word formation processes essay

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Chapter 6: Morphology- Word formation

The grammar of words: word building, chapter preview, 6.1 introduction.

Speakers keep their languages alive and usable by changing the vocabulary of their languages (and, less easily, their grammar) according to what they need to express.

6.2 Word formation

Word formation concerns the processes that allow us to create new words with grammatical resources already available within a language. These processes must of course obey the rules of the language, i.e. its grammar. The word emailer is a well-formed word of English, as are other possible words like downloader or rebooter , because they follow the same word-formation rule of English that allows words like writer or daydreamer .

Activity 6.1

Assuming, as we did in the preceding chapter, that words are made up of morphemes, word formation involves a patterning of morphemes within words, whose rules we can find out. Let’s use some data to see what we mean by morpheme patterning.

We observe that:

• Morphemes must occur in certain positions within a word. For example, the {plural} morpheme in rooms , spelt – s , must occur at the end of the word, not at the beginning (* sroom ) or in the middle of it (* roosm ).
• The word class to which lexical morphemes belong is important for their ordering within complex words. The forms darkroom , songbird and birdsong are well-formed, whereas the form * roomdark is not.
• Certain bound forms must occur before others. The form commitments is acceptable, whereas the form *commitsment is not.
• Bound forms cannot be combined with one another. Whereas birdsong , with two free forms, is well-formed, neither *unments nor *mently are.

Observations like these help us tell apart different types of morphemes, which in turn helps us tell apart different word formation processes.

In word formation, the building blocks are of two types, and so are the constraints.

The building blocks

• Stem : a morpheme, or a word, to which other morphemes can attach.
• Affix : a morpheme that attaches only to a stem.

How can these two concepts help us explain some of the observations above? We can see, from the data in (4.1), that the words commitment and happily are well-formed, whereas * mently is not. Using the concepts just introduced, we can now explain why this is the case. Both commitment and happily are complex words, i.e. words comprising more than one morpheme. Both words also comprise a stem and an affix: commitment comprises the stem commit to which the affix – ment attaches, while happily comprises the stem happy to which the affix – ly attaches. In contrast, if we treat * mently as a complex word, it seems to comprise two affixes (- ment and – ly ) attached to one another, rather than a stem and an affix. But our definition of affix says that affixes only attach to stems, not to other affixes.

Activity 6.2

Activity 6.3

There is another technical term used to refer to the fundamental stem, as it were, of a word. In the word commitments, this stem is commit , the basic word from which the complex word commitments is built. We then say that the root of the word commitments is commit . The root of a complex word is itself a word from which all affixes have been removed. We can visualise this word formation process as follows, where the arrow indicates the result of word building:

This example shows that a root can be a stem, but that not all stems are roots.

Activity 6.4

The constraints

• Hierarchy : the internal structure of complex words is hierarchical.
• Well-formedness : each step in word formation must produce a well- formed word of the language.

These two constraints help us make sense of word formation. Going back to our analogy of building a wall, they reflect the commonsense observation that walls are built layer by layer, and that each brick added to a wall in fact builds a small wall of its own by fitting neatly among its neighbours. We follow a similar reasoning with word building: complex words are built up step by step from stems and/or affixes, and each intermediate word must itself be a well- formed word. As shown in example (6.2), a word like commitments is formed by attaching the affix -ment to the root/stem commit , forming the word commitment , a new well-formed stem to which -s in turn attaches. In addition, knowing that dark is an Adj and room is a noun in the complex word darkroom , and that Adj precedes N in English, we can explain why darkroom is well-formed whereas * roomdark is not.

6.3 Major word formation processes

The most productive word formation processes in English are affixation , compounding and conversion , the ones that we deal with in greater detail in this chapter.

In morphology, productivity means the degree to which a word- formation process is used in a language. We might use an analogy of productive worker bees – the most productive worker bee is the one that makes the most honey. So also the most productive word formation rules are the ones that are used most frequently to create new words in a language or language variety. Generally, productivity is directly proportional to compositionality , the degree to which the meaning of a new word is predictable from the meanings of its constitutive morphemes. That is, “more productive” entails “more compositional”, and vice versa. For example, an affix like {plural} – s is extremely productive, in that new nouns in English can be made plural by using it. It is also compositional, in that it consistently contributes the meaning ‘more than one ’ to the new word. If emailer is a noun, then emailers is its plural.

However, we should note that compositionality is not an absolute matter. It is not the case that processes, or words meanings, are either compositional or non-compositional. Rather, compositionality is understood as a cline: at one end of this cline, we find transparent word meanings which are easily deduced from the meanings of the morphemes that make up the word; at the other end of this cline, there are opaque meanings which are not easily inferred from the morphemes making up the word. We will see below several examples of degree in compositionality.

6.3.1 Affixation

Affixation is one of the most productive word formation processes in English. In affixation , an affix attaches to a stem. All the words in the sentence Teachers dislike yawning students are affixed words. We can analyse affixes based on two criteria: according to their distribution, and according to their meaning.

Distribution of affixes

We said above that affixes must attach to a stem, but we did not clarify the order of attachment of stem and affix. We now add that there are different types of affix, according to their distribution. For example:

• Prefixes precede the stem.
• Suffixes follow the stem.

We need this clarification in order to explain why the two words unhappy and happily in (6.1) are well-formed, whereas *happyun and *lyhappy are not: un- is a prefix, and – ly is a suffix. That is, un- must precede the stem to which it attaches, while -ly must follow its stem. Note the use of a dash following or preceding these affixes. This is essential to make clear whether we’re referring to a prefix or a suffix.

Activity 6.5

Meaning of affixes

According to meaning, affixes can be of two types.

• Derivational affixes form a new word with a new lexical meaning.
• Inflectional affixes form a variant of the word they attach to, adding a grammatical meaning.

You will notice that this difference in the kinds of meanings conveyed by affixes parallels the difference that we discussed in the previous chapter, concerning lexical and grammatical words. Like lexical words which express ideas/concepts, derivational affixes have semantic content. Derivational affixes are so named because when they attach to a root/stem, they derive a new word, i.e. a word with a new lexical meaning. In contrast, inflectional affixes, like grammatical words, carry grammatical meaning. They mark grammatical properties such as tense, number, person and case, and do not change the lexical meaning of the words they attach to.

This difference between lexical and grammatical meaning explains why certain words are regularly given an entry of their own in dictionaries, whereas other words share the same entry. For example, the words commit and commitment , though related, are in fact two words, with two different lexical meanings that entitle each to a separate dictionary entry. In contrast, inflected words (e.g. rooms) are listed under the same entry as their root, given that they represent grammatical variants of the same word.

