Sound-gradation (sometimes is referred to as
sound-interchange ) – forming
a new word by means of changing a root sound, either consonant (e.g.
excuse – excuse , voiced in the verb and devoiced in the noun) or vowel (e.g.
brood – breed ) or
both (e.g.
breathe – breath, live – life ).
5.
Semantic stress (also known as
stress-interchange or
distinctive change ) –
creation of a new word through a change of stress, e.g.
‘present – pre’sent, ‘conduct – con’duct , etc.
6.
Reduplication – forming a new word by means of a complete or partial
repetition of the same stem (e.g.
goody-goody, chin-chin, mishmash, criss-cross, chow-chow, hurdy-gurdy ).
7. Back Formation ( or
disaffixation )
- forming a word by means of discarding
a suffix (e.g.
to baby sit from
baby-sitter, to beg from
beggar, to edit from
editor, to brainstorm from
brainstorming, to diplome from
diplomat ,
to reminisce from
reminiscence. Some linguists prefer to use the term
back-derivation related to this
type of word-formation.
7.
Blending (often referred to as
telescopism )
– forming a new word from the
beginning of one word and the end of another (e.g.
smog from
smoke and
fog ,
motel from
motorist and
hotel , etc.). Many linguists prefer to consider blending as a subtype
of shortening.
§ 2. Syntactico-morphological and other minor types of word-building 1.
Substantivization – an incomplete transition from an adjective or a participle to a
(collective) noun (e.g.
the poor, the wounded, the rich, the two-year-olds ). 2.
Lexicalization – or change of the lexical meaning of the plural forms of the nouns (
lines =poetry, colours = banner, pains = trying hard, etc.) 3.
Conversion – an affixless
word-making device by which we mean converting a noun into a verb (
water – to water ), an adjective into a noun (my
native town –
a native of the town), a verb into a
noun (
to swim – a swim ), etc. without any distinct ending.
4.
Syntactical word-building where a combination of words is semantically
and structurally isolated to form a word without any changes in the syntactical and
semantic relations, e.g.
free-and-easy, man-at-arms, jack-in-the-box , etc.
5.
Onomatopoeia – creation of new words through sound imitation, e.g.
to bang, to hiss, to mew. Some lingusits also talk about such type of enriching a vocabulary as
commonization – the process of making a common noun (sometimes a verb or an
adjective) out of a proper noun (name). Others prefer to consider it a type of
conversion. Cf:
a shylock (for a greedy person).
Affixation and composition are generally considered the most productive means
of word-building and they seem to have been such in the course of the whole history
of English. Conversion and shortening come next, and these have become more
productive lately than they used to be formerly.
70
All the other methods of word-building are much less productive and some of
them dead, (e.g. sound gradation, stress-interchange).
