Word-formation. The productivity of word-formation means.

Word-formation – the process of forming words by combining root and affixal morphemes according to certain patterns specific for the language (affixation, composition), or without any outward means of word formation (conversion, semantic derivation). Word- formation is one of the main ways of enriching vocabulary. There are four main ways of word-building in Modern English: affixation, composition, conversion, shortening.

Affixation has been one of the most productive ways of word-building throughout the history of English. It consists in adding an affix to the stem of a definite part of speech. Affixation is divided into suffixation and prefixation.

The main function of suffixes in Modern English is to form one part of speech from another, the secondary function is to change the lexical meaning of the same part of speech, e.g. educate v – educatee n.

Prefixation is the formation of words by means of adding a prefix to the stem. In English it is characteristic for forming verbs. The main function of prefixes in English is to change the lexical meaning of the same part of speech, e.g. happy- unhappy, head – overhead.

Composition is the way of word-building when a word is formed by joining two or more stems to form one word, e.g. best-seller, underfoot.

Conversion is a characteristic feature of the English word-building system. It is also called affixless derivation or zero suffuxation. Conversion is the main way of forming verbs in Modern English, e.g. to eye, to hammer, to machine-gun. Verbs can be converted from adjectives, in such cases they denote the change of the state: to tame, to slim. Verbs can be also converted from other parts of speech: to down (adverb), to pooh-pooh (interjection). Nouns can also be converted from verbs.

Shortenings (or contracted words) are produced in two different ways. The first is to make a new word from a syllable of the original word. The letter may lose its beginning (phone from telephone, fence from defence), its ending (hols from holidays) or both the beginning and ending (flu from influenza). The second way of shortening is to make a new word from the initial letters of a word group: U.N.O., B.B.C., M.P. This type is called initial shortenings (acronyms). They are found not only among formal words but also among colloquialisms and slang: g.f. (girl-friend).

There are also secondary, non-productive ways of word-building: sound interchange, stress interchange, sound imitation, blends, back formation (disaffixation).

Sound-interchange is the way of word-building when some sounds are changed to form a new word, e.g. to strike – stroke, to sing – song.

Stress interchange can be mostly met in verbs and nouns of Romanic origin: nouns have the stress on the first syllable and verbs on the last syllable, e.g. accent – to accent.

Sound imitation is the way of word-building when a word is built by imitating different sounds: a) sounds produced by human beings: to whisper, to mumble; b) sounds produced by animals, birds, insects: to moo, to hiss, to buzz; c) sounds produced by nature and objects: to splash, to bubble, to clatter.

Blends are words formed from a word-group or two synonyms, e.g. hustle (hurry and bustle), cinemaddict (cinema addict).

Backformation (disaffixation) is the way of word-building when a word is formed by dropping the final morpheme to form a new word, e.g. to bach (from bachelor), to televise (from television).