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Word Formation

order, objects usually follow their verbs in sentence structure, but not necessarily in compounds such as knee-jerk.

According to Jackson and Amvela (2007: 93), “all compounds are non-interruptible in the sense that, in normal use, their constituent parts are not interrupted by extraneous elements“. The example they give to illustrate this point is that of the compound dare-devil, in which, if the article “the” is inserted, the stability of the whole structure is affected to such an extent that the resulting string of words dare-the-devil is turned into a phrase and can no longer be considered a compound.

The special type of modification and inflectibility that apply in the case of compounds also help to set them apart from phrases. Modification refers to the use of other words to modify the meaning of a compound. Since the compound is a single unit, its components cannot be modified independently. It is the compound as a whole which is modified by other words. For instance, air-sick may not be modified either as hot air-sick, with the component air being determined by the adjective hot, or as airvery sick, with the component sick being determined by the adverb very. However, a construction such as seriously air-sick is possible, with the adverb seriously modifying the whole compound.

In terms of flexibility, as a lexical unit, a compound may be inflected according to the grammatical class it corresponds to, while its constituents cannot be inflected each in its turn. Thus, the compound nouns ash-tray, fingerprint, textbook, dish-washer form the plural by adding a final –s to the whole compound: ash-trays, fingerprints, textbooks, dish-washers. Downgrade, sweet-talk, baby-sit as compound verbs become downgraded, sweet-talked, baby-sat in the past tense.

3.5.2.5. Semantic characteristics of compounds

From a semantic point of view, compounds may be grouped in two major classes: compounds with an idiomatic meaning and compounds with a compositional meaning. The former tend to acquire a rather specialized meaning which cannot be grasped on the basis of the meaning of its constituents: a turnkey for example, is a person who, in the past, used to hold the keys of the prison, while a turncoat is a traitor. The meaning of the compounds in the latter class is transparent and easier to understand, since it is arrived at by adding the meanings of their constituents: a bulldog is a breed of dog, an easy chair is a type chair. In between the two classes, there is a third, comprising compounds in whose case the meaning of at least one of the constituents is somehow obscured. We may include here words such as dustbin, which is a container not restricted to the collection of dust alone, or blackboard, the object one writes on, which may have colours other than black and may be made of materials other than wood.

As Katamba (2005: 67) suggests, “an interesting property of most compounds is that they are headed. This means that one of the words that

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make up the compound is syntactically dominant”. Quite frequently, the syntactic head is the semantic head of the compound as well, while the nonhead element usually indicates some of its characteristics. The two examples above, bulldog and easy chair help to illustrate this as well: a bulldog is a dog with short hair, a short neck, a large head, and short thick legs, while an easy chair is a large comfortable chair. If a compound contains a semantic head, i.e., if its meaning incorporates the meaning of at least one of its components, it is called an endocentric compound. If it has no semantic head, i.e., if its meaning is idiomatic and therefore different from the meanings of its constituents, like the meanings of turnkey and turncoat above, the compound is an exocentric compound.

Hulban (1975) approaches the semantic relationship between the constituents of a compound from a different perspective. He describes them as restrictive and relational compounds, with a series of nuances existing in between the two. Thus, the material something is made of is revealed in compounds such as paper bag, lather jacket, ironware. Place relationships are implied in downtown, upstream, seashore. Purpose is obvious in blow-pipe, looking-glass, goldfield, while comparison is present in good-for-nothing, larger-than-life. In words such as male-doctor, shewolf, womankind, boy-friend, woman teacher, the idea of gender is involved. Purpose and comparison show relationships, while material and gender show restrictions. Place may indicate both restriction – sunset and relation – sea shore. An example of a compound whose internal semantic organization may be viewed from more than one perspective is eye-glasses which, depending on the point of view, may express purpose, material or the idea of place.

