Word formation (словообразование)

It’s a process of creating new words from material available in the language after a certain structural and semantic formulas and pattern, forming words by combining root & affix morphemes.

2 types of word formation:

1) Compounding (словосложение)

2) Word – derivation

Within the types further distinction may be made between the ways of forming words. The basic way of forming words is word-derivation affixation and conversion apart from this shortening and a number of minor ways of formal words such as back-forming, blending, sound imitation are traditionally referred to formation.

Different types of word formation:

Affixation is the formation of new words by means of suffixes and prefixes to stems\basis.

Affixes may be grouped

1) according to their linguistic origin. We distinguish affixes of Germanic origin (full, less), of Romanic origin (ion), of Greek origin (ise, izm);

2) according to the parts of speech. We distinguish noun forming, adj. forming and verb forming affixes;

3) according to semantic functions. They may denote persons, quality, negation. Many suffixes originated from separate words: hood originated for the noun hood, which meant state or condition; full – полный (adj. In O.E) now it is suffix. Suffixes may change the part of speech: critic (al).

All suffixes are divided into lexical and grammatical.

Lexical suffixes build new word. Productive affixes. For ex: read-readable, happy-happiness, act-actor.

Grammatical suffixes change the grammatical form of a word. Often used to create neologisms and nonce-words (I don’t like Sunday evenings: I feel so mondayish). For ex: finish-finished, say-says, rose-roses.

Some productive suffixes:

Noun forming – er, ing, is, ist, ance

Adj – forming – y, ish, ed, able, less

Adv – forming – ly

Verb – forming - Ize, /ise, ate

Prefixies - Un, die, re

Conversion (zero derivation) it is one of the major ways of enriching EV & referrers to the numerous cases of phonetic identity of word forms of 2 words belonging to different part of speech.. The new word has a meaning which differs from that of original one though it can >< be associated with it. nurse (noun) to nurse – to feed

A certain stem is used for the formation of a categorically different word without a derivative element being added.

Bag – to bag, Back – to back, Bottle – to bottle This specific pattern is very productive in English

The most popular types are noun →verb or verb→noun To take off – a take off

Conversion can be total or partial. Partial: the then president (тогдашний). An adverb is used as an adjective, only in this particular context. Total: work – to work

Conversion may be the result of shading of English endings. The historical changes may be briefly outlined as follows: in O.E. a verb and a noun of the same root were distinguished by their endings. For ex: the verb ‘to love’ had a form (Old Eng.) ‘lufian’. This verb had personal conjunctions. The noun ‘love’ had the form ‘lufu’ with different case endings. But in the course of time, the personal and case endings were lost. There are numerous pairs of words (e. g. love, n. — to love, v.; work, n. — to work, v.; drink, n. — to drink, v., etc.) which did, not occur due to conversion but coincided as a result of certain historical processes (dropping of endings, simplification of stems) when before that they had different forms (e. g. O. E. lufu, n. — lufian, v.).

The two categories of parts of speech especially affected by conversion are nouns and verbs. Verbs made from nouns are the most numerous amongst the words produced by conversion: e. g. to hand, to back, to face, to eye, to mouth, to nose, to dog, to wolf, to monkey, to can, to coal, to stage, to screen, to room, to floor, to blackmail, to blacklist, to honeymoon, and very many others.

Nouns are frequently made from verbs: do (e. g. This is the queerest do I''ve ever come across. Do — event, incident), go (e. g. He has still plenty of go at his age. Go — energy), make, run, find, catch, cut, walk, worry, show, move, etc. Verbs can also be made from adjectives: to pale, to yellow, to cool, to grey, to rough (e. g. We decided to rough it in the tents as the weather was warm), etc.

Other parts of speech are not entirely unsusceptible to conversion as the following examples show: to down, to out (as in a newspaper heading Diplomatist Outed from Budapest), the ups and downs, the ins and outs, like, n, (as in the like of me and the like of you).

Compounding & word comparison. Compound words are made of 2 derivational stems. The types of structure of CW: neutral, morphological &syntactic.

In neutral compound the process is released without any linking elements sunflower. There are three types of neutral compounds simple compounds went a compound consist of a simple affixes stems.

Derivate/ derivational compound - has affixes babysitter.

Contracted – has a shorten stems. TV-set

Morphological C –few in number. This type is non productive. Represented by words, where 2 stems are combined by a linking vowel/ consonant Anglo-Saxon, statesman, craftsmanship.

Syntactic C – formed of segments of speech preserving articles, prepositions, adverbs. Mother-in-law

Reduplication. New word are made by stem ether without any phonetic changes Bye-Bye or variation of a root vowel or consonant ping-pong

Shortening. There are 2 ways of producing them:

1. The word is formed from the syllable of the original word which in term may loose its beginning –phone, its ending vac (vacation) or both fridge.

2. The word is formed from the initial letter of a word group BB, bf – boyfriend. Acronyms are shorten words but read as one UNO [ju:nou]

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