- •1. Lexicology as a Science.
- •2.1. Lexicology and Non-linguistic Disciplines.
- •2.2. Lexicology and Linguistic Disciplines.
- •Two Approaches to Language Study.
- •1. The New Lexical Units Appearance
- •1.1. Word-Building
- •2. Morpheme
- •3. Structural Types of English Words
- •1. Introduction
- •2. The Historical Development of Conversion
- •3. The Problem of the First Component in ‘Stone Wall’
- •4. Semantic Relations in Conversion
- •1. Introduction
- •2. Suffixes
- •2.1. Noun Suffixes
- •2.2. Adjective Suffixes
- •2.3. Adverb Suffixes
- •2.4. Verb Suffixes
- •2.5. Numeral Suffixes
- •3. Prefixes
- •Verb Prefixes:
- •2.2. Morphological Type of Compounds
- •2.3. Syntactical Type of Compounds
- •Remain but have a different meaning with the shortened form. E.G. Courtesy — curtsy,
- •1. Sound Interchange
- •2. Stress Interchange
- •3. Reduplication
- •4. Sound Imitation
- •5. Blending (Contamination)
- •6. Back Formation
- •7. Redistribution
6. Back Formation
The process is based on analogy. Prof. Yartseva explains this mistake by the influence of the whole system of the language on separate words, e.g.: it is characteristic of English to form nouns denoting the doer of the action from verb stems by means of the suffix -er (speak –speaker). So when the French noun 'beggart' was borrowed (a wandering monk) the final syllable 'ar' was easily associated in the minds of Englishmen with the suffix -er because it was pronounced in the same way. So the corresponding verb was formed from the noun by dropping the final syllable. In this way the verb 'to beg' appeared in English. This way of word-building is opposite to 'derivation'. Therefore it is called 'back-formation'.
The same way of word-building is used in other languages, e.g. a Dutch word 'zondek' was borrowed into Russian in the form of 'зонтик', 'ик' was understood as a diminutive suffix, so the word 'зонт' appeared in Russian.
In the second quarter of the 20th century a new type of backformation appeared in English: compound verbs are formed from compound nouns and from word combinations.
Backformation is connected with misunderstanding structure of words.
7. Redistribution
This way of word-building is used very seldom. It is the result of a mistake in understanding the structure too. In this case the border between the indefinite article and the noun is misunderstood.
Secondary ways are really secondary because they are mostly not productive.
Those are the secondary ways of word-building in modern English. Secondary ways are really secondary because they are mostly not productive. Yet if we compare the secondary ways of word- building we can see that some of them are used more often than others (e.g. 'blending' is used rather often and 'redistribution' is used very seldom).