3.5.3. Conversion

Conversion is the process of forming new words by means of transferring them from one morphological class to another, without any changes, either in their form or in their pronunciation. The procedure is extremely productive in English. In fact, this technique is so frequent that many scholars see it as a matter of syntactic usage rather than as a wordformation device. Among them, there are, for example, Pyles and Algeo (1993), who use the term “functional shift” to refer to the process and to highlight the fact that, by it, words are converted from one grammatical function to another, without their form being affected in any way. Cristina Tătaru (2002) follows the same line of thinking in calling what is traditionally known as “conversion” - “functional polysemy”, as opposed to “lexical polysemy” which involves only a change in lexical meaning, leaving the grammatical class of the words unaltered. She further explains that, even if, at first sight, the type of polysemy implied by conversion is clearly a functional one, lexical polysemy accompanies the process as well. “The new meaning, although semantically related to the first, contains markers

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typical of the new part of speech that has been generated, which is not the case with lexical polysemy. Hence, the necessity of analyzing the semantic ties obtained between the converted item and its original, in order to capture the essence of the phenomenon” (Tătaru 2002: 79). The most frequent cases of conversion involve nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

3.5.3.1. Nouns obtained by conversion

The parts of speech that are most frequently converted into nouns are adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions.

• nouns converted from adjectives:

Since there is a great variety of adjectives in English, the nouns obtained from them are very numerous and they present various types of semantic relationships with their originals, thus making the subclass they belong to highly diversified. Some of the types of deadjectival nouns are the following:

- collective nouns obtained from adjectives by definite articulation: the good, the bad, the cripple, the young;

-nouns denoting characteristic features, obtained by the same mechanism: the beautiful, the ugly, the absurd;

-proper collective nouns denoting nationalities, obtained by definite articulation as well: the English, the Dutch. Other such nouns are obtained by adding the plural ending –s to the adjective, the article becoming then optional: (the) Romanians, (the) Americans, (the)

Italians;

- nouns denoting “the presence of the quality in a person”: an

academic, an alarmist, an anarchist;

- nouns denoting “the presence of the quality in an object”: an acid,

an adhesive, an adverbial, an absolute.

As Tătaru (2002: 82) suggests, “the attempt at grouping various types of meanings should not ignore the possibility of the nominalization of any other adjective by conversion: a red reminding of Titian (=kind, type of

red); in the dark (=confused), or: Don’t go out after dark! a bitter of very good quality (=type of drink)…”

• nouns converted from verbs:

De-verbal nouns may express:

- the result of the action denoted by the original verb: an abstract, a

drive;

- the process to which the original verb referred: an ache, an alert,

an arrest;

- the agent of the action denoted by the verb: an advocate, an ally,

an affix, a cheat, a bore;

- the name of the action denoted by the verb: a hunt, a cry, a jump, an attempt. This subcategory of converted nouns is best represented

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by the –ing nouns which name the action implied by the verb: falling, driving, swimming;

-the patient of the action denoted by the verb: a castaway, a catch;

-the instrument of the action denoted by the verb: a lift, a ransom,

a cover, a wrap;

- the state corresponding to the action denoted by the verb: wish,

want, desire, doubt, envy;

- the place of the action denoted by the verb: retreat (“cumpăna apelor”), turn, rise.

• nouns converted from adverbs, prepositions and

interjections:

There are rather few nouns originating in adverbs in English. Some of the basic directional adverbs, such as front, back, behind, aside, left, right have been nominalised, sometimes by being used with a definite article. Other times, directional adverbs may be marked for the plural and used nominally in binominals such as the ups and down, the ins and outs. However, the fact that these nouns are not used outside set phrases or in the singular demonstrates that the conversion of the adverbs is not yet a fully completed process.

Tătaru (2002) mentions another category of adverbs that have undergone nominalization: the adverbs relating to the frequency of musical tempo (at their origin, simple adverbials of frequency in Italian which became internationalisms with a specialized meaning): an andante, an allegro, an adagio.

The adverb altogether may also be used figuratively as a noun in a phrase such as to be in the altogether (“to be completely naked”). The examples of prepositions that have been turned into nouns are even fewer: the pros and cons (where pros comes from the Latin preposition pro and cons has been obtained by adding the plural inflection –s to the abbreviation of counter). Pro may be used nominally with the definite article a, then meaning not “argument for”, but “person favouring a certain idea, view, option”.

All interjections may be nominalised by articulation either with a definite or with an indefinite article, their meaning becoming “name of the sound, noise”: a bang, a screech, the squeal, the Hm Hm. It may happen that, by nominalization, the meaning of the initial interjection changes completely via a transfer from a proper sense to a figurative one. This is the case of the interjection gobbledygook, initially denoting the sound made by the turkey which has now come to mean “very complicated or technical language that you cannot understand” or “nonsense”.

