The categories and types of present day english word formation

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Department of translation studies and contrastive linguistics named

after Hryhoriy Kochur
Nadiya Andreichuk, associate-professor
nadiyaan@gmail.com

Ukrainian
word-formation (part 1)

Contrast is the occurance
of different elements

to create interest

are plenty of

words there of every kind,

and the range of words is wide and their variation.
Homer, The Illiad, 20

Classification of the principal types of word-formation.
3. Word-formation rules.
4.

Productivity.
5. Contrastive analysis of affixation in English and Ukrainian.

studies the patterns on which a language forms new

lexical units i.e. words.
word-formation is said to treat of

composites which are analyzable both formally and semantically.

stems) of a given language all the word-forms of

that lexeme,
derivation results in the formation of what is

traditionally considered to be a different word

is admittedly as much of our linguistic competence as

the ability to make and understand new sentences

viewed from two angles:
— word-creation as a historical process;
—

the relation of new words to the other words in

the language

I. Based upon the morphological structure of the initial

word or words. Proceding from this principle we may distinguish:

A.Derivation — the type where the word has only one semantic centre, the other morphemes being affixes, e.g. brotherhood.
B. Compounding — the type where the word has at least two semantic centres,e.g. red-hot, navy-blue walking-stick, newspaper, to whitewash.

Based on the relationship of components to the new

word. According to this principle we have the following types:

A.Morphological word-building — creating new words using morphemes and changing the structure of the existing words after certain linguistic patterns:
— derivation — suffixation and prefixation, zero-derivation,

more stems to form a new unit,
—

shortening — abbreviation or curtailing of the word,
— sound-interchange-

the change of a unit in a morpheme resulting in a new lexical meaning (life — live),
— back – formation — creating a new word by removing actual or supposed affixes (edit from editor)
— reduplication (to murmur)

from one part of speech into another which implies

both a change in morphological and syntactic peculiarities of a

word
e.g. the unemployed, the poor, молода тополя i молода запрошувала гостей на весiлля.

units by the process of isolation from free word-combinations

e.g. forget-me-not,
marry-go-round,
stay-at-home,
happy-go-lucky,
kill- me-quick,
for-eyes-only,
pie-in-the-sky,
добранiч,

нiсенiтниця

М.Я. Плющ) are inclined to include into this classification

lexico-semantic word-building i.e. any change in the meaning of

word that comes out as the result of the historical development of the language

new meaning its just its semantic system that is

broadened. It becomes polysemantic but no new word appears. A

new word appears when the limit of semantic variation is reached and a homonym is created. But it still doesn`t mean that semantic change is a means of creating new words. Homonyms retain no semantic connection with the initial word

in one important respect: they are of limited productivity:

not all words which result from the application of the

rule are acceptable.
They are freely acceptable only when they have gained an institutional currency in the language.

drawn between “actual words” (sandstone, unwise), and “potential words”

(*lemonstone, *unexcellent)
both of these being distinct from “nonEnglish words”

like *selfishless, which, because it shows the suffix -less added to an adjective and not to a noun, does not obey the rules of word-formation

the intersection of the historical and contemporary (synchronic) study

of the language, providing a constant set of “models” from

which new words, ephemeral or permanent, are created from day to day.
2) on a larger scale, the rules themselves (like grammatical rules) undergo change: affixes and compounding processes can become productive or lose their productivity; can increase or decrease their range of meaning or grammatical applicability.

Englsh suffix -th, no longer used to form new

words, survives in such nouns as warmth, length, depth, width,

breadth.
A corollary [kə’rɒl(ə)rɪ] of this approach is that the historical study of a word is irrelevant to its status as an illustration of present-day rules: the fact that the word unripe has existed in the English language since Anglo-Saxon times does not prevent us from using it as an example of a regular process of word-formation still available in the language.

occasion (as in She needs guidance, and the poor

child is as guidanceless as she is parentless are normally

comprehensible, but are used at a certain cost to acceptibility. They are often referred to as nonce formations and are liable to be criticized if too many are used.

a derived form has preceded the word from which

(formally speaking) it is derived.
Thus editor entered the language

before edit, lazy before laze, and television before televize. The process by which the shorter word is created by the deletion of a supposed affix is known as back-formation, since it reverses the normal trend of word-formation, which is to add rather than to subtract constituents.

relevance to the contemporary study of word-formation.

