Backformation

Back-formation is the formation of a new word by the removal of (real or apparent) affixes etc. from an existing word; a word that is an instance of this.

A back-formation is revealed by the fact that the date of its first use is later than that of its apparent derivative. The majority of back-formations in English are verbs.

E.g., to typewrite fr. typewritER

to beg fr. beggAR [ME beggen fr. AF begger fr. OF begard fr.

Mdu beggaert mendicant monk]

Back-formation results in the following Morphemic Composition Types:

1. root words beg

2. derived words sanitate (fr. sanitation)

3. compound words (verbs, as a rule, with asyntactic premodification of the

verbal stem by noun): to housebreak (to commit the crime of housebreaking)

fr. housebreaker; to housebreak (to train a dog, a cat, etc. to live in the house

with clean habits) fr. housebroken.

Register, time axis and regional differentiation of the vocabulary time axis differentiation

Obsolete Words (outdated, no longer in active use): Archaic words (archaisms) and Historisms.

Archaisms:

Lexical archaism, a word that denotes a thing or idea which continues to exist but which is generally named differently nowadays.

E.g., plight – to pledge

ween – to think

betide – to happen to

Grammatical archaism, an archaic grammatical form or structure.

E.g., kine – cows

dost – do

hath – has

Historism, a word that denotes an outdated thing or phenomenon.

E.g., lyre – a stringed instrument of the harp family used in ancient Greece;

musket – a smoothbore shoulder gun used from the late 16th through the 18th century.

Neologism, a new word or word equivalent formed according to the productive structural patterns or borrowed from another language; a new meaning of an established word.

E.g., E-mail, laptop, glasnost, bag lady, etc.

Neologisms may be the result of:

1. Abbreviation: comms fr. Communications; SAD – seasonal affective depression.

2. Affixation: to deselect – to remove from participation;

clothesaholic – a person obsessed with clothes;

genderist – involving unfair discrimination between male and female.

3. Back-formation: to explete – to use an expletive, swear.

4. Blending: magalog (magazine + catalog) – a large magazine-format catalog advertizing mail-order goods.

5. Borrowing: pryzhok (fr. Russian); visagiste (fr. French), intifada (fr. Arabic).

6. Compounding: flesh-pressing – large-scale hand-shaking, especially as a political campaign ploy.

7. Conversion: to Velcro – to be fastened by means of Velcro; to stiff – to be a commercial failure; flop.

8. Semantic change: brilliant (of a weapons system) – capable of extremely precise self-guidance to target individual enemy sites [metaphor]; pink collar – working in a job traditionally held by women of the middle class [metonymy]; to disimprove – to make or become worse [euphemism].

Nonce-word, a word coined and used for a single occasion.

E.g., Every time he gets to the fourth whisky-and-potash [whiskey and soda], he always becomes maudlin about this female. (Wodehouse. Life…) Register (functional style), a system of expressive means peculiar to a specific sphere of communication, related to a level of formality, anywhere on a scale from the extremely formal or ceremonial to the colloquial or slangy, and manifested in syntax, vocabulary, and, possibly, pronunciation.