1.5. Shortening

There are two main ways of shortening: contraction (clipping) and abbreviation (initial shortening). Contraction (clipping) is to make a new word from a syllable (rare two) of the original word. There are four types of contraction:

1) Final clipping (apocope) - omission of the final part of the word e.g. doc> doctor, lab>laboratory, vac>vacation, ad>advertisement

2) Initial clipping (apheresis) - omission of the fore part of the word e.g. phone>telephone, plane>airplane, story>history, Fred>Alfred

3) Medial clipping (syncope) - omission of the middle part of the word e.g. maths>mathematics, fansy>fantasy, specs>spectacles

4) Mixed clipping - omission of the fore and the final parts of the word e.g. tec>detective, flu>influenza, fridgOrefrigerator, Liz>Elizabeth

The second way of shortening is to- make a new word from the initial letters of a word group and called abbreviation (initial shortening). They are subdivided into 5 groups:

1) Acronyms. These words are read in accordance with the rules of orthoepy,

e.g. UNO (United Nation Organization), UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization), NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)

2) Alphabetic abbreviations. In this case letters get their full alphabetic pronunciation and a full stress,

e.g. the USA (the United States of America), B.B.C. (British Broadcasting Corporation), M.P. (Member of Parliament), F.B.I. (Federal Bureau of Investigation), CV (Curriculum vitae), EU (European Unity).

3) Compound abbreviations. The first immediate constituent is a letter and the second - a complete word,

e.g. A-bomb (Atomic bomb), V-day (Victory day), Z-hour (Zero hour)

4) Graphic abbreviations. They are used in texts for economy of space and are pronounced as the corresponding unabbreviated words,

e.g. Mr. (mister), m. (mile), ft. (foot), v. (verb), pp. (pages), etc.

5) Latin abbreviations. They are read as separate letters or are substituted by their English equivalents,

e.g. i.e. (that is), a.m. (in the morning), Id (in some place), ef (compare), p.a. (Lat. per annum)

1.6. Phrasal Verbs

Phrasal verbs are combinations of a verb and adverb or a verb and preposition (or verb with both adverb and preposition). They divided into two groups: non-idiomatic (retain their primary local meaning), e.g. come in, come out, take off, put down, drink up, etc. and idiomatic (cannot be derived from their immediate constituents), e.g. bring up, bear out, give in, fall out, etc.

2. Semi-productive ways of word-formation

Back-Formation is a derivation of new words (mostly verbs) by means of subtracting a suffix or other element resembling it. An example of back-formation in English is the verb to beg derived from the noun beggar, to baby sit from the noun baby-sitter, to sculpt from sculptor,etc.

Blending is the formation of new lexical units by means of margin fragments of words into one new word, or combining the elements of one word with a notional word, e.g. smog (smoke+fog), drunch (drinks+Iunch).

Reduplication compounds are made by doubling a stem. It falls into 3 main groups: reduplicative compounds proper (immediate constituents are identical in their form without any phonetic changes), e.g. bye-bye, flash-flash, goody-goody; ablaut (gradalional) compounds (variation of a root vowel), e.g. riff-raff, dilly-dJly, ping-pong; rhyme compounds (immediate constituents are joined to rhyme), e.g. willy-nilly, namby-pamby.

Lexicalization of the plural of nouns. There are cases when the grammatical form of the plural of nouns becomes . isolated from the paradigm and acquires a new lexical meaning, e.g. look (погляд) :: looks (зовжшшеть).

Sound imitation (onomatopoeia) is the process in which words are made by imitating sounds produced by living beings and inanimate objects. It is of some interest that sounds produced by the same kind of animal are represented by quite different sound groups in different languages. For instance, English dogs bark or howl, English cock cries cock-a-doodle-doo, ducks quack and frogs croak..

3. Non-productive ways of word-building

Sound interchange (gradation) is the process in which word belonging to different parts of speech may be Differentiated due to the sound interchange in the root, e.g. food (n):: feed (v), gold (n):: gild (v), sing (v):: song (n).Change of stress is mostly observed in verb-noun pairs, e.g. transport > to transport and much more seldom in verb-adjective pairs, to prostrate > prostrate. The difference in stress often appeared after the verb was formed and was not therefore connected with the formation of the new word.

LECTURE №6-7 SEMASIOLOGY

1 Semasiology as the branch of Linguistics.

2 Referential and Functional approaches to word-meaning.

3 The classification of meanings of words.

4 Semantic structure of the word.

5 Change of meaning.

6 Transference of meaning.

1Semasiology as the branch of Linguistics

The branch the study of language concenredwith the meaning' of words is called semasiology. The term comes from Greek semasia "signification" (from sema 'sign' and logos word)

Meaning is one of the most important word's characteristics. The interrelation between the structural pattern 0f the word and its lexical meaning is called motivation. There are three main tipes of motivation: phonetical,morphological, and semantic. Phonetical motivation is observed in words whose sound-clusters imitate the sounds they signify (e.g. buzz, clip, hiss, whisper, snap, gaggle, etc.). Morphological motivation is apparent part in derived words and nonradiomatic compounds due to their word-formation pattern (e.g. worker (work + -er) - 'one who works', rewrite (re- + write) - 'write again

.Semantic motivation is the relationship between the direct and the transferred meaning of the word, 2. Referential and Functional approaches to word-meaning

In modern linguistics word-meaning are studied from different angles of view:

a)through establishing the interrelations between words and concepts which they denote - the so-called referential approach;

b)through the observations of the functional use of a word in speech - the functional approach; The referential approach is traditionally represented by the following triangle: