Lecture 6 word-building system in english
Plan
General notion.
Affixation.
Valency of word-building elements.
Composition.
a) Ways of forming compounds;
b) Structural and semantic characteristics of compound words;
c) Derivational compounds.
Conversion.
Shortening
a) Clipping;
b) Acronymy.
7. Blending.
8. Back-formation.
1. General Notion
Word building is one of the ways of vocabulary extension. It is coining new words from existing elements according to existing patterns. New words are formed for two main reasons:
1) when it is necessary to give a name to a new object or phenomenon;
2) when a new name is needed for a familiar thing whose old name has become too stale because of its frequent use.
There exist the following types of word building in Modern English:
- affixation (to dehire),
- composition (airplane),
- conversion (to orbit),
- shortening (TV, exam),
- back-formation (to enthuse),
- blending (smog),
- sound imitation (boom),
- stress shifting, or stress interchange ('conduct (n) - con'duct (v)),
- sound interchange (break – breech).
Some linguists distinguish between word formation and word creation.
Word-formation includes derivation, conversion, and composition. Other types refer to word creation. In word formation a word-building rule is applied to a derivational base or bases, and affixes can be used (in the case of derivation and composition). Conversion is treated as zero derivation.
Word-building bases can be of 3 types:
- bases which coincide with stems of different degrees of complexity (simple, derivative, compound), e.g., dreamy, dreamily, daydreamer;
- bases which coincide with word forms, e.g., love-lost, good-looking;
- bases which coincide with word-groups, e.g., left-hander (from left hand).
The derivational base motivates the lexical meaning of the word. Word creation has no motivating base or derivative elements (e.g., D, lab, fruice), therefore it is considered to be a separate way of vocabulary extension. Some of the types of word-creation are rather productive in present-day English, such as blending, back-formation, shortening.
Productivity is the ability of a word-building type (or a pattern, or an affix) to coin new words at a given period of language history. The degree of productivity is seen in the ability of a word-building type, or a pattern in this type, or a word-building element to coin new words for one occasion – the so-called nonce words.
The word-building type, or a pattern, or an element is highly productive, if new words (nonce words) are easily formed. The suffixes -less, -ish are productive (e.g., collarless, dripless, old-maidish, Dickensish). The word-building type or pattern is semi-productive if new words are only occasionally used. For example, the suffix -dom was recently used to form the nouns slavedom, gangsterdom, but other words with this suffix are very early coinages. Non-productive types such as stress interchange, sound interchange are not used in the word building process nowadays. And even in productive types there can be non-productive patterns or elements. For example, the suffixes -hood, -ship, -th are not productive today, though suffixation itself is a highly productive word-building type.
Productivity must not be mixed up with frequency. Many of quite frequent suffixes are no more productive today, for example, the adjective-forming suffixes -y (mighty, angry, witty, steady), -ful (sorrowful, blissful, wonderful), -ary (necessary, ordinary).