35. Contraction as one of the ways of shortening

There are two main ways of shortening. They are: contraction (or clipping) and abbreviation (or initial shortening).

Contraction. We distinguish between four types of contraction or clipping. They are final, initial, medial and mixed clippings.

1. Final clipping, that is omission of the final part of the word, e.g.: doc (for doctor), mag (for magazine), vegs (for vegetables), Al (for Albert), Nick (for Nickolas), Phil (for Philip), etc.

2. Initial clipping, that is omission of the fore (initial) part of the word, e.g.: phone (for telephone), story (for history), Fred (for Alfred), etc.

3. Medial clipping, that is omission of the middle part of the word, e.g.: maths (for mathematics), fancy (for fantasy), etc.

4. Mixed clipping, that is the omission of the fore and the final parts of the word, e.g.: tec (for detective), flu (for influenza), fridge (for refrigerator), Liz (for Elizabeth), etc.

36. Abbreviation as one of the means of word formation in English

Abbreviation is initial shortening. They are words produced by shortening the ICs (immediate constituents) of phrasal terms up to their initial letters. Abbreviations are subdivided into 5 (five) groups. They are: acronyms, alphebatic, compound, graphic and Latin abbreviations.

1) Acronyms are read [red] as ordinary words, e.g.: UNO /’ju:nou/ (for United Nations Organization), etc.

2) Alphabetic abbreviations in which letters get their full alphabetic pronunciation and a full stress, e.g.: USA /’ju:es’ei/ (for the United States of America), B.B.C. /’bi:’bi:’si:/ (for the British Broadcasting Corporation),

3) Compound abbreviations in which the first IC (immediate constituent) is a letter (or letters) and the second a complete word, e.g.: V-day (< Victory day), L-driver (< learner-driver), etc.

4) Graphic abbreviations are pronounced as the corresponding unabbreviated words, e.g.: Mr. (for Mister), Co (for Company), X-mas (for Christmas), etc.

5) Latin abbreviations sometimes are not read [red] as Latin words but as separate letters or their English equivalents, e.g.: i.e. /ai’i:/ - that is, a.m. /ei’em/ - before noon, in the morning, e.g. – for example, etc.

37. Conversion as one of the means of affixless derivation

Conversion is a special type of affixless derivation. A newly-formed word gets a paradigm and syntactic functions different from those of the original word.

As a result the two words are hoˊmonymous. They have the same morphological structure and belong to different parts of speech. As a matter of fact, all parts of speech can be drawn into the word-building process of conversion. Its derivational patterns are different. The most widespread among them are N → V (a noun is converted into a verb), V → N (a verb is converted into a noun), A → V (an adjective is converted into a verb). For example:

N → V: a face – to face, a walk – to walk,

V → N: to make – a make, to talk – a talk.

A → V: narrow – to narrow, empty – to empty.