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3.5.3.2. Adjectives obtained by conversion

According to Tătaru (2002: 85), “it could be said that anything that fulfils an attributive and / or a predicative function is an adjective in English”.

Nouns, for example, can function both as descriptive adjectives: girl friend, technology boom, trail-and-error judgment and as limitative adjectives: family duties, trial match, songbird.

Pronouns can also engender adjectives by conversion. All compounds built with the personal pronouns he and she, which generate the masculine and the feminine from the common gender, can be considered to reflect this phenomenon. Demonstrative, relativeinterrogative, indefinite and reflexive pronouns may function as adjectives without any change in their form.

Numerals also take up adjectival functions when they are used in adjectival distribution: three books, nine point seven percent, the second

answer.

However, the part of speech that is most frequently converted into adjectives is the adverb. Directionals such as above, front, back, upstairs, outdoors may function both as adverbs and as adjectives (sometimes, in a noun and converted adjective group, they follow the noun): the above

statement (the statement above), the front gate, the back door, the rooms

upstairs, the furniture outdoors. Adverbs of time such as yearly, monthly, weekly, daily may become adjectives when used in adjectival distribution:

yearly event, monthly seminar, weekly meeting, daily routine.

Phrases and idiomatic expressions can undergo conversion to adjectives: a do-it-yourself manual, a cut-and-dried speech, a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-

his-mouth attitude.

Verb forms other than the participle converted into adjectives are quite infrequent.

3.5.3.3. Verbs obtained by conversion

The most productive area in which conversion manifests itself is that of verbs. Very many English verbs have been obtained by conversion, from nouns especially.

• verbs obtained from nouns:

The semantic relationships between the nouns and their converted verbal counterparts are very diverse and, therefore, quite difficult to classify. Consequently, the patterns of meaning which can be identified form a rather non-homogenous class:

- verbs denoting the action resulting in the situation designated by the noun: to rain, to snow, to frost;

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- verbs denoting the action generating the notion designated by the

noun: to point, to spot, to drop, to stripe;

- verbs with an instrumental meaning: to finger, to elbow, to

shoulder, to saw, to hammer, to screw, to gun, to nail;

- verbs with an agentive meaning (“to be / to act like what the nouns designates”): to wolf, to ape, to monkey, to parrot, to pig, to nurse,

to father;

-verbs with a locative meaning: to pocket, to corner, to garage;

-verbs meaning “to put in what the noun designates”: to bottle, to

catalogue, to list;

- verbs meaning “to deprive of what the noun designates”: to peel, to

skin, to scalp;

- verbs meaning “to send / go by what the noun designates”: to mail,

to ship.

- verbs meaning “to provide with what the noun designates”: to cover, to wrap, to plaster, to coat.

• verbs obtained from adjectives:

The basic meaning of the de-adjectival verbs is “to bring about the characteristic expressed by the adjective in an object”: to calm, to

dirty, to square, to round, to alert, to aggregate, or “to make a subject suffer the instatement of the quality expressed by the adjective: to wrong, to dry, to wet, to sour, to clean.

• verbs obtained from adverbs, conjunctions,

interjections:

Verbs obtained from adverbs, conjunctions or interjections are pretty rare in English. Nevertheless, verbs such as to forward, to but

(“But me no buts!”), to chirp, to squeal, to hum, to meow are present in the language.

3.5.3.4. Adverbs obtained by conversion

Quite frequently, adverbs are obtained from adjectives by derivation with the suffix –ly, therefore the cases of adverbs converted from adjectives are rather rare. Sometimes, in non-literary language, forms homonymous to adjectives occur in adverbial distribution, but, as Tătaru (2002: 88) points out, “it is rather doubtful whether these are cases of conversion or simply manifestations of the tendency to drop the ending in the adverb”. Awful rare used instead of awfully rare is such a case.

However, the use of augmentatives such as pretty, mighty, jolly, of adjectival origin, in order to form the absolute superlative (besides very) could be more readily interpreted as instances of conversion.