To the

present-day speaker of English, the relationship between laze and lazy

need be no different from that between sleep and sleepy.

The process is particularly fruitful in creating denominal verbs.

to be used with some hesitation, especially in respect

of the full range of verbal inflections.
We had the

agential baby-sitter before the verb baby-sit and the form “Will you baby-sit for me?” before пnflected forms “He baby-sat for them”.
Other back-formations continue to display their lack of established acceptibility: *They sight-saw, *She housekept.

with processes that are productive at the present time.

The fact that words have resulted from the past operation

of word-formation processes is in itself irrelevant from a synchronic point of view
E.g. the word gospel cannot be seen as a modern English word-formation, though formed in earlier English from the words good and spell (in the obsolete sense “news”) . Nor, as an English word, can karate be seen as a ‘formation’, though in Japanese it is clearly a junction of cara ‘empty’ and te ‘hand’.

psychosomatic, workaholic, motel, bionic have all been formed within

English sufficiently recently as to be representative of currently productive

processes.
The native speaker operates daily in the implicit knowledge that the meaning of most adjectives can be negated by prefixing un- and that most adjectives will permit the formation of abstract nouns by suffixing -ness.

no means straightforward. There is no simple parallel to

the use and non-use of forms:
* fulgrace-dis [ on syntagmatic

grounds: dis- can only prefix]
* emptyless [ on semantic and grammatical grounds: -less cannot be added to adjectives]
* thinkledge [-ledge is obsolete]
* doorleg [pragmatically excluded in present world]
* snow-cream [a possible but unused compound] etc.

means are not merely those with the aid of

which we can form new words at a given stage

of the development of the language but those that can be used for the formation of unlimited number of new words. Therefore we can speak of limited productivity and absolute productivity. There are means of word-formation that cannot be used n o w for word-formation e.g. lexicalization of grammatical forms, sound-interchange, stress-interchange.

denote the creation of an independent word from one

of word-forms
a number of English nouns in the plural

form underwent lexicalization and acquired independent forms and meaning: bead — коралик, beads — вервечка; colour — колiр, colours — прапор. Synchronically -s in such words is regarded not as a grammatical inflexion expressing plurality but as a special case of affixation. It is not used in modern English to coin new words.

and offer no model to form new words after,

e.g.:
food — to feed

a house — to house
gold — to gild to speak — speech
blood — to bleed defence — defend
present – presence
Stress-interchange formally served as word-formation means and produced pairs like conflict — to conflict.

adding derivational affixes to stems. Once formed derived words

become independent lexical items that recieve their own entry in

a speaker’s mental dictionary.
Prefixes and suffixes differ significantly in their linguistic status. Prefixes primarily effect a semantic modification of the stem
primary function of suffixes being, by contrast, to change the grammatical function (for example the word class) of the stem.

(e.g. woman, womanly, womanish, womanized; добро, добрий, доброта, добряга),
2)

according to the affix morpheme(e.g. swimmer, speaker, drinker; погонич, пiдпасич,

керманич)
The first classification would put derived words into a large number of small groups, while the second would produce a limited number of very large groups.
We should also note that there are often significant relations between affixes: especially antonymy as with pre- and post-, -full and -less.

suffixation in English and Ukrainian we will group affixes

according to the word class that results when they are

added to a base. We therefore will speak of noun suffixes, verb suffixes etc.
In addition, since particular suffixes are frequently associated with attachment to stems of particular word classes, it is also convinient to speak of them as denominal suffixes, de-adjectival suffixes, etc.

