Contractions (fancy – fantasy, ma’am – madam)

Shorten words arise in various types of colloquial speech as long as their connection with prototype is alive, they remain synonyms. When the connection is lost the shorten words may become stylistically neutral. Stylistically they may belong to any variety of colloquial style. They are especially numerous and various branches in slang (sport, newspaper etc). Nursery words are also clipped (granny, mum). Stylistic peculiarity goes with the emotional colouring. School and college slang reveal some ironical attitude to the things named (ec – economics, caf – cafeteria). The only type of clippings that belongs to literary of booking style are poetical contractions (ne’er, e’er o’er).

21. Much less commonly we find what are called back formation. (edit – editor) –or is wrongly analysed as a suffix like –er (worker, builder) and is therefore removable. To burgle – burglar the same way. Most examples are no longer transparent. It’s difficult to realize that the verb to grovel is a back formation from groveling, (grove – face down + one who does). There are not many of these and except of very recent one like burgle, they are always opaque. They came into the language because the form they came from was itself opaque and open to the wrong analyses.

22. Creation by blending are also called portmanteauwords (языковая контаминация, слово-гибрид) There are 2 meanings packed up into one word. In blending parts of 2 familiar words are yoked together (usually the first part of one word and the second of the other), to produce a word which combines the meanings and sound of the old ones. The process of formation is also called telescoping because words seem to slide into one another like sections of a telescope. (smog = smoke +fog, heliport = helicopter + airport, motel = moto + hotel, flush = flash + quash). Sometimes we lose the track of the components of new bland, the original of the word is no longer transparent (Vaseline = Wasser (German) water + elaron (Greek) oil).

Two types of blends can be distinguished. One may be termed additive, the second – restrictive. Both involve the sliding together not only of sound but of meaning as well. Yet the semantic relations are different.

1). the first is transformable into a phrase consisting of the respective complete stems combined by the conjunction and (e.g. smog < a mixture of smoke and fog). The elements may be synonymous, belong to the same semantic field or at least be members of the same lexico-grammatical class of words: smaze < smoke + haze.

2). The restrictive type is transformable into an attributive phrase where the first element serves as modifier of the second: cine(matographic pano)rama > Cinerama; medicare < medical care, positron < positive electron, telecast < television broadcast.

23. Acronym (Acros = end + onym = name) is a special type of blending, a typical acronym takes the first sound of each of the several words and makes a new word from those initial sounds. If the resulting word is pronounced like any other word – it is a true acronym.

E.g.: ASCII – American Standard Court of Internation Interchange. WAC – Women Army Cops. NATO – North-Atlantic Treaty Organization, VAT – Value Added Tax, UNO - United Nations Organization, Laser – light amplification by stimulated emission radiation, wasp – white Anglo-Saxon protestants.

To make an acronym pronounceable we take not initial sound, but the first consonant and the first vowel together (rador = radio detecting + ranging). Sometimes acronyms are based on even larger changes of the words they abbreviate. COMECOM – Council for mutual economical system. FORTRAN – formula translation. There is a half way between blendings and acronyms. Then an acronym becomes fully accepted as a word often comes to be spelt with locace letters (rador).

If the letters which make up an acronym are individually pronounced such acronyms are called initialisms. (E.g.: BBC - British Broadcasting Company, SOS – save our souls (a wireless code-signal of extreme distress), TV, B.C., I. Q., OK, pto.

Abbreviation is achieved by omission of letters from one or more parts of the whole. (usu –usual, Fri – Friday, abbr – abbreviation, bldg – building, govt – government, wd - word, doz, dz – dozen, ltd – limited, B.A. – Bachelor of Arts, NY). Doubling of initial letters shows plural forms as p.p. for pages. These are not separate words but only graphic signs or symbols representing them.

A specific type of abbreviations having no parallel in Russian is represented by Latin words but substituted by their English equivalents (a.m., p.m., cf., e.g. “exempli gratia”, ibid “ibidem”, i.e., viz = “namely”).

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