In derivational affixation (or derivation , for short), the word class of the stem and the word class of the derived word may or may not be the same. This means that derivational affixes may be class-maintaining or class- changing . Consider these two words:

(6.3) unhappy         commitment

Affixing un – to the Adj happy derives a new Adj ( unhappy ); un – is a class- maintaining derivational affix. Affixing – ment to the verb commit also derives a new word ( commitment ), but this time the lexical class of the derived word changes to a noun; – ment is a class-changing derivational affix.

Inflectional affixes, as we saw in (6.1), change the grammatical meaning of the words they attach to. Consequently, inflectional affixation (or inflection ) is always class-maintaining. For example, inflectional affixation with plural -s changes the grammatical meaning of the singular noun room to plural rooms , but the lexical category remains unchanged. Both room and rooms are nouns. Similarly, affixation with -ed changes the grammatical meaning of walk from present tense to past tense walked , but the lexical category remains unchanged. Both walk and walked are verbs. If we assume that lexical meaning is more central than grammatical meaning, we can see why inflectional affixes regularly follow derivational affixes in the formation of words. One example is the word commitments , discussed in section 6.2 above.

Using the two criteria of distribution and meaning, we can distinguish English affixes in the following way:

Figure 6.2. Types of affix in English

Figure 6.2 shows that the derivational affixes of English can be either prefixes or suffixes. For example, un- in unhappily is a derivational prefix, while -ly in the same word is a derivational suffix. In contrast, the inflectional affixes of English are all suffixes. In fact, contemporary English has only eight inflectional affixes: four bound to verbs, two bound to nouns, and two bound to adjectives.

Activity 6.6

Can you identify the eight inflectional affixes of contemporary English?

Other languages, however, have inflectional prefixes as well as suffixes. One example is Swahili (the major African lingua franca). In many languages, nouns must belong to different grammatical classes, called genders . You may be familiar with gender from languages like French, which has two (masculine and feminine) or German, which has three (masculine, feminine and neuter). In these languages, gender is marked by suffixes. Swahili has several different genders (e.g. for ‘human’, ‘other living things’, ‘liquids’, etc.) and all are marked with inflectional prefixes. As in other gendered languages, adjectives qualifying a noun must show the same gender inflection as the noun. Here is one example from Swahili with a noun and an adjective for the gender sometimes called “Class 6” (in Swahili, the adjective follows the noun):

Figure 6.3. Example of gender inflection in Swahili

Affix identification

In section 5.4.3, we listed three criteria to identify morphemes, namely sound, grammar and meaning. The same criteria can of course be used to identify different affixes. Let’s see how the three criteria apply to the affix -ly in the words sharply , kindly and happily . If all three criteria are obeyed, then we are dealing with the same affix. If any one criterion is not met, then we are dealing with different affixes.

• Sound . In all three words, the affix is pronounced the same way, [li] (conventions to represent pronunciation are dealt with in the next chapter). In other cases, the pronunciation of an affix may be predictable by rule. Predictable variation of this kind also satisfies the sound criterion.
• Grammar . The affix attaches to the same stem class, in the same position (as a prefix or as a suffix), and the lexical category of the resulting word must be the same for all the words under consideration. In this case, -ly is suffixed to an Adj to form an Adv in all three words.
• Meaning . The affix establishes a regular meaning relationship between the stem and the word resulting from the affixation. In this case, the meaning of the newly derived word can be paraphrased as ‘in a manner’, where the Adj replaces the blank. For example, sharply means ‘in a sharp manner’.

Note that the meaning paraphrase must contain the stem of the word, in this case the adjectives sharp , kind and happy , in order to make the meaning relationship between the stem and the derived word absolutely clear. We can now generalise our observations about the formation of the words sharply, kindly and happily to all other words containing the same affix by means of a shorthand rule, like this:

(6.4)     Adj + – ly → Adv, ‘in a _ manner’

In rule notation of this kind, the plus sign represents sequential ordering of morphemes, and the arrow indicates the result of that ordering. This rule summarises all the information that we need, in order to identify the affix – ly . You can use this rule to check for yourself that sharply contains the same affix as words like brightly, lightly or beautifully .

The observations and analysis that we developed in this section of course apply to any complex word formed through affixation, not just the three adverbs under discussion here. Otherwise, our conclusions would be useless in a scientific account of language.

Activity 6.7

6.3.2 Compounding

Affixation involves attaching one or more affixes to a stem. In contrast, compounding involves attaching a stem to another stem. In the following sentence, the words in italics are compounded words:

(6.5) Janice spilled the salad dressing on her brand-new laptop .

Notice that spelling is irrelevant for the identification of compounds. Compounds may be spelt with hyphens as in brand-new , without hyphens as in salad dressing , or as single words as in laptop . What is crucial is the meaning relationship between the stems making up the compound word.

Form of compounds

Each of the stems in a compound is itself a word of the language, and therefore belongs to a particular word class. However, the word class of each stem does not necessarily correspond to the word class of the compound word itself, as shown in the table below:

Figure 6.4. Word classes of compounds and their stems

Figure 6.4 shows that the word class of the compound word may be the same as the word class of one of its stems, often the right-hand stem (as in pickpocket, seasick, spoonfeed, and overshadow), but that this need not always be the case (as in barefoot, rundown and pullover). There is wide variability in the correspondence of word class between stems and compound, and it is this flexibility that contributes to the lively productivity of compounding as a word-formation process.

Languages like English allow simple juxtaposition of stems to form a compound, as in the examples above. This is the commonest compounding process in these languages. But other compounding processes exist, such as linking stems by means of grammatical words as in mother of pearl , chief of staff or black and white . Examples are expressions like a mother of pearl necklace or a black and white photograph . Other languages prefer linking stems in this way, for example Romance languages like French or Portuguese. What’s important is that the words so linked, whether by simple juxtaposition or through the use of linking words, acquire a specific meaning of their own, that is different from the meaning of each of the stems that make up the compound. Compound words, like derived words, have dedicated entries in dictionaries.

Activity 6.8

We saw in Activity 6.4 that the word disgraceful contains more than one stem. This being so, explain why this word is not a compound.

Meaning of compounds

A compound word encapsulates a specific concept. The meaning of many compounds is non-compositional and may lie anywhere from transparent to opaque on a compositionality cline. What this means is that we cannot predict the exact meaning of a compound by assuming a particular relationship between the stems that build it. Take, for example, the compounds meatball and handball . They both have the structure N + N → N, and they both mean something that is related to meat and ball in the first case, and to hand and ball in the second. But whereas meatball means ‘a ball made of meat’, handball doesn’t mean ‘a ball made of hand(s)’. Similarly, handbag means ‘a bag to be carried in your hand’, whereas handball does not mean ‘a ball to be carried in your hand’.

