The main types of word formation

Words in English public website

Ling 216
Rice University
Prof. S. Kemmer

Types of Word Formation Processes

Compounding
Compounding forms a word out of two or more root morphemes. The words
are called compounds or compound words.

In Linguistics, compounds can be either native or borrowed.

Native English roots are
typically free morphemes, so that means native compounds are made out of
independent words that can occur by themselves. Examples:

mailman (composed of free root mail and free root man)
mail carrier
dog house
fireplace
fireplug (a regional word for ‘fire hydrant’)
fire hydrant
dry run
cupcake
cup holder
email
e-ticket
pick-up truck
talking-to

Some compounds have a preposition as one of the component words as in the
last 2 examples.

In Greek and Latin, in contrast to English, roots do not typically stand
alone. So compounds are composed of bound roots. Compounds formed in
English from borrowed Latin and Greek morphemes preserve this
characteristic. Examples include photograph,
iatrogenic, and many thousands of other classical words.

Note that compounds are written in various ways in English:
with a space between the elements; with a hyphen between the
elements; or simply with the two roots run together with no separation.
The way the word is written does not affect its status as a
compound. Over time, the convention for writing compounds can change,
usually in the direction from separate words (e.g. email used to be written with a hyphen.
In the 19th century, today and tomorrow were sometimes still written to-day and to-morrow. The to originally was the preposition to with an older meaning ‘at [a particular period of time]’.
Clock work changed
to clock-work and finally to one word with no break
(clockwork). If you read older literature you might see some
compound words that are now written as one word appearing
with unfamiliar spaces or hyphens between the components.

Another thing to note about compounds is that they can combine words
of different parts of speech. The list above shows mostly noun-noun
compounds, which is probably the most common part of speech
combination, but there are others, such as adjective-noun (dry
run, blackbird, hard drive), verb-noun (pick-pocket,
cut-purse, lick-spittle) and even verb-particle (where
‘particle’ means a word basically designating spatial expression that
functions to complete a literal or metaphorical path), as in
run-through, hold-over. Sometimes these compounds are
different in the part of speech of the whole compound vs. the part of
speech of its components. Note that the last two are actually nouns,
despite their components.

Some compounds have more than two component words. These are formed
by successively combining words into compounds, e.g. pick-up truck,
formed from pick-up and truck , where the first component,
pick-up is itself a compound formed from
pick and up. Other examples are ice-cream
cone, no-fault insurance and even more complex compounds like
top-rack dishwasher safe.

There are a number of subtypes of compounds that do not have to do
with part of speech, but rather the sound characteristics of the
words. These subtypes are not mutually exclusive.

Rhyming compounds (subtype of compounds)
These words are compounded from two rhyming words. Examples:

lovey-dovey
chiller-killer

There are words that are formally very similar to rhyming compounds,
but are not quite compounds in English because the second element is
not really a word—it is just a nonsense item added to a root word to
form a rhyme. Examples:

higgledy-piggledy
tootsie-wootsie

This formation
process is associated in English with child talk (and talk addressed
to children), technically called hypocoristic language. Examples:

bunnie-wunnie
Henny Penny
snuggly-wuggly
Georgie Porgie
Piggie-Wiggie

Another word type that looks a bit like rhyming compounds
comprises words that are formed of
two elements that almost match, but differ in their vowels.
Again, the second element is typically a nonsense form:

pitter-patter
zigzag
tick-tock

riffraff
flipflop

Derivation
Derivation is the creation of words by modification of a root without
the addition of other roots. Often the effect is a change in part of
speech.

Affixation (Subtype of Derivation)
The most common type of derivation is the addition of one or more affixes to a
root, as in the word derivation itself. This process is called
affixation, a term which covers both prefixation and suffixation.

Blending
Blending is one of the most beloved of word formation processes in
English. It is especially creative in that speakers take two words
and merge them based not on morpheme structure but on sound structure.
The resulting words are called blends.

Usually in word formation we combine roots or affixes along their
edges: one morpheme comes to an end before the next one starts. For example, we
form derivation out of the sequence of morphemes
de+riv+at(e)+ion. One morpheme follows the next and each one has
identifiable
boundaries. The morphemes do not overlap.

But in
blending, part of one word is stitched onto another word, without any
regard for where one morpheme ends and another begins. For example,
the word swooshtika ‘Nike swoosh as a logo symbolizing
corporate power and hegemony’
was formed from swoosh and swastika. The swoosh
part remains whole and recognizable in the blend, but the tika part is
not a morpheme, either in the word swastika or
in the blend. The blend is a perfect merger of form, and also of
content. The meaning contains an implicit analogy between the
swastika and the swoosh, and thus conceptually blends them into one
new kind of thing having properties of both, but also combined
properties of neither source. Other examples include glitterati (blending
glitter and literati) ‘Hollywood social set’, mockumentary (mock and
documentary) ‘spoof documentary’.

The earliest blends in English only go back to the 19th century, with
wordplay coinages by Lewis Carroll in Jabberwocky. For example, he
introduced to the language slithy, formed from lithe and
slimy, and galumph, (from gallop and
triumph. Interestingly galumph has survived as a word in
English, but it now seems to mean ‘walk in a stomping, ungainly way’.

