- •What Is Lexicology?
- •1.1 Definition of Lexicology
- •The Structure of the English Lexicon
- •2.1 Words and their Associative Fields
- •2.2 Word Families
- •2.3 Word Classes
- •2.4 Semantic, or Lexical, Fields
- •Synchronistic and Diachronistic Approaches to the Structure of the English Vocabulary
- •2.2 English Lexemes of Native Origin
- •2.3 Borrowed, or Loan, Lexemes
- •2.3.1 Borrowings from Latin
- •2.3.2 Scandinavian Borrowings
- •2.3.3 Loans from French
- •2.3.4 Spanish Loanwords
- •2.3.5 Borrowings from Italian
- •2.3.6 Loans from Dutch and German
- •2.3.7 Borrowings from Slavic, Hungarian, and Turkish
- •Classification of Borrowings according to the Degree of Assimilation
- •2.5 Etymological Doublets
- •2.6 Folk Etymology
- •The Word
- •3.1 Defining a Word
- •3.2 Morphological Structure of Words
- •3.2.1 Word Structure
- •3.2.2 Stems
- •3.2.3 Types of affixes
- •3.2.4 Derivational and Functional Affixes
- •Inflection of Derived or Compound Words
- •3.3 Cliticization
- •3.4 Internal Change/Alternation
- •3.5 Suppletion
- •3.6 Reduplication
- •Word Formation
- •4.1 Derivation
- •V ? Athe act of X’ing
- •V ? Vnot X
- •4.1.1 Types of Derivational Affixes
- •4.3.1 Classification of Compounds
- •4.3.2 Endocentric and Exocentric Compounds
- •4.4 Reduplication
- •4.5 Conversion
- •4.6 Blending
- •4.7 Backformation
- •4.8 Clipping
- •4.9 Acronyms and Abbreviations
- •Semantics
- •5.1 Types of Semantics
- •5.2 Linguistic Sign
- •5.3 Denotation
- •5.4 Connotation
- •5.5 Reference
- •5.6 Sense
- •5.7 Semantics and Change of Meaning
- •5.9 Sense Relations
- •5.9.1 Similarity of Sense
- •5.9.2 Oppositeness of Sense
- •5.9.3 Meaning Categories: Hyponymy
- •5.9.4 Meronymy
- •5.9.5 Related Meanings
- •5.9.6 Different Meanings: Homonymy
- •Homonyms
- •Homophones homographs homonyms proper
- •Phraseology
- •6.1 Definition
- •6.2 Classification of phraseologisms
- •6.3 The Origin of Phraseological Units
- •6.3.1 Native Phraseological Units
- •6.3.2 Borrowed Phraseological Units
- •6.4 Semantic Structure of Phraseological Units
- •6.5 Semantic Relations of Phraseological Units
- •6.5.1 Similarity of Sense
- •6.5.2 Oppositeness of Sense
- •Major Differences between American and British variants of the English Language
- •7.1 Differences in Vocabulary
- •7.2 Spelling Differences
- •7.3 Grammatical Differences
- •Lexicography
- •I need to add Types of Dictionaries
4.4 Reduplication
Reduplication is a process of forming new words by repeating the entire free morpheme (total reduplication) or a part of it (partial reduplication). It is not a productive means of forming new words in the English language; however, it is common in other languages like Turkish. A few examples of reduplication in English are win-win, lose-lose, blah-blah, bye-bye, and goody-goody. The following examples illustrate partial reduplication: okey-dokey, zig-zag, chick-flick, roly-poly, walkie-talkie, knick-knack, and others. These combinations are used informally.
4.5 Conversion
Although conversion, the term first used by Henry Sweet (1898, p. 38), is one of the most productive means of coining new words in Modern English, scholars still argue whether this phenomenon should be studied within syntax, morphology, word-formation, or even semantics. Georgious Tserdanelis and Wai Yi Peggy Wong take a syntactic approach to conversion. They believe that conversion is the creation of new words “by shifting the part of speech to another part without changing the form of the word” (2004, p.430), contending that in Modern English, there is no distinction between parts of speech, i.e. between a noun and a verb, noun and adjective, and others. Pyles and Algeo (1993, p.281) use the term ‘functional shift’ to refer to the same process to highlight that words are converted from one grammatical function to another without any change in form, e.g., paper (n)--paper (v). This functional approach to conversion cannot be justified and should be rejected as inadequate because one and the same word cannot simultaneously belong to different classes of words, or parts of speech. We defend a position that conversion is a word-forming process and should be studied within word formation because conversion deals with forming of new lexical units and perfectly fits the definition of word formation as the process of coining new words from the existing ones.
The major kinds of conversion are noun ?verb, verb?noun, adjective ?noun, and adjective ? verb. For example:
Noun ?verb: bottle (n)—bottle (v), network (n)—network (v)
Verb?noun: call (v)—call (n) and command (v)—command (n)
Adjective ? verb: better (adj)—better (v).
Adjective ?noun: poor (adj)—the poor (n). Such conversions are relatively rare. Some scholars believe that they are not conversions at all but substantivized adjectives.
Adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections may act as bases for conversion, e.g. up (adv)—up (v) and down (adv)—down (v).
Although some scholars (Jackson & Ze Amvela, 2005) believe that conversion may occur within the same word class, e.g., walk (v) and walk (v) a dog, we do not consider them as conversions because they are different meanings of one and the same word, and these meanings are realized in the context. We do not recognize the class of marginal cases of conversion (Bauer, 1983) or partial cases of conversion, either. If there is any change in the structure, spelling, or pronunciation while new words are formed from the existing ones, we do not recognize them as conversions.