is the leading one in Indo-European languages. The characteristic

feature of suffixation is its ability to combine with other

means of word-building:
prefixation, e.g. un-predict-able, по-дорож-ник;
compounding, e.g. blue-eye-ed, ясновид-ець,
postfixation, e.g. гурт-ув-а-ти-ся

of speech:
nouns: teacher, kingdom, difference, вмикач, переселенець, танцюрист;
numerals: seventh,

семеро;
adjectives: readable, денний, капроновий;
verbs: threaten, страхати, гикати;
adverbs: quickly, швидко, пішки,

тричі

parts of speech:
noun : man-ly, україн-ець, хат-инк-а
adjective: black-ish, нов-ин-а
numeral:

тр-ійк-а
pronoun: ти-ка-ти, сам-ець
verb: чита-льн-я, спів-ець,promot-er
adverb: вчора-шн-ій, тут-ешн-ій
conjunction: але-ка-ти
exclamation:

ох-а-ти, му-ка-ти, ну-ка-ти

of, collection of :

baggage, frontage, mileage

2.-dom — not very productive, tends to convey pejorative [pɪ’ʤɒrətɪv] overtones : officialdom but not in stardom or kingdom)
3.-ery, -ry -(a) the condition of behaviour associated with: drudgery, slavery, (b) location of: nursery, refinery,bakery, (c) concrete aggragate : machinery, rocketry, d) nouns rather freely formed: gadgetry

in: spoonful, glassful

( freely formed)
5.- hood –state

(only midely productive) : boyhood, brotherhood, widowhood
7.- ing — (a) noncount concrete aggregates ( fairly freely formed with reference to the material): tubing, panelling carpeting; (b) activity connected with: cricketing, farming, blackberrying ( fairly freely made)

of : Calvinism, idealism
9.- ocracy — government by: democracy,

aristocracy
10.- ship
limitedly productive : membership,dictatorship

геройство, молодецтво,

материнство, дитинство, скотарство, бджiльництво
2.- iзм, изм — вчення, iдеологiчнi напрями: реалiзм, натуралiзм
3.- чина, щина- часовi вiдтiнки, iсторичнi рухи: бувальщина, панщина,
4.- няк — гаї, сади за породою дерев i кущiв дубняк, вишняк

мошва
7.- н(я) — (pejorative): комашня
8.- ор(а) —

дiтвора  
9. — ин(а) — agricultural products:

садовина, городина

of:

breakage, coverage
2.- ation —

the process or state of: exploration, starvation
3.- al — the action or result of: refusal, revival dismissal
4.- ing — results from the action: building, opening
5.- ment — the result of: arrangement, management,amazement

узагальнення процесу дii чи стану: споживання, благання,

зазiхання, терпiння
2.- к(а) опредмечена дiя, результат процесу : розробка, перевозка
3.-

б(а), -от(а) процес, стан: боротьба, слiпота, турбота
4.- ин(а) — метушливi, безладнi дiї бiганина, мiшанина
5.- тв(а) – (nonproductive): битва, клятва,
6.- iзацi(я), изацi(я) — заходи: класифiкацiя

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Lviv National University
named after Ivan Franko

Lexicology

Department of translation studies and contrastive linguistics named after Hryhoriy Kochur
Nadiya Andreichuk, associate-professor
nadiyaan@gmail.com

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Lecture 4
Contrast is the occurance
of different elements
to create interest

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A person’s tongue is a twisty thing, there are plenty of words there of every kind, and the range of words is wide and their variation.
Homer, The Illiad, 20
 

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Plan
1. Definition of the field of word-formation.
2. Classification of the principal types of word-formation.
3. Word-formation rules.
4. Productivity.
5. Contrastive analysis of affixation in English and Ukrainian.

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Ф
DEFINITION

the branch of the science of language which studies the patterns on which a language forms new lexical units i.e. words.
word-formation is said to treat of composites which are analyzable both formally and semantically.