Activity 6.9

Explain why this is an example of language play:

If olive oil is made by pressing olives, how is baby oil made?

As illustrated above, the meaning of some compounds is opaque because of the idiosyncratic relationships between the stems forming the compound. But compound opacity can also result from meaning shifts in the stems of a compound. The compound blackboard , for example, was created at a time when all school boards were black, i.e. the stem black was used in its literal sense. Nowadays, however, we can talk about green blackboard s and even about white blackboards (although the word whiteboard has been coined for the latter), without feeling that we are being paradoxical about the colour of the board. The reason is that the stem black no longer designates the colour ‘black’ in this compound. Together with the stem board , it identifies a particular kind of object instead.

Despite the opaque meaning that the first stem contributes to these compounds, there is a sense in which compounds like blackboard or darkroom do have a transparent meaning, in that a blackboard is a board, and a darkroom is a room. The same cannot be said of the meaning of compounds like pickpocket or pullover . In compounds of the former type, the second stem is central to the meaning of the whole compound. We can paraphrase the meaning of compounds like handbag or shoulder-bag by saying that they are bags of a particular kind. Similarly, we can paraphrase the meanings of compounds like seasick and car-sick by saying that they both involve being sick in some way. Compounds of this type are called headed compounds : the second stem is the head of the compound, and the first is its modifier.  Two properties can be observed among these compounds, relating to:

• Meaning : the modifier narrows down the meaning of the head.
• Word class : the compound word belongs to the same word class as its head.

By these two properties, the meaning of a headed compound can be said to refer to a kind-of the meaning of its head. For example, a handbag is a kind of bag (for more on kind-of relations between word meanings, see section 9.5.2). The meaning of these compounds tends to lie on the transparent segment of the compositionality cline, compared to the meaning of non-headed compounds like pickpocket or pullover .

The productivity of compounding is borne out by the frequency with which so-called long compounds are formed. Long compounds are expressions formed by successive compounding of other compounds (this kind of compounding is an example of recursion . In English, 3-word and 4-word compounds are very common. Two examples are, with their stems numbered for ease of reference:

Because long compounds are formed by compounding other compounds, we need to take account of hierarchy in their formation. Often, decisions about the order in which the stems attach to one another result in quite different interpretations of the meaning of the final compound. We would all agree that example (6.6a) can only mean ‘a service dealing with vehicle breakdown’, not ‘a breakdown service for vehicles’. That is, (6.6a) is formed by attaching stems 1 and 2 to each other, and then stem 3. Similarly, (6.6b) can only mean ‘a professional troupe for children’s entertainment’, not ‘an entertainment troupe made up of professional children’). That is, (6.6b) is formed by attaching stems 3 and 4 to each other, followed by stems 2 and 1, in that order.

But how would we parse a long compound like Singapore noodles soup ? Do we mean ‘a kind of soup with noodles that is served in Singapore’, or ‘a soup containing Singapore noodles’? The two interpretations can be made clear using square brackets for the stems that are parsed together, like this:

a. [Singapore] [noodles soup]

b. [Singapore noodles] [soup]

The choice of interpretation may well depend on what we understand a “concept” to be, in the sense discussed above for the meaning of compounds. Singapore noodles may be a concept for certain speakers, in which case the parsing in (6.7a) is the one that immediately comes to mind. For other speakers, the compound may be ambiguous , i.e. mean two different things according to the alternative analyses in (6.7).

An illuminating episode concerning compound parsing involved one of the authors of this book as main character. As a newcomer to Asia, I saw a poster describing a red dragon boat team . My first reaction was to wonder “What colour is the dragon??” Would you have any trouble assigning a colour to the dragon too, or would you find the issue irrelevant? The explanation for my confusion is that, for me, dragon boat was not a compound concept, so I didn’t know whether to parse red dragon first, or dragon boat first. Think for yourself how you would parse a long compound like kitchen towel rack , which is always ambiguous because there is no single “basic” compound concept involved in its formation.

Activity 6.10

Do you find these long compounds ambiguous? Explain why you think so.

busy family schedule

toy car factory

wooden door latch

Here is a schematic summary of the word types discussed so far:

6.3.3 Conversion

The last of the three highly productive word formation process that we wish to discuss here is conversion. Conversion involves a change in the word class of a word without any change in the form of the word. Examples of converted words appear in italics below:

(6.8) If you bookmark your favourite websites, they’ll cookie every download .

Used originally as nouns, the words bookmark and cookie are currently used also as verbs. The converse is true of the word download , which started life as a verb and is now used also as a noun. The productivity of conversion is seen in the vast number of identical word forms that serve as different word classes. A few examples include judge, fast, party, impact, and email . Out of context, the word class of converted words cannot be determined. In English, virtually any word can be converted to a noun. This is why we can talk about the rich , a have-not , or the whys, ifs and buts of an argument.

Conversion differs from both affixation and compounding in that new words are formed not through the addition of morphemes (whether affixes or stems) but simply by changing their word class. Because of this, conversion adds new simple words to the language, from other simple words, whereas affixation and compounding add complex words.

When dealing with word formation processes, it may sometimes be useful to find out the original word class of a word. Etymology (from the Greek etymon , ‘true meaning’ and logos , ‘science’) deals with the historical evolution of word meanings. Any good dictionary, such as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) or the Merriam-Webster, for British and American uses of English, respectively, will provide this information. Incidentally, a lot of people think that the original meaning of words is their ‘true meaning’, as the Greek word above suggests. If so, we would all be very wrong in our current use of many words. Take nice , for example. At the time English imported this word from Latin through French in the Middle Ages, it mean ‘ignorant, foolish’ – certainly not how we use this word today.

6.4 Other word formation processes

We now discuss briefly four other word formation processes that are common in various languages. All of them share one characteristic that sets them apart from the three major processes discussed so far: they all shorten words.

6.4.1 Backformation

Backformation is so named because it is the opposite of affixation: it involves removing from a word a part of it that is perceived as an affix. The word is taken “back”, as it were, to its stem “form”.

The interesting feature of backformed words is that the supposed affix is in fact not an affix at all, and there is therefore no stem to go back to. By analogy with other legitimately affixed words of the language, backformation in fact creates a new word. One classic example of backformation will help explain how it works. The word television was created as-is to designate what we all know it to mean. By analogy with pairs of words like supervision-supervise, revision-revise , the word television was (wrongly) assumed to be a derived word too, and the new verb televise was backformed from it. Many backformed words create verbs from nouns in similar ways. Examples include hawk from hawker , edit from editor , and electrocute from electrocution .