Since conversion does not imply any changes in the form of words, it is sometimes difficult to tell which item should be treated as the base and which as the converted form. One criterion lying at the basis of drawing

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such a distinction is the semantic dependence of one item upon the other. For example, the meaning of the verb to net may be explained by means of the noun net as “to put into a net” and, therefore, the verb may be said to be the converted form. Another criterion is the ability of the word to serve as the root for derivatives and to form compounds. If the word has such ability, it is considered the base word, if it lacks it, it is usually regarded as the converted word. According to this approach, the noun water, as the root for derived words such as watery, waterless, and as one of the elements in

compounds such as waterbed, waterborne, watercolour, watercourse, waterfall, waterline is seen as the base word, while the verb water, which cannot yield either derivatives or compounds is regarded as the converted lexical item.

When the period when a particular word entered the language is known, it is easier to establish that the “older” word is the base form, while the “younger” one is the converted item.

Converted words may be common vocabulary items, with a reduced stylistic potential, or, by conversion itself, they may have acquired expressive force and become poetic. Hulban (1975) quotes a number of examples of converted words in the latter category:

The sun is yellowing to decline. (D.H. Lawrence);

… you wolf down great mouthfuls of lamb and green peas… (S. Maugham) How does it pay a man of your talent to shepherd such a flock as this…? (G.B. Shaw);

Whatever it is, don’t blue it.(S. Maugham).

3.6. Minor means of word formation

Besides derivation, conversion and compounding described above, there are a number of minor means of word formation in English.

3.6.1. Clipping

Clipping compounds, blends or portmanteau words1 are lexical items that have come into being by combining two other words of which at least one is fragmentary.

1 „Portmanteau words” is a term coined by Lewis Carroll in his Through the Looking Glass. The author introduces it for the first time when, Alice, the main character of the book, asks Humpty Dumty to explain to her what the words in the Jabberwocky poem mean. Among these words, there are “slithy” and “mimsy”, which Humpty Dumty explains as follows, pointing at how they have been formed:

“Well, ‘slithy’ means ‘lith and slimy’. ‘Lith’ is the same as ‘active’. You see, it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word… Well

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According to where the clipping occurs, this type of compounds may be classified as:

• clippings having a full former element and a clipped latter element: cablegram = cable + telegram, mailomat = mail +

automat, dumbfound = dumb + confound;

• clippings having a full latter element and a clipped former element: Eurasian = Europe + Asian, paratroops = parachute +

troops, telescreen = television + screen;

• clippings having both the former and the latter elements clipped: brunch = breakfast = lunch, motel = motorist + hotel, Oxbridge =

Oxford + Cambridge.

Clipping has been very productive, giving birth both to words that are easily recognizable and that have entered the everyday vocabulary of English (such as camcorder = camera + recorder, Bollywood = Bombay + Hollywood, used for the Indian film industry, brunch = breakfast + lunch) and to words that are either rather technical and recognizable by scientists more readily than by the non-specialists or coined by journalists and meaningful for a limited number of readers (edutainment = education + entertainment, agitprop = agitation + propaganda). The technical fields and the newspapers are areas in which the high rate by which clippings are formed is fully justified – in the former, the shortness of clippings help scientists avoid the confusion using too many words to designate a concept might create, in the latter, novelty brought by clippings is a readerattraction strategy.

3.6.2. Contraction

Clipping occurs not only in the case of compound words, but in the case of isolated words as well. When words are shortened to just a part of them, they are said to be contracted. Contraction may be performed in three ways:

• by aphaeresis, which is the elimination of the beginning of the word: cello (from violoncello), bus (from omnibus), plane (from

airplane), pike (from turnpike), phone (from telephone);

• by syncope, which is the elimination of the middle part of the word: ma’am (from madam), o’er (from over), don’t (from do not),

fancy (from fantasy), specs (from spectacles);

• by apocope, which is the elimination of the final part of the word: fab (from fabulous), caff (from café), bicarb (from bicarbonate),

exam (from examination), cinema (from cinematopgraph), memo (from memorandum), gas (from gasoline), etc.

then, ‘mimsy’ is ‘flimsy and miserable’ (there’s another portmanteau for you).” (Carroll 1980: 271)

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3.6.3. Back-formation

If clipping is a special type of compounding, back-formation might be considered a special instance of derivation (regressive or back derivation). Back formation is a process based on the analogy between words that contain affixes and words that have component parts homonymous to affixes. These parts are removed in order to restore (or back-form) what is believed to have been the “original”. For example, babysitter did not appear in English by adding the suffix –er to the verb compound baby-sit, but rather –er was first added to the sit part of the compound and only after the verbal noun sitter was obtained, did the word baby-sitter come into being. By back formation, the verb baby-sit was formed as if the compound noun baby-sitter had been obtained from this verb by suffixation. Likewise, peddle is back-formed from peddler, while edit is a back formation from editor.