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inflection vs derivation
inflection produces from the stem (or stems) of a given language all the word-forms of that lexeme,
derivation results in the formation of what is traditionally considered to be a different word

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Importance
the ability to make and understand new words is admittedly as much of our linguistic competence as the ability to make and understand new sentences

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fundamental assumption
All types of word-formation may be viewed from two angles:
— word-creation as a historical process;
— the relation of new words to the other words in the language

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principles of classification of the types of word-formation
I. Based upon the morphological structure of the initial word or words. Proceding from this principle we may distinguish:
A.Derivation — the type where the word has only one semantic centre, the other morphemes being affixes, e.g. brotherhood.
B. Compounding — the type where the word has at least two semantic centres,e.g. red-hot, navy-blue walking-stick, newspaper, to whitewash.

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principles of classification of the types of word-formation
II. Based on the relationship of components to the new word. According to this principle we have the following types:
A.Morphological word-building — creating new words using morphemes and changing the structure of the existing words after certain linguistic patterns:
— derivation — suffixation and prefixation, zero-derivation,

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A.Morphological word-building
— compounding — joining of two or more stems to form a new unit,
— shortening — abbreviation or curtailing of the word,
— sound-interchange- the change of a unit in a morpheme resulting in a new lexical meaning (life — live),
— back – formation — creating a new word by removing actual or supposed affixes (edit from editor)
— reduplication (to murmur)

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B. Morphological-syntactic word-building
— new words appear through transference from one part of speech into another which implies both a change in morphological and syntactic peculiarities of a word
e.g. the unemployed, the poor, молода тополя i молода запрошувала гостей на весiлля.

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C. Lexico-syntactic word-building
the formation of new units by the process of isolation from free word-combinations
e.g. forget-me-not,
marry-go-round,
stay-at-home,
happy-go-lucky,
kill- me-quick,
for-eyes-only,
pie-in-the-sky,
добранiч, нiсенiтниця

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lexico-semantic word-building ?
Some scientists(М.А. Жовтобрюх i Б.М.Кулик, М.Я. Плющ) are inclined to include into this classification lexico-semantic word-building i.e. any change in the meaning of word that comes out as the result of the historical development of the language

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critical remark
But if a word aquires a new meaning its just its semantic system that is broadened. It becomes polysemantic but no new word appears. A new word appears when the limit of semantic variation is reached and a homonym is created. But it still doesn`t mean that semantic change is a means of creating new words. Homonyms retain no semantic connection with the initial word

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rules of word-formation
usually differ from a syntactic rules in one important respect: they are of limited productivity: not all words which result from the application of the rule are acceptable.
They are freely acceptable only when they have gained an institutional currency in the language.

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rules of word-formation
there is a line to be drawn between “actual words” (sandstone, unwise), and “potential words” (*lemonstone, *unexcellent)
both of these being distinct from “nonEnglish words” like *selfishless, which, because it shows the suffix -less added to an adjective and not to a noun, does not obey the rules of word-formation

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rules of word-formation
1) are at the intersection of the historical and contemporary (synchronic) study of the language, providing a constant set of “models” from which new words, ephemeral or permanent, are created from day to day.
2) on a larger scale, the rules themselves (like grammatical rules) undergo change: affixes and compounding processes can become productive or lose their productivity; can increase or decrease their range of meaning or grammatical applicability.

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productive rules and “dead’’ processes
For example, the Old Englsh suffix -th, no longer used to form new words, survives in such nouns as warmth, length, depth, width, breadth.
A corollary [kə’rɒl(ə)rɪ] of this approach is that the historical study of a word is irrelevant to its status as an illustration of present-day rules: the fact that the word unripe has existed in the English language since Anglo-Saxon times does not prevent us from using it as an example of a regular process of word-formation still available in the language.

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nonce formations
New formations, invented casually for a particular occasion (as in She needs guidance, and the poor child is as guidanceless as she is parentless are normally comprehensible, but are used at a certain cost to acceptibility. They are often referred to as nonce formations and are liable to be criticized if too many are used.

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back-formation
History provides quite a number of examples where a derived form has preceded the word from which (formally speaking) it is derived.
Thus editor entered the language before edit, lazy before laze, and television before televize. The process by which the shorter word is created by the deletion of a supposed affix is known as back-formation, since it reverses the normal trend of word-formation, which is to add rather than to subtract constituents.

