16. Shortening of words

Shortening is a morphological word building(w-b) in which a part of original word is taken away (tele- television). This type of w-b is old enough, we can find the examples of shortening in Shakespeare’s words. Shortening may be the result of the reduction of the front, the middle or the back part of a word, or mixed types (phone, math). Sometimes it may be a synonym or a lexical variant, but sometimes a full word and a shorten one are different words (story- history). Shortenings produce new word within the same part of speech, they are especially numerous among adj and verbs (to vac, comfy). The final reduction is more often than the others. There are shortenings of word combinations ( pop- popular music)  Abbreviation are created mostly in written speech, a big amount of them appeared during the First World War. There are two ways of reading abbreviations: 1. like ordinary words (NATO- North Atlantic Treaty Organization, RADAR- Radio Detecting and Ranging); 2. by letters (FBI- federal bureau of investigation, GI-government issue). There is also abbreviations of famous people (GBS- George Bernard Show)

17. Minor ways of word-building.

Minor types of word formation (shortening, sound imitation, blending) Shortening is a comparatively new way of word-building and it has a high degree of productivity. Within shortening we distinguish clipping, abbreviation.  Clipping - the process and the result of cur`tailing off a word to one or two syllables.  The first is to make a new word from a syllable of the original word.  - The original word may lose its beginning (PHONE). This type is called initial shortening. Aphaeresis [æ`fiərisis]. - If a word loses its ending we have A`pocope - final clipping. Lab- laboratory  - `Syncope – medial clipping (ma’am, fantasy-fancy) - Clippings if a combined type – words which have been clipped both at the beginning and at the end (FLUE, FRIDGE).  Thus clipping may be initial, medial, final, combined. The second way is to make a new word from the initial letters of a word-group. Abbreviation - the process and the result of forming a word out of the initial elements (letters, morphemes) of a word combination.  - Acronym - an initial abbreviation that is read as if it were an ordinary English word and sounds like an ordinary English word. UNO, AIDS - Initial abbreviations with alphabetic reading (BBC, MTV) - Word-combinations with one element initially abbreviated – a-bomb, T-shirt - Latin abbreviations- i.e. pm, am, etc. Blending -a word-formation means which consists in merging parts of words into one word: oilitics, slimnastics, smog, brunch Sound imitation – forming new words in which the combination of sounds imitates the sounds produced by animate and inanimate objects. (onomatopoeia or echoism) The term onomatopoeia is from Greek onoma ‘name, word’ and poiein ‘to make → ‘the making of words (in imitation of sounds)’. For instance, English dogs bark (cf. the R. лаять) or howl (cf. the R. выть). The English cock cries cock-a-doodle-doo (cf. the R. ку-ка-ре-ку). Some names of animals and especially of birds and insects are also produced by sound-imitation: crow, cuckoo, humming-bird, whip-poor-will, cricket.