As Tătaru (2002: 95) points out, certain words were borrowed into English that already had suffix-like components in their structure. This is the case of the word puppy, for example, borrowed from the French poupee. Its original being presumed to have been obtained by derivation with the diminutive suffix –y, pup was back-formed.

Active since the 19th century, back-formation is a process that has proved productive especially in the case of compound verbs, an area not very well represented in Modern English. Recent back-formed verbal compounds include force-land, blood-transfuse, sleepwalk, housekeep, electrocute, etc. It has also been much used in technical terminology, where one encounters terms such as aerodyne from aerodynamic, lase from laser

or hydrotrope from hydrotropic.

3.6.4. Folk etymology

Like back-formation, folk etymology is based on analogy as well, this time, a partial or total analogy in pronunciation between borrowed words and words already existing in the language. As Katamba (2005: 136) observes, “false etymology” as he calls the process, plays an important role in the phonological adaptation of foreign words to the English sound system. “People tend to rationalize; they want a reason for the imported word sounding the way it does. So they link it with a plausible real word in their language”, distorting the actual etymon of the word borrowed by English from another language.

Thus, crayfish, meaning “crab” was formed as a consequence of the misinterpretation of the French etymon ecrevisse, which was believed to be a kind of fish. The Greek word asparagus came to be borrowed into English as sparrowgrass, while the Latin appenditium finally gave penthouse in English. Hulban (1975: 103) explains that the meaning of penthouse, at

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present, “a very expensive and comfortable apartment or set of rooms on the top floor of a building”, used to be “a subsidiary structure attached to the wall of a main building, usually having a sloping roof”. Its etymon, appenditum, meant “a small building dependent upon a large church” and gave apentis in Old French. As the building is a house which has a roof with a slope, the word was associated with the French pente, meaning “slope”, hence penthouse in Modern English.

Though not as frequent as the major means of word formation, folk etymology is not all that rare. In English, there are a number of words formed by combining pseudo-roots to affixes. This is the case of trimaran, “a vessel with three hulls”, which seems to be formed from catamaran, “a twin hulled sailing boat”, as if –maran were a root meaning “hull”. Conversely, a form may be considered an affix that may be attached to roots. –holic, for example, has been attached to work and gave workaholic and to ice-cream and gave ice-cream-a-holic, on the basis of the pattern represented by alcoholic. It follows from here that –holic has been treated as a suffix meaning “someone who overindulges in something”, although that was not its original meaning.

Folk etymology is a process that works in the opposite direction as well, i.e. other languages that have borrowed words from English have adapted them to their system altering the original to suit the regularities in them. The more indirect the borrowing, the greater the alterations are likely to be. For instance, as Katamba (2005) exemplifies, Luganda borrowed pakitimane from Swahili which, in turn, borrowed it from English – pocket money. Pakitimane means “wallet” rather than “pocket money”. When words pass from one language to another, there is always the danger of misunderstanding what exactly these words denote or what aspects of an object they specifically pick out. “A degree of drift is almost inevitable when a game of Chinese whispers is played” (Katamba 2005: 137).

3.6.5. Deflection

Deflection, also called sound interchange or root derivation consists of a sound (vowel, consonant or both vowel and consonant) change in the root of a word, a new word being thus obtained. The process is not very productive at present, but it used to be one of the major means by which grammatical categories were marked and by which new words were formed in Old English. It affected words belonging to the word stock which have survived up to now in the language.

The Indo-European ablaut change in the root vowel of strong verbs, due to differences in stress, has been preserved in Modern English in irregular verbs such as sing – sang – sung; drink – drank, drunk; speak –

spoke; abode – abide; bit – bite; ride – road.

A number of causative verbs have been formed from other verbs by this means: sit – set (“to cause too sit”), fall – fell (“to cause to fall by

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