Non-Productive Ways of Word-Formation

Back-formation (regressive derivation) is the derivation of new words by subtracting a real or supposed affix from existing words (often through misinterpretation of their structure), e.g. an editor > to edit, enthusiasm > to enthuse etc.

n The most productive type of back-formation in present-day English is derivation of verbs from compounds that have either –er or –ing as their last element, e.g. sightseeing > to sightsee; proofreading > to proofread; mass-production > to mass-produce; self-destruction > to self-destruct; a baby-sitter > to baby-sit etc.

Onomatopeia (Gr. onoma ‘name, word’ and poiein ‘the make’) (sound imitation, echoisms) is the formation of words by a more or less exact reproduction of a sound associated with an object producing this sound.

Semantic classification of onomatopeic words:

n sounds produced by people: to babble, to chatter, to giggle, to grumble, to titter, to grumble etc.;

n sounds produced by animals (to moo, to neigh, to mew, to purr etc.), birds (to twitter, to crow, to cackle etc.), insects and reptiles (to buzz, to hiss);

Semasiology vs Onomasiology

Onomasiology (Gr. ònomasía ‘name, designation’, logos ‘study’) is a subdiscipline of lexical semanticsthat studies the word meaning in the direction ‘from the concept – to a sound form (or forms)’. Thesauruses are compiled according to onomasiological principles.

Semasiology (Gr. sēmasia ‘signification, meaning’ and lógos ‘study’) is a sundiscipline of lexical semantics concerned with the studies of the word meaning in the opposite direction: ‘from the sound form – to its meaning (or meanings)’.

Types of Word Meaning

Word-meaning is not homogeneous but is made up of various components the combination and the interrelation of which determine to a great extent the inner facet of the word.

Grammatical meaning is the meaning which unites words into big groups such as parts of speech or lexico-grammatical classes. It is recurrent in identical sets of individual forms of different words, e.g. stones, apples, kids, thoughts have the grammatical meaning of plurality.

Lexical meaning is the meaning proper to the word as a linguistic unit; it is recurrent in all the forms of this word and in all the possible distributions of these forms, e.g. the word-forms write, writes, wrote, writing, written have different grammatical meanings of tense, person, aspect, but the same lexical meaning ‘to make letters or other symbols on a surface, especially with a pen or pencil’.

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