Modern English Word Formation

Word

Formation

be word-conscious, to be able to guess the meaning of words

they come across from the meaning of morphemes, to be able to recognize the origin of this or that lexical unit.
 The task of the work is to show the ways of word building, i.e. affixation, suffixation, compounds, statives, vowel and consonant alternations and conversion.
Topical interest. This work is of topical interest because English is a living growing language. The system of its sounds is subjected to various changes, the words and word combinations undergo changes. The most noticible and most appreciable transformations occur in words that form part of English, that is in its vocabulary.

of any language is never stable, but is constantly changing,

growing and decaying. The changes in the vocabulary of the language are due both to linguistic and extra-linguistic causes, which are determined by the social nature of the language. The intense development of science and technology has lately given birth to a great number of new words such as ‘computer’, ‘cyclotron’,’radar’, ‘psycholinguistics’, etc.; the conquest and research of outer space started by the Soviet people contributed words like ‘sputnik’, ‘lunokhod’,’babymoon’,’moon-car’,’spaceship’. It is significant that the suffix –nik occurring in the noun ‘sputnik’ is freely applied to new words of various kinds, e.g. ‘flopnik’,’mousenik’, ‘woofnik’,etc.

factors which govern their acceptance into the language, are generally

taken very much for granted by the average speaker to understand a word, it is necessary to know how it is constructed, whether it is simple or complex, that is whether or not it can be broken down into two or more parts. We are able to use a word which is new to us when we find out what object or notion it denotes. Some words, of course, are more understandable than others.

the pattern, we can easily guess the meaning of a

word although there are lots of other words which look similar, for instance, unfashionable and unfavourable for which this analysis will not work. We accept as quite natural the fact that although we can use the verbs ‘to pipe’, ‘to drum’ and ‘to trumpet’, we cannot use the verbs ‘to piano’ and ‘to violin’.

news is that even if you have an
excellent vocabulary, you

know only a
small percentage of those words. The good
news, however, is that you can increase
your vocabulary throughout your life. The
even better news is that once you have
learnt a new word, it is yours for life. It will
always be stored away, ready to be recalled
the next time you have a conversation or
write a letter or composition.

word ‘titanic’ in the following
sentences. 1. The Titanic sank

in
the North Atlantic on an April
night in 1912 after hitting an
iceberg. 2. The enemies were
locked in a titanic struggle. You
can tell from the first sentence
that Titanic is a ship and from the
second sentence that ‘titanic’
means “having great size, force
or power.

word. The context of a word is the sentence, the

surrounding words, or the situation in which the word appears. There are several types of them. 1. Definition or restatement is defined in the sentence ,e.g. We read a collection of fables, short stories that teach a lesson. 2. The meaning of the word is made clear by the example, e.g. Bombay is a populous city; one way the Indian government has tried to ease the overcrowding there is to build a second Bombay . 3. Comparison. e.g. Joseph has always been amiable – almost as friendly as his older brother Mark. ( As introduces a comparison between Joseph’s disposition and that of his older brother.) 4. Contrast. e.g. The mayor’s popularity, soared to its highest point, but the city council’s dropped to its nadir. ( A contrast is drawn between the highest point of the mayor’s popularity and the lowest point, the nadir, of the city council’s.

words are
constantly being added. English words come from many
sources.

Some come from the dead language Latin, and
others come from ancient Greek. Knowing the words and
parts of words borrowed from Latin and Greek can help us
understand the meaning of many English words. In general,
English words are of two kinds:

those that can be
analysed into smaller
parts:
untimely

those that cannot
time, face, feel

are made up of parts called
prefixes
roots
suffixes
They offer clues
to

the meaning of the words.

A root

is the part of a word

that carries the basic meaning.

A prefix

is one or more syllables

placed in front

of the root to modify the meaning of the root

or to form a new word.

OF THEM MAY APPEAR IN HUNDREDS OF DIFFERENT WORDS. BECAUSE PREFIXES OFTEN

HAVE MORE THAN ONE MEANING, THEY CAN BE HARD TO INTERPRET.

