20. Position of the clipped part

1) Final clipping - the beginning of the prototype is retained (сохранено). It forms the bulk of the class (“ad”, “advert” from advertising, coke from coca–cola, fab – fabulous (легендарный), lab – laboratory, mac - mackintosh, ref - referee).

2) Initial clipping – words retaining the final part of the prototype. They are less numerous but much more firmly established as separate lexical units with a meaning very different of that of the prototype (cute – acute (резкий), fend – defend (оборонять), mend – amend (улучшать), story - history, to tend from attend). Cases like cello ['tSel|qV] – violoncello, to phone – telephone where the curtailed (сокращенные) words are stylistical synonyms or even variants of their prototypes are very rare. The process of assimilation of loan words is especially frequent in this group.

3) Middle clipping - shorten words with the middle part of the word left out are equally (в равной мере) few. They are divided into 2 groups:

3.1. words with a final-clipped stem retaining the functional morpheme (maths – mathematics, specs – spectacles);

3.2. contractions (сокращения) (fancy – fantasy, ma’am – madam).

21. Back formations

Much less commonly we find what are called back formation. (edit – editor) “-or” is wrongly analysed as a suffix like “–er” (worker, builder) and is therefore removable. The same with burgle – burglar (грабитель). Most examples are no longer transparent (ясны). It’s difficult to realize that the verb “to grovel” is a back formation from “groveling”, (grove – face down + one who does). There are not many of these and except of very recent one like “burgle”, they are always opaque [o(u)'peIk] (неясны). They came into the language because the form they came from was itself opaque and open to the wrong analyses.

22. Blending

Creation by blending is also called portmanteau [pɔ:t′mæntəʊ] words. There are 2 meanings packed up (входящие) into one word. In blending parts of 2 familiar words are yoked [jouk] (соединены) together (usually the first part of one word and the second of the other), to produce (произвести) a word which combines (сочетает) the meanings and sound of the old ones. The process of formation is also called telescoping because words seem to slide into one another like sections of a telescope. (smog = smoke + fog, heliport = helicopter + airport, motel = moto + hotel). Sometimes we lose the track of the components of new bland, the original of the word is no longer transparent (Vaseline = Wasser (German) water + elaron (Greek) oil).

Two types of blends can be distinguished. One may be termed additive (добавление), the second – restrictive (ограничительный).

1) the first is transformable (м/б преобразован) into a phrase consisting of the respective (соответственных) complete stems combined by the conjunction (e.g. smog < a mixture of smoke and fog).

2) the restrictive type is transformable into an attributive phrase where the first element serves as modifier of the second: medicare < medical care, positron < positive electron, telecast < television broadcast.