Backformation isn’t always clear-cut, and at times may cause hesitation in the use of certain word forms. For example, when you find your bearings do you orientate or orient yourself? And are you then orientated or oriented ?

6.2.2 Clipping

In contrast to backformation, clipping simply cuts a word short, without reference to morphological structure. Examples of clipped words include exam from examination , maths from mathematics , and pub from public house . Many students taking English Language refer to their course as Elang . Many of us surf the net rather than the internet , and ride in cars rather than motorcars . These examples show that clipping can affect any part of the original word, its beginning, end or middle. The words fridge and flu , from refrigerator and influenza , for example, retain the middle, while clipping off the beginning and end of the words.

Activity 6.11

Can you explain the language play in the sign below, painted on the side of an electrician’s van?

Let us remove your shorts

6.4.3 Acronymy

Acronymy involves using the initial letters of a sequence of words or morphemes to form a new word. We mentioned the word television above, as the name of a familiar object, but the likelihood is that you don’t watch television , you watch its acronym TV instead. Other examples of acronyms are KL for Kuala Lumpur , MMR for (vaccination against) measles, mumps, rubella , DOS for disk operating system , or UNESCO for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation .

These examples in fact conflate two types of acronyms. Some, like KL , are pronounced by the names of the letters that compose them, whereas others, like UNESCO , can be pronounced as a word. The former are sometimes called initialisms , whereas the latter are acronyms proper. The word CD- ROM is a mixture of both, its first part an initialism and its second part an acronym. Words like PhD ( Philosophy Doctor ) or radar ( radio detecting and ranging ) are also taken as acronyms, although they both take two initial letters from one of their words, rather than just one (“ Ph” from Philosophy and “ ra” from radio ).

Activity 6.12

1 . Can you find the rule for these shortenings?

2. Now try to predict the shortenings for the following expressways:

Central Expressway

Tampines Expressway

3. Think about naming practices of this kind in your own country, for roads, institutions, services, etc. Any interesting examples?

Once acronyms become words in their own right, they behave like ordinary words, exhibiting the features of the word class to which they are assigned. We can thus pluralise nouns like radar and CD-ROM , to talk about radars and CD-ROMs , respectively. Spelling, particularly of proper acronyms, also normalises to lowercase letters. This is the case for radar , as it is for scuba and laser , from self-contained underwater breathing apparatus and light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation , respectively.

These examples make it easy to understand why acronymy is an economical way of using words, and why, therefore, acronyms are extremely common in any media where speed of communication is seen as desirable, e.g. chatrooms, email, instant messaging systems. Other recent examples of acronyms include SARS for severe acute respiratory syndrome , DVD for digital video disc , URL for uniform resource locators and SMS for short message service.

Activity 6.13

• Collect a file of commonly used acronyms that you use on email or when messaging your friends.
• Make a list of acronyms used in the news (either on TV/radio or in print).

6.4.4 Blending

A blend can be seen as the compounding of clipped words, in that it takes segments from words and joins them together in a new word that retains meaning characteristics from the original words. The word smog , for example, is a blend of smoke and fog , and means a ‘blend’ of smoke and fog. Similarly, brunch is a blend of breakfast and lunch, a modem is a blend of a modulator and demodulator, while a dramedy blends drama and comedy.

Other examples of blends are the names by which local varieties of languages are known. Examples of labels involving English include Hinglish (Hindi English), Japlish (Japanese English), Swenglish (Swedish English), and Spanglish (Spanish English). These blends reflect the dual contribution of their two referents to form the language variety in question. Within this set of labels, the word Singlish is also a blend, although its first clipping refers to a country (Singapore) rather than a language. The same applies to Manglish (Malaysian English), the variety of English spoken in Malaysia.

6.5 Morphological analysis of complex words

Several of the word formation processed discussed in this chapter can, and in fact do, operate on the same word. This flexibility is part of the productivity of these word formation processes. We can, for example, find words like ATMs , formed through acronymy and affixation, or like piano-players , where compounding and affixation apply. Let’s now see how complex words like these are analysed.

6.5.1 Interpretation of meanings

Insight into the meaning of a complex word is best gained by means of a paraphrase that explicitly describes its meaning. Paraphrase makes clear not only the grammatical identity of each of the component morphemes in a complex word, but also the grammatical relations among them. As highlighted above, paraphrases must mention the morphemes that constitute a word, so that the meaning of the word becomes clear. For example:

Figure 6.6. Examples of paraphrases of complex words

6.5.2 Representation of structure

The internal structure of words may be represented schematically by means of a diagram. In linguistics, diagrams that represent grammatical structure have become known as tree diagrams , although they in fact suggest an upside down, or inverted “tree”, with branches that grow downwards rather than upwards. By analogy with actual trees, tree diagrams have branches , straight lines that link units at successive levels of analysis, and nodes , the points at which the branching take place. Each node of the diagram bears a label, which clearly identifies the relevant unit for the intended analysis. Labelled tree diagrams are commonly used in morphology and in syntax, and their purpose is to enable us to visually grasp the linguistic structure of words, phrases and sentences in terms of their linear and hierarchical organisation.

When drawing a morphological tree diagram, we can work bottom-up , starting at the bottom of the tree, labelling each morpheme in each word, and work our way upwards. Or, we can work top-down , starting with the word as a whole and breaking it down into its constitutive morphemes. In either case, we must bear in mind that word analysis obeys the two constraints stated in section 4.2 above: the analysis reflects the hierarchical step-by-step process of word formation, and must build well-formed words at each stage of word formation.

Here are the complete diagrams for three words, the nouns ATMs and piano-players , and the verb emailed. For these diagrams, we chose, arbitrarily, to use the abbreviations der . and infl . for derivational and inflectional , and an arrow to indicate conversion. Other conventions can be used in diagrams, so long as their meaning is made perfectly clear.

The diagrams (6.9)-(6.11) give us all the information that we need in order to understand the internal structure of the words, in what could be called the words’ formation “history”. The information in brackets is in fact redundant, and is shown here just for clarity. There is no need to repeat, for example as in (6.10), that player is a derived stem: its suffix is already specified as derivational. The diagrams also show that inflection applies last, in all three word formations. All words in the examples are therefore inflected words, regardless of other processes in their formation.