The main function of prefixes

is to change

the lexical meaning of the same part of speech.

There are 51 prefixes in the system of Modern English word formation.

Prefixation

adjective formation, while prefixation is mostly typical of verb formation. The

distinction also rests on the role different types of meaning play in the semantic structure of the suffix and the prefix. The part-of -speech meaning has a much greater significance in suffixes as compared to prefixes which possess it in a lesser degree. Due to it, a prefix may be confined to one part of speech as, for example, enslave, encage, unbutton ,or may function in more than one part of speech as over- in over kind, overfeed, overestimation.
Unlike prefixes, suffixes as a rule function in any one part of speech often forming
a derived stem of a different part of speech as compared with that of the base, e.g. careless - care; suitable - suit, etc. Furthermore, it is necessary to point out that a suffix closely knit together with a base forms a fusion retaining less of its independence that a prefix which is as a general rule more independent semantically, e.g. reading- 'the act of one who reads'; 'ability to read'; and re-read — 'to read again'.

Grammatical Derivational

-s, -ed, -ing

-ly,-ence,ize,-hood

grammatical provide a grammatical signal of some kind but don’t greatly alter the basic meaning of the word and those that, by being added, create new words. The endings are suffixes of the first kind. Grammatical suffixes are important in grammar, but in vocabulary we are more concerned with the second kind of suffixes – those that make new words – derivational suffixes.

of speech.


Classification of suffixes

be mentioned. The stem is the part of the word
which

remains unchanged throughout the paradigm
of the word. Stems have not only the lexical meaning but
also grammatical meaning. They can be noun stems, adjective
stems and verb stems. Sometimes it is rather difficult to
distinguish between simple and derived words, especially in
the cases of phonetic borrowings from other languages and
of native languages with blocked morphemes, e.g. “cranberry”,
“absence”,etc.

Roots

often have one stress. The meaning of a compound
often differs

from the meaning of its elements.
Compounding- is one of the productive types of word-formation in Modern English.
Compound words are inseparable vocabulary units.
They are formally and semantically dependent on the
constituent bases and the semantic relations between them
which mirror the relations between the motivating units.
The main types of compound nouns are as follows:

Compounds

noun-stem+noun -stem

apple-tree, snowball, newspaper

adjective stem+ noun stem

blackbird, whitehorn, blackleg

of the type price rise, wage freeze, steel helmet, sand

castle.
Grammarians can’t come to the conclusion whether adjectives can be formed by means of conversion from nouns.

doesn’t change the part-of-speech meaning.
Examples: prof=professor, to rev=to revolve, comfy=comfortable.

have
been named adjectives, though they can’t
be attributes in a sentence,

and though their meaning
doesn’t seem to be that of property. The a- means on,
in or at. Statives are invariable. They often show a
temporary state rather than a permanent one. They
most usually follow a link-verb (was asleep) or they
can be used like a participle, but they can’t go before
the noun they modify. In the sentence a stative is most
usually a predicative (he fell asleep).

The statives

Modern
English is highly productive in replenishing the English word-stock
with new

words. This term refers to the numerous cases of words
belonging to different parts of speech. This may be illustrated by
the following cases: work – to work; love – to love; paper –
to paper. As a rule we deal with simple words. There is a certain
difference on the morphological level between various parts of
speech, mostly between nouns and verbs. What serves a word-
building means? The answer is a paradigm. As it is a morphologi-
cal category, conversion can be described as a morphological
way of forming words.

Conversion

blends two ways of word-building are combined: abbreviation
and composition.

To form a blend we clip the end of the first
component and the beginning of the second component. As a
result we have a compound –shortened word. One of the first
blends in English was the word “smog” from two synonyms:
smoke and fog. Mostly blends are formed from a word-group:

cinemadict
informecial
slimnastics
slanguist

dramedy
faction
medicare
socialite

acromania
chunnel
megalog

Blends

– slang linguist acromania – acronym mania chunnel – channel, canal megalog –

magazine catalogue dramedy – drama comedy faction – fact fiction – fiction based on real facts medicare – medical care socialite – social elite