compounds-proper (
hot-house, lamp-shade ) and b)
derivational compounds (
cold-blooded ).
UNIT 5. WORD-BUILDING AND ENRICHMENT OF THE VOCABULARY § 1. Morphological word-building Word-building or word-formation in its wide sense means the process of
formation of words according to certain patterns. There are distinguished
morphological, syntactical and syntactico-morphological types of word-building.
Morphological word-formation is characterized by a change in the
morphological structure. It includes:
1.
Affixation – forming new words by means of adding affixes, that is suffixes
and prefixes, e.g.
wonderful, enjoy, boredom. In modern colloquial speech there is a tendency to use another type of affixes
called
infixes to form new words. An
infix is an affix that is inserted inside the root of
words. English has very few true infixes and those it does have are marginal. The
infix
iz or
izn is characteristic of hip-hop slang, e.g.
I knizzow is an intensified form of
I know (I really know). To make a word more emphatic there is a tendency in English
to use vulgar and emotional words as infixes. E.g.:
fan-bloody-tastic ,
guaran-damn tee, etc.
2.
Word-composition, i.e. joining two or more stems to form a new word, e.g.
hogshead, Turkoman, Russo-Japanese, speedometer. 3.
Shortening (sometimes referred to as
contraction or
clipping ), i.e. making a
new lexical unit by means of omitting a certain part of a longer word, e.g.
amend – mend, fantasy – fancy, trigonometry – trig, etc.
Shortening is often referred to as
abbreviation though the latter almost in every
case implies formation of a lexical unit by means of omission of all but initial letters
in a group of words, e.g.
CIS, CIA, UFO, etc. Here also belongs a special type of
abbreviations called
acronyms , e.g.
radar – radio detection and ranging,
NATO , etc.
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Yet, in our opinion, we should regard these types as separate means of word
formation.
4.