Activity 6.14

4.5.3 A note on spelling and morphological analysis

Written representations of language add an additional level of arbitrariness to it. We have also insisted that linguistics is concerned primarily with spoken language , rather than written/printed forms of it. “Creative spellers” do manage to get their written messages through, if their original spoken form can be recovered from the written/printed material. One example is the following letter written by a child to Santa Claus, where the intended meaning is clear despite the unexpected spelling:

(6.12) I want a bored game.

While the observation that spelling is a secondary representation of language remains true, it is also true that spelling is not entirely irrelevant to linguistic analysis. Being conservative by nature, not least because it reinforces the dominance of the sense of sight over hearing, spelling preserves the visual coherence of morphologically-related words that may have lost their family resemblance in speech. Speech-faithful spellings like the following can be easily read, and might be advocated by spelling reformists:

(6.13) ilektrik ilektrishan ilektrisiti ilektrikal

The counterargument to such reformation is that the alternative spellings ilektrik, ilektrish and ilektris would fail to represent the unity of the morpheme electric , found in the conventional spelling of all four words.

Food for thought

Let’s face it,

English is a crazy language. There is no egg in the eggplant No ham in the hamburger

And neither pine nor apple in the pineapple. English muffins were not invented in England French fries were not invented in France.

We sometimes take English for granted

But if we examine its paradoxes we find that Quicksand takes you down slowly

Boxing rings are square

And a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

If writers write, how come fingers don’t fing? If the plural of tooth is teeth

Shouldn’t the plural of phone booth be phone beeth? If the teacher taught,

Why didn’t the preacher praught?

If a vegetarian eats vegetables

What the heck does a humanitarian eat!? Why do people recite at a play

Yet play at a recital? Park on driveways and Drive on parkways?

How can the weather be as hot as hell on one day And as cold as hell on another?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy

Of a language where a house can burn up as It burns down,

In which you fill in a form By filling it out

And a bell is only heard once it goes!

English was invented by people, not computers And it reflects the creativity of the human race (Which of course isn’t a race at all).

That is why

When the stars are out they are visible

But when the lights are out they are invisible. And why it is that when I wind up my watch It starts

But when I wind up this poem It ends.

Richard Lederer

Further reading

Deterding, David H. and Poedjosoedarmo, Gloria R. (2001). Chapter 2. Morphology. In The grammar of English. Morphology and syntax for English teachers in Southeast Asia . Singapore: Prentice Hall, pp. 6-17.

Hudson, Grover (2000). Chapter 15. Six ways to get new words. In Essential introductory linguistics . Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 239-251.

Attribution

This chapter has been modified and adapted from The Language of Language. A Linguistics Course for Starters under a CC BY 4.0 license. All modifications are those of Régine Pellicer and are not reflective of the original authors.

ENG 3360 - Introduction to Language Studies Copyright © 2022 by Régine Pellicer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Types of Word Formation in English

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

In linguistics (particularly morphology  and lexicology ), word formation refers to the ways in which new words are formed on the basis of other words or morphemes . This is also known as derivational morphology .

Word formation can denote either a state or a process, and it can be viewed either diachronically (through different periods in history) or synchronically  (at one particular period in time).

In  The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language,  David Crystal writes about word formations: 

"Most English vocabulary arises by making new lexemes out of old ones — either by adding an affix to previously existing forms, altering their word class , or combining them to produce compounds . These processes of construction are of interest to grammarians as well as lexicologists. ... but the importance of word-formation to the development of the lexicon is second to none. ... After all, almost any lexeme, whether Anglo-Saxon or foreign, can be given an affix, change its word class, or help make a compound. Alongside the Anglo-Saxon ​ root in ​ kingly , for example, we have the French root in royally and the Latin root in regally . There is no elitism here. The processes of affixation, conversion, and compounding are all great levelers."

Processes of Word Formation

Ingo Plag explains the process of word formation in Word-Formation in English :

"Apart from the processes that attach something to a base ( affixation ) and processes that do not alter the base ( conversion ), there are processes involving the deletion of material. ... English Christian names , for example, can be shortened by deleting parts of the base word (see (11a)), a process also occasionally encountered with words that are not personal names (see (11b)). This type of word formation is called truncation , with the term clipping also being used."

(11a) Ron (-Aaron) (11a) Liz (-Elizabeth) (11a) Mike (-Michael) (11a) Trish (-Patricia) (11b) condo (-condominium) (11b) demo (-demonstration) (11b) disco (-discotheque) (11b) lab (-laboratory)

"Sometimes truncation and affixation can occur together, as with formations expressing intimacy or smallness, so-called diminutives :"

(12) Mandy (-Amanda) (12) Andy (-Andrew) (12) Charlie (-Charles) (12) Patty (-Patricia) (12) Robbie (-Roberta)

"We also find so-called blends , which are amalgamations of parts of different words, such as smog ( sm oke/f og ) or modem ( mo dulator/ dem odulator ). Blends based on orthography are called acronyms , which are coined by combining the initial letters of compounds or phrases into a pronounceable new word (NATO, UNESCO, etc.) Simple abbreviations like UK or USA are also quite common."

Academic Studies of Word-Formation

In the preface to the Handbook of Word-Formation, Pavol Stekauer and Rochelle Lieber write:

"Following years of complete or partial neglect of issues concerning word formation (by which we mean primarily derivation, compounding, and conversion), the year 1960 marked a revival—some might even say a resurrection—of this important field of linguistic study. While written in completely different theoretical frameworks (structuralist vs. transformationalist ), both Marchand's Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-Formation in Europe and Lee's Grammar of English Nominalizations instigated systematic research in the field. As a result, a large number of seminal works emerged over the next decades, making the scope of word-formation research broader and deeper, thus contributing to better understanding of this exciting area of human language ."

In "Introduction: Unravelling the Cognitive in Word Formation." Cognitive Perspectives on Word Formation, Alexander Onysko and Sascha Michel explain:

"[R]ecent voices stressing the importance of investigating word formation in the light of cognitive processes can be interpreted from two general perspectives. First of all, they indicate that a structural approach to the architecture of words and a cognitive view are not incompatible. On the contrary, both perspectives try to work out regularities in language. What sets them apart is the basic vision of how language is encapsulated in the mind and the ensuing choice of terminology in the description of the processes. ... [C]ognitive linguistics concedes closely to the self-organizing nature of humans and their language, whereas generative-structuralist perspectives represent external boundaries as given in the institutionalized order of human interaction."

Birth and Death Rates of Words

In their report "Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death," Alexander M. Petersen, Joel Tenenbaum, Shlomo Havlin, and H. Eugene Stanley conclude:

"Just as a new species can be born into an environment, a word can emerge in a language. Evolutionary selection laws can apply pressure on the sustainability of new words since there are limited resources (topics, books, etc.) for the use of words. Along the same lines, old words can be driven to extinction when cultural and technological factors limit the use of a word, in analogy to the environmental factors that can change the survival capacity of a living species by altering its ability to survive and reproduce."