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back-formation
is a purely historical concept, however of little relevance to the contemporary study of word-formation.
To the present-day speaker of English, the relationship between laze and lazy need be no different from that between sleep and sleepy.

The process is particularly fruitful in creating denominal verbs.

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back-formation
It should be noted that new formations tend to be used with some hesitation, especially in respect of the full range of verbal inflections.
We had the agential baby-sitter before the verb baby-sit and the form “Will you baby-sit for me?” before пnflected forms “He baby-sat for them”.
Other back-formations continue to display their lack of established acceptibility: *They sight-saw, *She housekept.

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productivity
Any description of word-formation should obviously be concerned with processes that are productive at the present time.
The fact that words have resulted from the past operation of word-formation processes is in itself irrelevant from a synchronic point of view
E.g. the word gospel cannot be seen as a modern English word-formation, though formed in earlier English from the words good and spell (in the obsolete sense “news”) . Nor, as an English word, can karate be seen as a ‘formation’, though in Japanese it is clearly a junction of cara ‘empty’ and te ‘hand’.

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productivity
On the other hand, words like ice-cream, conceptualize, psychosomatic, workaholic, motel, bionic have all been formed within English sufficiently recently as to be representative of currently productive processes.
The native speaker operates daily in the implicit knowledge that the meaning of most adjectives can be negated by prefixing un- and that most adjectives will permit the formation of abstract nouns by suffixing -ness.

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productivity

the distinction between productive and nonproductive is by no means straightforward. There is no simple parallel to the use and non-use of forms:
* fulgrace-dis [ on syntagmatic grounds: dis- can only prefix]
* emptyless [ on semantic and grammatical grounds: -less cannot be added to adjectives]
* thinkledge [-ledge is obsolete]
* doorleg [pragmatically excluded in present world]
* snow-cream [a possible but unused compound] etc.

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productivity
There exists a point of view that productive means are not merely those with the aid of which we can form new words at a given stage of the development of the language but those that can be used for the formation of unlimited number of new words. Therefore we can speak of limited productivity and absolute productivity. There are means of word-formation that cannot be used n o w for word-formation e.g. lexicalization of grammatical forms, sound-interchange, stress-interchange.

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lexicalization of grammatical form
is a term used to denote the creation of an independent word from one of word-forms
a number of English nouns in the plural form underwent lexicalization and acquired independent forms and meaning: bead — коралик, beads — вервечка; colour — колiр, colours — прапор. Synchronically -s in such words is regarded not as a grammatical inflexion expressing plurality but as a special case of affixation. It is not used in modern English to coin new words.

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Sound-interchange
includes vowel and consonant inerchange. Both are nonproductive and offer no model to form new words after, e.g.:
food — to feed a house — to house
gold — to gild to speak — speech
blood — to bleed defence — defend
present – presence
Stress-interchange formally served as word-formation means and produced pairs like conflict — to conflict.

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Affixation
Is defined as the formation of words by adding derivational affixes to stems. Once formed derived words become independent lexical items that recieve their own entry in a speaker’s mental dictionary.
Prefixes and suffixes differ significantly in their linguistic status. Prefixes primarily effect a semantic modification of the stem
primary function of suffixes being, by contrast, to change the grammatical function (for example the word class) of the stem.

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Classification of derived words
1) according to the root-morpheme (e.g. woman, womanly, womanish, womanized; добро, добрий, доброта, добряга),
2) according to the affix morpheme(e.g. swimmer, speaker, drinker; погонич, пiдпасич, керманич)
The first classification would put derived words into a large number of small groups, while the second would produce a limited number of very large groups.
We should also note that there are often significant relations between affixes: especially antonymy as with pre- and post-, -full and -less.

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suffixes
In order to make a comparative analysis of suffixation in English and Ukrainian we will group affixes according to the word class that results when they are added to a base. We therefore will speak of noun suffixes, verb suffixes etc.
In addition, since particular suffixes are frequently associated with attachment to stems of particular word classes, it is also convinient to speak of them as denominal suffixes, de-adjectival suffixes, etc.

