The basic ways of word-formation

Word formation is one of the main ways of enriching vocabulary. There are 4 main ways of word-building in Modern English: affixation, composition, conversion, abbreviation.

· Linguists distinguish among 3 types of affixes. An affix that is attached to the front of its base (stem) is called a prefix. An affix that is attached to the end of its base is turned suffix. English has no system of infixes (within a stem – to express tense, number or gender). As a rule prefixes modify the lexical meaning of stems to which they are added. Suffixes modify the lexical meaning of the stem, but also usually transfer the word itself to another part of speech.

e.g. care (n) – careless (adj)

As prefixes are indifferent to parts of speech they are characterized according to:

ü their origin: Native (un-), Romanic (in), reek (sym-)

ü meaning: negative (in-, un-, non-, a-, dis-); prefixes of time and order (ex-, neo-, fore-, after-, post-); prefixes of repetition (re-); reversed prefixes (de-, un-, dis-); locative prefixes (extra-, pan-, super-, sub-, trans-); size and degree (hyper-, mega-, mini-, super-, ultra-, vice-).

ü productivity (the ability to make new words)

e.g. (un)- is a highly productive

Suffixes can be divided according to: a). their origin: Romanic (-age, -ment), Native (-er, -dom, -ship), Greek (-ism, -ize); b). meaning: e.g. (-er) denotes the agent of the action,
(-ess) denotes feminine gender, (-ence, -ance) has abstract meaning; c). parts of speech they form: noun suffixes (-er, -ness, -ment), adjective forming suffixes (-ish, -ful, -less), verb forming suffixes (-en, -fy); d). productivity: relative freedom with which they can combine with bases of the appropriate category: productive (-er, -ly, -ness, -ie, -let), non-productive (-dom, - th) and semi-productive (-eer, -ward)

· Word-composition – the combination of 2 or more existing words to create a new one – one of the most common and important word-building processes in English. A compound is a unit of vocabulary that consists of more tham one lexical stem: campsite (n+n), bluebird (adj+n), whitewash (adj+v), inlaws (p+n), jumpsuit (v+n). With very few exceptions the resulting compound is a noun, a verb or an adjective. In most compounds the rightmost morpheme determines the category of the entire word (e.g. “green house” is a noun because its rightmost component is a noun, “spoon feed” is a verb because fed also belongs to this category and “nationwide” is an adjective just as wide is. The morpheme that determines the category of the entire word is called the head).

· Conversion is a process that assigns an already existing word to a new syntactic category. There are 3 most common conversion in English: verbs derived from nouns (to bloom), nouns derived from verbs (a survey) and verbs derived from adjective (to empty). Less common types of conversion can yield nouns from adjectives (a bitter), from phrases (a down-and-out), from affixes (“isms”) and verbs from prepositions (up the price).

· Abbreviation – in the process of communication words and word-groups can be shortened. There are 2 main types of shortenings: graphical and lexical.

® Graphical abbreviations are the result of shortening of words and word-groups only in written speech while orally the corresponding full forms are used. They are used for the economy of space and effort in writing. The oldest group of graphical abbreviation in English is of Latin origin: e.g. for example (example gratia), no-number (numero), i.e. – that is (id est). there are graphical abbreviations of native origin. We have several semantic groups of them:

- Days of the wake: Mon – Monday

- Names of months: Apr – April

- Names of countries UK: Yorks – Yorkshire

- Names of states in USA: Calif – California

- Names of address: Mr, Mrs, Ms, Dr

- Military ranks: capt – captain

- Scientific degrees: BA – Bachelor of Afts, DM – Doctor of Medicine

- Units of time, length, weight: f/ft – foot/feet, sec. – second

® Initial abbreviation. There are 3 types of initialisms in English:

- Initialisms with alphabetical reality: UK, CND (campaign for Nuclear Disarmament)

- Initialisms which are read as if they are words: UNESCO (United Nations Economic, Scientific, Cultural organization)

- Initialisms which coincide with English words in their sound forms (NOW – National organization of women)

® Abbreviation of words: clipping a part of word ®a new lexical unit where either the lexical meaning or the style is different from the full form of the word.

e.g. “fantasy”®”fancy” – different lexical meaning

laboratory®lab – different styles

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