Курсовая работа по теме:

«word-building pattern. Productivity of word -building patterns.»

Выполнила студентка : Самсонова Мария , 5 семестр

Проверил:доц. Овчинникова Н.Д.

«Word-building pattern. Productivity of word -building patterns.»

Word-building in Modern English

1.The origin of word-building (wb) as a means of secondary nomination

Limited retentive capacities of human memory brought into operation the powerful psychologic instrument – thinking which worked out a wise economical way of naming ever changing reality. For language it meant to make use of the existing language material by combining the old, known and long established meanings in certain patterned ways. These patterns reveal and repeat the subjective relations between real things. The mechanism of associations makes the semantic basis of word-building, being a means of secondary nomination. So, word-building is the process of creating words from the material available in the language after certain structural and semantic formulas and patterns.

2.The notion of a word-building pattern (wbp) as a two-facet linguistic unit

A WBP is a linguistic model which appeared as a reflection of the reacted use of ready units and which exists objectively in men’s minds. This model serves as the basis for creating new vocabulary items on analogy of those already used by speakers. It includes a derivational base (DB) and a derivational affix (DA).

Structurally in a secondary word the root morpheme is called a DB to which an affix is attached. Their semantic roles in the semantic structure of secondary words are just the opposite: it is an affix that is the base as it indicates the generalized name of the class of objects in which the one under nomination is included. A structural DB only names a property by which the object is identified. A DA has double semantics because basically an affix combines 2 types of meaning: its own categorical meaning and a part of speech meaning.

WBPs are two-facet linguistic units with the abstracted expression of both planes. As linguistic schemes they contain a semantic component found in and common to all individual words for which the patterns hold true.

3.Productivity (pr) of word-building patterns

The wb power of derivational units (affixes and patterns) to create new words for nominating new phenomena of reality is termed productivity (productive, non-productive and dead affixes). We have two main sources to judge about PR of derivational units: dictionaries and examination of modern texts which are rich in nonce-words. Pr is supported by a powerful linguistic factor: motivation which has different degrees: complete, partial and lack of motivation or idiomaticity. Motivation makes patterns productive and helps produce occasional words.

4.The basic types of word-building in present day English

1. major types

Affixation (suffixation, prefixation)

Origin of affixes: originally independent words; a result of secretion; have always been known as derivational affixes; adopted from foreign languages; of international currency; hybrid words.

Classification of affixes: native/ borrowed, productive/ non-productive/ dead, semantically, positive/ negative, stylistically neutral/ coloured.

Conversion

Theories: morphemic, morphological, syntactica, functional.

The two affected parts of speech are nouns and verbs. Verbs can also be made from adjectives.

Origin of conversion: it arose as a result of certain global and fundamental changes within the entire system of English; it is a reflection of the fundamental transformation of English from a synthetical type to analytical.

Composition

Structural aspect: neutral compounds (simple neutral, derived or derivational, contracted), morphological compounds, syntactic compounds.

Semantic aspect: can the meaning of a compound word be regarded as the sum of its constituent meanings?

Theoretical aspect of composition is the criteria for distinguishing between a compound and a word-combination. Criteria: graphic (spelling), semantic, phonetic, morphological, syntactic.

Sources of Compounds: are built spontaneously according to productive distributional formulas of the given period; may be the result of a gradual process of semantic isolation and structural fusion of free word-groups; borrowings.

2. minor types

Shortening (Contraction) consists in substituting a whole for a part. We may speak of graphical abbreviations (in written speech only) and lexical shortenings (a new word is made from a syllable (rarer, two) of the original word; a new word is made from the initial letters of a word group).

Sound-Imitation (Onomatopoeia) Words are made by imitating different kinds of sounds that may be produced by animals, birds, insects, human beings and inanimate objects.

Reduplication is doubling a stem, either without any phonetic changes or with a variation of the root-vowel or consonant

Back-Formation (Reversion) Instead of a noun made from a verb by affixation, a verb is produced from a noun by subtraction.

Blending (portmanteau words) is merging parts of words into one word.

Sound- and Stress-Interchange.

Exesizers.