Word-formation
processes
Food for Thought
How receptive are people towards new
words?
Do people accept the use of different
forms of that new word easily?
Point to Note
There is a lot of regularity in the word-
formation processes in the English
Language.
Background
The study of the origin and history of a
word is known as its etymology.
Background
There are many different ways in which
new words can enter the language.
A lot of words in daily use today were, at
one time, considered barbaric misuses of
the language. In the early 19th century,
words like handbook and aviation horrified
readers of a London newspaper.
Yet many new words can cause similar
outcries as they come into use today.
Background
Rather than act as if the language is being
debased, most linguists prefer to view the
constant evolution of new words and new
uses of old words as a reassuring sign of
vitality and creativeness in the way a
language is shaped by the needs of its
users.
Coinage
The invention of totally new terms.
The most typical sources are invented
trade names for commercial products that
become general terms (usually without
capital letters) for any version of that
product.
Examples include Kleenex, Teflon, Tylenol,
aspirin, Vaseline and zipper.
Coinage
New words based on the name of a person
or a place are called eponyms.
Examples:
Sandwich – from the 18th century Earl of
Sandwich who first insisted on having his
bread and meat together while gambling.
Jeans – from the city of Genoa where the
type of cloth was first made.
Borrowing
One of the most common source of new
words in English is the process of taking
over words from other languages.
Throughout history, English has adopted a
vast number of new words from other
languages, including croissant (French),
dope (Dutch), lilac (Persian), piano
(Italian), pretzel (German), sofa (Arabic),
tycoon (Japanese) and yogurt (Turkish).
Borrowing
A special type of borrowing is described as
loan translation or calque. In this
process, there is a direct translation of the
elements of a word into the borrowing
language.
Compounding
The joining of two separate words to
produce a single form is known as
compounding.
Common English compounds are
bookcase, doorknob, fingerprint, sunburn,
textbook, wallpaper, wastebasket and
waterbed.
Blending
The combination of two separate forms to
produce a single new term is called
blending.
Blending is typically accomplished by
taking only the beginning of one word and
joining it to the end of the other word.
Blending
Examples:
Brunch = Breakfast + Lunch
Smog = Smoke + fog
Motel = Motor + Hotel
Telecast = Television + Broadcast
Infotainment = Information +
Entertainment
Clipping
Clipping occurs when a word of more
than one syllable (facsimile) is reduced to
a shorter form (fax), usually beginning in
casual speech.
Common examples include ad
(advertisement), cab (cabriolet), condo
(condominium), fan (fanatic), flu
(influenza), perm (permanent wave), pub
(public house) etc.
Clipping
A particular type of reduction, favoured in
Australian and British English, produces
forms technically known as hypocorisms.
In this process, a longer word is reduced
to a single syllable, then –y or –ie is added
to the end.
Examples include movies (‘moving
pictures’) and telly (television’).
Backformation
Typically, a word of one type (usually a
noun) is reduced to form a word of
another type (usually a verb).
A good example of backformation is the
process whereby the noun television first
came into use and then the verb televise
was created from it.
Conversion
A change in the function of a word, as for
example when a noun comes to be used
as a verb (without any reduction), is
generally known as conversion.
Examples of nouns converted to use as
verbs include bottle (bottled the home
brew), butter (buttered the toast), chair
(chair the meeting), spy etc.
Conversion
It is worth noting that some words can
shift substantially in meaning when they
change category through conversion.
The verb to doctor often has a negative
sense, not normally associated with the
source noun a doctor.
Acronyms
Acronyms are new words formed from the
initial letters of a set of other words.
These can be forms such as CD (compact
disk) or VCR (video cassette recorder).
Many acronyms simply become everyday
terms such as laser (light amplification by
stimulated emission of radiation) and
radar (radio detecting and ranging).
Derivation
The most common word formation process
to be found in the production of new
English words.
Derivation is accomplished by means of
a large number of small ‘bits’ of the
English language which are not usually
given separate listings in dictionaries.
Derivation
The small ‘bits’ are generally described as
affixes.
Some familiar examples are the elements
un-, mis-, pre-, -ful, -less, -ish, -ism and –
ness which appear in words like unhappy,
misrepresent, prejudge, joyful, careless,
boyish, terrorism and sadness.
Multiple Processes
Although we have concentrated on each of
these word-formation processes in
isolation, it is possible to trace the
operation of more than one process at work
in the creation of a particular word.
For example, the term deli seems to have
become a common American English
expression via a process of first borrowing
delicatessen (from German) and then
clipping that borrowed form.
Multiple Processes
Forms that begin as acronyms can also go
through other processes, as in the use of
lase as a verb, the result of backformation
from laser.
In the expression waspish attitudes, the
acronym WASP (‘white Anglo-Saxon
protestant’) has lost its capital letters and
gained a suffix (-ish) in the derivation
process.
Final Note
Many of these new words can have a very
brief life-span.
The generally accepted test of the ‘arrival’
of recently formed words in a language is
their published appearance in a dictionary.
Food for Thought
How will an understanding of word-
formation processes aid your
understanding of a text, in relation to its
purpose, target audience, context and
culture?