Some blends that have been around for quite a while include brunch
(breakfast and lunch), motel (motor hotel), electrocute (electric and
execute), smog (smoke and
fog) and cheeseburger (cheese and hamburger).
These go back to the first half of the twentieth
century. Others, such as stagflation (stagnation and inflation),
spork (spoon and fork), and carjacking (car and hijacking) arose
since the 1970s.

Here are some more recent blends I have run across:

mocktail (mock and cocktail) ‘cocktail with no alcohol’
splog (spam and blog) ‘fake blog designed to attract hits and
raise Google-ranking’
Britpoperati (Britpop and literati) ‘those knowledgable about current British pop music’

Clipping
Clipping is a type of abbreviation of a word in which one part is
‘clipped’ off the rest, and the remaining word now means essentially the same
thing as what the whole word means or meant. For example, the word
rifle is a fairly modern clipping of an earlier compound
rifle gun, meaning a gun with a rifled barrel. (Rifled means
having a spiral groove causing the bullet to spin, and thus making it
more accurate.) Another clipping is burger, formed by clipping
off the beginning of the word hamburger. (This clipping could
only come about once hamburg+er was reanalyzed as ham+burger.)

Acronyms

Acronyms are formed by taking the initial letters of a phrase
and making a word out of it. Acronyms provide a way of turning a phrase into a word. The classical acronym is also
pronounced as a word. Scuba was formed
from self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. The
word snafu was originally WW2 army slang for Situation
Normal All Fucked Up. Acronyms were being used more and more by
military bureaucrats, and soldiers coined snafu in an
apparent parody of this overused device. Sometimes an acronym uses not just the first letter, but the first syllable of a component word, for example radar, RAdio Detection And Ranging and sonar, SOund Navigation and Ranging. Radar forms an analogical model for both sonar and lidar, a technology that measures distance to a target and and maps its surface by
bouncing a laser off it. There is some evidence that lidar was not coined as an acronym, but instead as a blend of light and radar. Based on the word itself, either etymology appears to work, so many speakers assume that lidar is an acronym rather than a blend.

A German example that strings together the initial syllables of the
words in the phrase, is Gestapo , from GEheime STAats POlizei
‘Sectret State Police’. Another is Stasi, from STAats
SIcherheit ‘State Security’.

Acronyms are a subtype of initialism. Initialisms also include words made from the initial letters of a Phrase but NOT pronounced as a normal word — it is instead pronounced as a string of letters. Organzation names aroften initialisms of his type. Examples:

NOW (National Organization of Women)
US or U.S., USA or U.S.A. (United States)
UN or U.N. (United Nations)
IMF (International Monetary Fund)

Some organizations ARE pronounced as a word:
UNICEF
MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving)

The last example incorporates a meaning into the word that fits the nature of the organization. Sometimes this type is called a Reverse Acronym or a Backronym.

These can be thought of as a special case of acronyms.

Memos, email, and text messaging (text-speak) are modes of communication
that give rise to both clippings and acronyms, since these
word formation methods are designed to abbreviate.
Some acronyms:

NB — Nota bene, literally ‘note well’. Used by scholars making notes
on texts. (A large number of other scholarly acronyms from Latin are
used, probably most invented in the medieval period or Renaissance,
not originally in Latin)
BRB — be right back (from 1980s, 90s)
FYI — for your information (from mid 20th century)

LOL — laughing
out loud (early 21st century) — now pronounced either /lol/ or /el o
el/; has spawned compounds like Lolcats).
ROFL — rolling on the floor laughing
ROFLMAO — rolling on the floor laughing my ass off

Reanalysis
Sometimes speakers unconsciously change the morphological boundaries of a word, creating a new morph or making an old one unrecognizable. This happened in hamburger, which was originally Hamburger steak ‘chopped and formed steak in the Hamburg style, then hamburger (hamburg + er), then ham + burger

Folk etymology
A popular idea of a word’s origin that is not in accordance with its real origin.

Many folk etymologies are cases of reanalysis in which the word is not only reanalysis but it changes under the influence of the new understanding of its morphemes. The result is that speakers think it has a different origin than it does.

Analogy
Sometimes speakers take an existing word as a model and form other words using some of its morphemes as a fixed part, and changing one of them to something new, with an analogically similar meaning. Cheeseburger was formed on the analogy of hamburger, replacing a perceived morpheme ham with cheese.
carjack and skyjack were also formed by analogy.

Novel creation
In novel creation, a speaker or writer forms a word without starting
from other morphemes. It is as if the word if formed out of ‘whole
cloth’, without reusing any parts.

Some examples of now-conventionalized words that were novel creations
include blimp, googol (the mathematical term),
bling, and possibly slang, which emerged in the last 200
years with no obvious etymology. Some novel creations seem to display
‘sound symbolism’, in which a word’s phonological form suggests its
meaning in some way. For example, the sound of the word bling
seems to evoke heavy jewelry making noise. Another novel creation whose sound seems
to relate to its meaning is badonkadonk, ‘female rear end’, a
reduplicated word which can remind English speakers of the repetitive
movement of the rear end while walking.

Creative respelling
Sometimes words are formed by simply changing the spelling of a word
that the speaker wants to relate to the new word. Product names
often involve creative respelling, such as Mr. Kleen.

© Suzanne Kemmer