• Crystal, David. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language . Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• Onysko, Alexander, and Sascha Michel. “Introduction: Unravelling the Cognitive in Word Formation.” Cognitive Perspectives on Word Formation , 2010, pp. 1–26., doi:10.1515/9783110223606.1.
• Petersen, Alexander M., et al. “Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death.” Nature News, Nature Publishing Group, 15 Mar. 2012, www.nature.com/articles/srep00313.
• Plag, Ingo. Word-Formation in English . Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• Stekauer, Pavol, and Rochelle Lieber. Handbook of Word-Formation . Springer, 2005.
• How Derivation is Used in Grammar
• Deverbal Nouns and Adjectives in English Grammar
• Understanding Splinter Words in English Grammar
• Base Forms of Words
• Definition and Examples of English Morphology
• What Are Derivational Morphemes?
• How Are New Words Created?
• Word Stems in English
• Word Family: Definition and Examples in English
• Making New Words With Affixation
• Definition and Examples of a Morph in Linguistics
• Synthetic Compound Words Examples
• Inflectional Morphology
• What Are Nonce Words?
• Italian Future Indicative Tense
• Complex Words in English

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The word formation process. Analyse the importance of word formation mechanism in maintaining the vitality of language

• Write a short introduction about word formation process. [20]

The term “word formation”, as the name suggest, is all about creating new words.  “Word formation process” is the process by which new words are created or invented.  Every language is in constant need for new words.  This is mainly because of the development in the technological field.  New products are coming on the market and all of them need names by which to be called.  Because of these new inventions and changes, a language needs to borrow, derive or otherwise coin new words simply because new things need names.  The formation of words does not just appear like that out of the blue, but rather, there are several methods that are used to create new words.

Before considering the techniques used to coin new words, let us consider language as a tool for communication and some vicissitudes it has undergone with the elapsing of time.  The only means by which humans communicate is language (be it spoken or body language).  It is the most vital tool of interaction between men.  With time, language needs to change in order to meet with the requirements of the people.  As Martina Wagener said in an article, “ language is dynamic, it changes constantly ”.  If we take the word “gay” for example, its meaning has changed.  It no longer means what it used to mean some years ago.  “Happy”, “jovial”, “cheerful” were the meanings of gay.  But in present times, the word “gay” is connoted to “homosexuality”. “If a […] word […] is used by many speakers of a language, it will probably survive and it can happen that one day, it becomes an everyday word and enters our dictionaries”  (Wagner 2010) .  This is exactly what happened with the word “gay”.  People started associating it with homosexuality, and today, in some 2011 dictionary editions, the word “gay” means “homosexual”.  Like the word “gay”, words like “surf” and “web” have also undergone a change in meaning.  They are new related to the internet.  Words like “lol” and “ROFL” have become very famous text messages and would probably enter in a dictionary in the coming years, because people have started using these words very often.

Moving on to the word formation process itself, there are many methods used to coin new words. Some of them are blending, backformation, conversion, compounding, derivations, clipping, and acronyms.  Among these processes, three of them are the most used ones to form new words. These are derivation, borrowing and compounding.  Besides these three processes, the other processes are also dynamic in creating new words but are not as much used as the three mentioned above.

This is a preview of the whole essay

Firstly, derivation is considered as “the most common word formation process to be found in the production of new English words”  (Yule 2006).  Derivation is the process of creating new words with the use of prefixes, suffixes and infixes.  The table below shows some examples of prefixes, suffixes and infixes.

As far as the process of borrowing is concerned, it is also considered as “one of the most common sources of new words in English”  (Yule 2006).  “Borrowing”, as the name suggests, is all about taking words or borrowing words from another language.  The English language borrowed “ nearly a hundred languages in the last hundred years ” (Finegan 2007).  Some examples of borrowing are organised in the table below.

“Calque” is a type of borrowing.  It is also known as a ‘loan translation’ because “ there is direct translation of elements of word into the borrowing language”  (Yule 2006).  “Gratte-ciel” (a French term) is a very common example of calque.  “Gratte-ciel” can literally be translated as “sky scraper”.

The last most common word formation process remaining is compounding.  Compounding is the process of combining words together to form a new word that “does not denote two things, but one”  and that is “ pronounced as one unit ” (Winicwski 2007).  In simpler words, compounding means joining together two different independent words to create a one.  Typically there are three types of compounding namely, solid, hyphenated and open compounding. The table below show examples of each of the three types of compounding.

Besides these three major word formation processes, there are also minor word formation processes.  They are minor in the sense that they are not as much used as borrowing, derivation and compounding in coining new words.  Acronymic formations, clipping, onomatopoeia, blending and back formation would fall in the category of minor word formation processes.   “Acronyms are new words formed from the initial letters of a set of other words” (Yule 2006). Examples of acronyms could be UBS (United Bus Services) and MBC (Mauritius Broadcasting Corporation).  Clipping is a process of reducing a multi-syllabic word into a monosyllable.  An example of such a word formation would be “fax” formed from “facsimile”.  Onomatopoeia is the process of forming words based on the actual sounds of the action.  For example “boom” is the sound of an explosion.  Blending is formed by the merger of sounds and meanings of two or more other words.  An example of blending is “modem” (modulator + demodulator).  “ A very specialised type of reduction process is knows as back formation”  (Yule 2006).  Generally, in back formation, a noun is reduced to a verb.  An example is the reduction of the noun “television” to the verb “televise”.

(b) Analyse the importance of word formation mechanism in maintaining the vitality of language [20].

Before tackling the aim of the question, it would be wise to try and see what is actually the importance of words.  Basically, words are the most important tools of communication between humankind.  Words are omnipresent and are used everywhere.  They are used to identify objects.  For instance, the word “cat” represents that small, four legged, full of fur and doing “miaow miaow” creature.  Without the word “cat”, it would be difficult to call a cat a cat.  Moreover, words are used for entertainment purposes in plays and films.  Imagine you are watching a play or a movie and there is not a single word uttered by the characters.  It would seem very strange.  On the social, individual or political levels, words are as equally important.  In politics, party leaders often use flowery words to convince the population to vote for them.  So we see the importance of words in the everyday life.

