion: Indian (pundit), Arabic (sherbet), Chinese etc. The Russian borrowings in the English language are of the following layers: prerevolutionary (before 1917 vodka, valenkis, pelmenis), sovietisms (preserve only Russian meaning: polit-bureau, 5-year-plan) and the perestroika period.