Word Formation in OE

According to their morphological structure OE words fell into three main types:

a) simple words (root-words) or words with a simple stem, containing a root-morpheme and no derivational affixes: land, singan, go:d, etc.;

b) derived words consisting of one-root morpheme and one or more affixes: be-ginnan, ge-met-ing, etc.

c) compound words, whose stems were made up of more than one root-morpheme: mann-cynn (mankind), weall-geat (wall gate), etc.

OE vocabulary developed in two ways:

1) by forming new words from elements existing in the language;

2) by borrowing words from other languages

As for word building, it could be used in two ways: derivation and word composition. Derived words were built by means of affixes: prefixes and suffixes. In addition to this, words were distinguished with the help of sound interchanges and word stress. Sound interchanges were frequent in the roots of related words, but still they were used as an additional feature which helped to distinguish between words built from the same root:

1) vowel gradation (ablaut) was used to distinguish verbs from nouns and also verbs of the same root: singan – song; sprecan – spraece; findan – fand, sittan –saet, etc.

2) consonant interchanges: ri:san- rae:ran; de:aþ - dead, etc.

The role of word stress was not great. The shifting of word stress helped to differentiate between some parts of speech being used together with other means: the verb had unaccented prefixes whereas the corresponding nouns had stressed prefixes: ond-`swarian - `ondswaru.

Prefixation was a productive way of building new words in OE. They were widely used with verbs but were far less productive with other parts of speech. For example, ga:n – go; a:`ga:n (go away); be`ga:n (go around), etc.

Suffixation was by far the most productive means of word derivation in OE. Suffixes not only modified the lexical meaning of the word but could refer to other parts of speech. Suffixes were mostly applied in forming nouns and adjectives, seldom in forming verbs.

Word composition was a highly productive way of developing the vocabulary in OE. This method of formation was common to all IE languages but in none of the groups has it become as widespread as in Germanic. Compounds in OE languages were of two types: morphological or primary compounds and syntactic or secondary compounds. The former were formed by combining two stems: mid-niht (midnight); syntactic compounds usually consisted of a noun in the Gen. case and a head noun: Sunnan-daeg, Englaland, Oxena-ford, etc.

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