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Suffixation
can be substabtialized and zero-suffixation. This word-building type is the leading one in Indo-European languages. The characteristic feature of suffixation is its ability to combine with other means of word-building:
prefixation, e.g. un-predict-able, по-дорож-ник;
compounding, e.g. blue-eye-ed, ясновид-ець,
postfixation, e.g. гурт-ув-а-ти-ся

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Suffixation
can be used to create all principal parts of speech:
nouns: teacher, kingdom, difference, вмикач, переселенець, танцюрист;
numerals: seventh, семеро;
adjectives: readable, денний, капроновий;
verbs: threaten, страхати, гикати;
adverbs: quickly, швидко, пішки, тричі

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suffixation
Suffixes can be added to stems of all parts of speech:
noun : man-ly, україн-ець, хат-инк-а
adjective: black-ish, нов-ин-а
numeral: тр-ійк-а
pronoun: ти-ка-ти, сам-ець
verb: чита-льн-я, спів-ець,promot-er
adverb: вчора-шн-ій, тут-ешн-ій
conjunction: але-ка-ти
exclamation: ох-а-ти, му-ка-ти, ну-ка-ти

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English and Ukrainian suffixes
English denominal nouns:
1.-age — measure of, collection of : baggage, frontage, mileage
2.-dom — not very productive, tends to convey pejorative [pɪ’ʤɒrətɪv] overtones : officialdom but not in stardom or kingdom)
3.-ery, -ry -(a) the condition of behaviour associated with: drudgery, slavery, (b) location of: nursery, refinery,bakery, (c) concrete aggragate : machinery, rocketry, d) nouns rather freely formed: gadgetry

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English denominal nouns
4.- ful — the amount contained in: spoonful, glassful ( freely formed)
5.- hood –state (only midely productive) : boyhood, brotherhood, widowhood
7.- ing — (a) noncount concrete aggregates ( fairly freely formed with reference to the material): tubing, panelling carpeting; (b) activity connected with: cricketing, farming, blackberrying ( fairly freely made)

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English denominal nouns
8.- ism — doctrine of, practice of : Calvinism, idealism
9.- ocracy — government by: democracy, aristocracy
10.- ship
limitedly productive : membership,dictatorship

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Ukrainian denominal nouns
1.-ств(о), цтв(о) — властивiсть, стан: геройство, молодецтво, материнство, дитинство, скотарство, бджiльництво
2.- iзм, изм — вчення, iдеологiчнi напрями: реалiзм, натуралiзм
3.- чина, щина- часовi вiдтiнки, iсторичнi рухи: бувальщина, панщина,
4.- няк — гаї, сади за породою дерев i кущiв дубняк, вишняк

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Ukrainian denominal nouns
5.- в(а) — поняття збiрностi : мошва
7.- н(я) — (pejorative): комашня
8.- ор(а) — дiтвора  
9. — ин(а) — agricultural products: садовина, городина

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English deverbal nouns
1.- age — action of, instance of: breakage, coverage
2.- ation — the process or state of: exploration, starvation
3.- al — the action or result of: refusal, revival dismissal
4.- ing — results from the action: building, opening
5.- ment — the result of: arrangement, management,amazement

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Ukrainian deverbal nouns
1.- анн(я), енн(я), iнн(я) — широке узагальнення процесу дii чи стану: споживання, благання, зазiхання, терпiння
2.- к(а) опредмечена дiя, результат процесу : розробка, перевозка
3.- б(а), -от(а) процес, стан: боротьба, слiпота, турбота
4.- ин(а) — метушливi, безладнi дiї бiганина, мiшанина
5.- тв(а) – (nonproductive): битва, клятва,
6.- iзацi(я), изацi(я) — заходи: класифiкацiя
 

It appears that one key factor affecting the perceptibility and thus productivity of the phonaesthemes is the number of different meanings with which the phonotactic sequences recur.

This paper shows how language change obscures the distinction between separate morphological processes such as compounding and derivation and thus between morphological categories and shows that there is not a preferred natural direction of language change.