When new words are formed in a language, it definitely helps increase the vocabulary of that language.  If we take the English language as example, we see the vast vocabulary it has in its anchor.  This is because this language has borrowed, derived or else has created new words.  If the vocabulary of a language increases, the language has a possibility to be considered as an international language.  Here again we should take English language as example.  English is an international language.  This is greatly because of the word formation mechanism used to coin new words in the language.  With a lot of vocabulary in the English language, the latter has become versatile.  A word can be changed into a very or an adjective.  An example is the word “danger” which can be transformed into the verb “endanger” and adjective “dangerous”.  So word formation increases the importance of language.

When a language creates new words, by borrowing for instance, it not only helps maintain that language’s own vitality but also other languages can borrow from the initial language.  For example English borrowed the word “sofa” from Arabic, and Creole borrowed the word “sofa” from English.  When English borrows, there are other languages that borrow from the “borrower” language.  This keeps other languages alive as well.

A language can die.  Absence of word formation process can cause its death.  There are many ways in which a language can die.   “Many of India’s languages are at risk of dying our”  (National Geographic News 2009).  Linguists have maintained that a language dies due to several occurrences like influence of the west, lack of speakers of that language and most importantly, lack of word formation kills a language.  In Mauritius, the Bhojpuri language is feared to be extinct.  This is why the government has decided to inculcate Bhojpuri in the curriculum of primary schooling.

Bibliography

~ Finegan, Edward. “ Language: Its structure and use ”. Boston Thomson Wadsworth,2007 print.

~ Martina, Wagner. “ Word formation process: How new words develop in the English language ”. LING 301 Lexical semantics. Ms Kraft. Winter term 2010.

~ Paroma Basu in New Delhi, India for National Geographic News. Feb 26 2009.

~Wisniewski, Kamil. “ word formation ”. Tlumaczenia Anglelski. N.p 2007. Web 22 March 2011.

~ Yule , George. “ The study of language ”. New York. Cambridge University Press 2006 print

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The Construction of Words: Introduction and Overview

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In Construction Morphology, morphological patterns are expressed by constructional schemas that motivate properties of existing complex words, and state how new complex words can be formed. This article briefly summarizes a number of theoretical assumptions of Construction Morphology, and how they play a role in the various contributions to this volume on advances in Construction Morphology. Key features of this theory are that morphology is word-based, that morphological patterns are interpreted as constructions (form-meaning pairs), and that there is no strict separation of grammar and lexicon. Paradigmatic relationships play an essential role in structuring lexical and grammatical knowledge. These ideas can be applied fruitfully to the study of sign language, visual language, language change, language acquisition, and language processing.

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Booij, G. (2018). The Construction of Words: Introduction and Overview. In: Booij, G. (eds) The Construction of Words. Studies in Morphology, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74394-3_1

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20 Morphological Analysis

Geert Booij (1947) received an M.A. degree (cum laude) in Dutch linguistics, with minors in general linguistics and philosophy from the University of Groningen in 1971. From 1971 until 1981 he was an assistant/associate professor in the Department of Dutch of the University of Amsterdam, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree in 1977 with the dissertation Dutch Morphology. A Study of Word Formation in Generative Grammar (Foris Publications, Dordrecht). He was a professor of general linguistics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (1981-2005), and at Leiden University (2005-2012). He is now an emeritus professor. He is the founder and editor of the book series Yearbook of Morphology and its successor, the journal Morphology , author of The Phonology of Dutch (1995), The Morphology of Dutch (2002), Construction Morphology (2010), and of The Grammar of Words (2005, 2012), all published by Oxford University Press, and of linguistic articles in a wide range of linguistic journals, mainly on phonology and morphology.

• Published: 18 September 2012
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This chapter begins with an introduction to morphological analysis. It then discusses the following: word formation, the lexicon, inflection, interfaces, morphological classification, affix ordering, diachrony, processing complex words, morphological productivity, and tools for morphological research.

20.1 What is morphological analysis?

M orphology is the subdiscipline of linguistics that deals with the internal structure of words. Consider the following sets of English word pairs:

In these word pairs we observe a systematic form—meaning correspondence: the presence of - er in the words in the right column correlates with the meaning component “one who Vs” where V stand for the meaning of the corresponding verb in the left column. The observation of such patterns is the basis for assigning the words in the right column an internal morphological structure [[x] v -ər] n where the variable x stands for the phonological form of the base verb. We thus consider these nouns to be complex words. The morphological schema that generalizes over these sets of paradigmatically related words may be formalized as follows:

[[x] v -ər] n ‘One who Vs’

This schema expresses the systematic form-meaning correspondence found in this set of word pairs. Words are signs with properties at a number of levels of the grammar: they have a phonological form, syntactic properties such as being a noun or a verb, a meaning, and sometimes a particular pragmatic value. Hence, morphology is not a component of the grammar on a par with phonology or syntax. It deals not only with form, unlike what the etymology of the word suggests, but pertains to all levels of the grammar (Jackendoff, 2002 ). Morphology is the grammar of a natural language at the word level, and calling morphology “the grammar of words” (Booij 2007 ) is therefore quite appropriate.

The schema in (2) expresses a generalization based on a number of existing verb—nouns pairs of the relevant type. Such schemas also indicate how new complex words can be made. Indeed, the process of creating deverbal - er -nouns is quite productive in English. Morphological schemas are word-based since they express generalizations concerning established complex words. In that sense, morphology is word-based. The language user will learn these abstract schemas gradually, after having been exposed to a sufficient number of words that instantiate those schemas. The acquisition of these schemas does not imply that the complex words on which they are based are removed from lexical memory once the schemas have been acquired. Schemas coexist with the complex words that instantiate these schemas (Bybee 1988 b , 1995 ). Hence, the grammar exhibits redundancy, which is no problem given the vastness of human memory. The wrong assumption that the existence of a rule excludes listing outputs of that rule is referred to as the rule-list fallacy (Langacker 1987 b ).

In morphological analysis we also make use of the notion “morpheme”, traditionally defined as the minimal meaning-bearing unit of a language. The word baker , for instance, might be said to consist of the lexical morpheme bake and the bound morpheme - er . However, the systematic paradigmatic relationships between words may also be signaled by other means than morpheme concatenation, such as stem alternation, reduplication, stress, and tone patterns. Therefore, the notion “morpheme” is a useful analytic notion for the description of the internal structure of words, but not the starting point of morphological analysis and morphological structure.

The two basic functions of morphological operations are word formation and inflection. Word formation processes create new words, and hence expand the lexicon of a language. Inflection is the grammatical sub-system that deals with the proper form of words in specific syntactic contexts. In Dutch, for instance, the verb werk “to work” has five different finite forms, depending on the number and person of the subject of the clause in which this verb occurs:

We consider these five forms as forms of the same word. The notion “word” in this more abstract sense is usually referred to as “lexeme”. Thus, Dutch has a lexeme werk (lexemes may be indicated by small capitals in order to avoid ambiguity). The stem form of this lexeme is werk , and the different inflectional affixes are added to this stem. The word werker “worker” is a different lexeme from the word werk “to work” (so Dutch has the lexemes werk and werker ). The plural form of this noun werkers has the following morphological structure:

This is a simple example of morphological analysis, and presented in a form that follows the conventions of interlinear morphemic glossing (Lehmann 2004 ). The first line presents the internal constituency of the complex word. The second line provides a morpheme by morpheme glossing, and the third line gives a paraphrase of the meaning of the linguistic unit.

The set of verbal forms in (3) illustrates the well-known problem that there is no one-to-one mapping between morphemes and units of (grammatical) meaning, also referred to as “cumulative exponence”. For instance, the - t of werkt expresses values for the following grammatical categories:

For this reason, a morpheme like - t is traditionally called a “portmanteau morpheme”. The Dutch sentence Jan werkt will receive the following glossing:

Grammatical features that are expressed by the same morpheme are separated by a dot instead of a hyphen. The combination of feature values for person and number is usually given without an internal dot.

Two other notions are important for morphological analysis, the notions “root” and “stem”. The stem of a word is the form minus its inflectional markers. The root of a word is the stem minus its word formation morphemes. Hence, in the English word workers the stem is worker , and the root is work . Another example is that in Polish the root noun kos “scythe” can be turned into a verbal stem with the meaning “to mow” by adding the verbalizing suffix - i . This verbal stem can then be used for deriving verbal forms such as the present participle košonc “mowing”, the phonetic form of kos-i-onc .

20.2 Word formation

Natural languages make use of a number of formal means for the formation of complex lexemes: compounding, affixation, reduplication, conversion, stem alternation (also referred to as internal modification), stress, and tone.

In compounding two or more lexemes are combined into a new one. Cross-linguistically, compounding is one the most common means for word formation, in particular compounding in which one of the constituents is the head (so-called endocentric compounding). The English word football is a compound, consisting of the two lexemes foot and ball , of which the second functions as the head: a football is a particular kind of ball, not a kind of foot. There are also languages with left-headed compounds, such as Maori. The Maori compound roro-hiko “lit. brain electricity, computer” denotes a particular kind of brain, namely a computer, not a particular form of electricity. In exocentric compounds such as pickpocket there is no constituent that functions as the head: a pickpocket is neither a pocket nor a pick. An example of an excocentric compound from Mandarin Chinese, a language with lots of exocentric compounds, is the compound tian fang consisting of the verb tian “to fill” and the noun fang “room” with the meaning “second wife (to a widower)”. Besides subordinating compounds, with one of the constituents functioning as the head, there are also coordinating compounds, such as Sanskrit maa-pio “mother and father”, and English singer-actor .

The second widespread process used in word formation is affixation, whereby an affix is prefixed, suffixed, infixed, or circumfixed to some input form. Each of the four options is illustrated in (7):

Compounding and affixation are referred to as concatenative morphology since their mode of operation is that of concatenating roots, stems, and affixes. A special form of concatenative morphology is reduplication. This is the process in which a stem or part thereof is copied and prefixed or suffixed to that stem, as in Javanese baita-baita ‘various ships (full reduplication) and t ə- tamu “to visit” from tamu “guest” (partial reduplication with copying of the initial consonant and insertion of a default vowel).

In non-concatenative morphology, other formal means are involved in the creation of new morphological forms. In the case of internal modification a stem with a different form is created, for instance, by replacing a vowel pattern or a consonant pattern (or both) with another one. Vowel alternations are characteristic of a number of Indo-European languages; in Semitic languages verbal roots may appear in a number of different “binyanim”, templates with specific patterns of consonants and vowels, sometimes in combination with a prefix:

stem alternation (Dutch, Indo-European)

sl ui t ‘to close’ sl o t ‘lock’

b i nd ‘to bind’ b a nd ‘bond’

binyan system (Modern Hebrew, Semitic)

katav (pattern CaCaC) ‘wrote’

ni-ktav (pattern ni-CCcaC) ‘was written’

kitev (pattern CiCeC) ‘inscribed’ (intensive meaning)

Other non-concatenative means for marking morphological operations are stress (as in the English word pair to revíew (verb) vs. réview (noun) and the use of tone to mark specific morphological categories. In some cases the tonal marking can be analyzed as a case of concatenative morphology. An example of the latter from the African language Noni is the following set of pairs of singular and plural nouns (Hyman and Leben 2000 , p. 590):

Since the roots involved may be assumed to have a lexical High tone, Hyman and Leben qualify the Low tone that is part of the singular tone pattern as a tonal prefix that marks the singular. Hence, affixes can also consist of suprasegmental units.

New lexemes may also be created without overt formal marking, which is referred to as conversion. A well-known case is the conversion of nouns into verbs, a very productive process in languages like English and Dutch; the following examples are from Dutch (the nouns are recent English loans except contact ):

These recently coined examples show how productive this way of creating lexemes is in Dutch. The morphological structure of such verbs can be represented as [[x] n ] v , and the corresponding meaning as “to perform an act in which N is involved”. In this way we avoid the assumption of arbitrary zero-morphemes that are sometimes used in morphological analyses to account for conversion.

The common denominator for all word formation processes except compounding is derivation. Hence, the notion “word formation” comprises both compounding and derivation.

20.3 The lexicon

The term “lexicon” refers to the component of the grammar that minimally contains a specification of the lexical units of a particular language. The set of lexical units is larger than the set of words. Idiomatic expressions such as to kick the bucket “to die” that are phrasal in nature need to be listed as well. This also applies to the many noun phrases that are used as classifying terms such as blue cheese and yellow pages that form established ways of denoting certain entities. The distinction between the notions “word” and “lexical unit” is important for a proper understanding of the relationship between morphology and syntax, as we will see below.

The set of words that are to be registered in the lexicon is the set of established words, that is, the set of words that is used by more than one native speaker and on more than one occasion. Thus, the lexicon is part of the language norm since it specifies the lexical conventions of a language. This norm can be changed by adding new words to the lexicon.

New complex words, once established, will be added to the lexicon. From a diachronic perspective there are other means of extending the set of complex words as well, as will be discussed below, in the section on diachrony.

In the lexicon, established complex words coexist with the schemas according to which they are formed. The schemas express generalizations about sets of established words, and indicate how new words can be formed. The relation between the schemas and their instantiations can be conceived of as a hierarchical lexicon in which a schema forms a node that dominates its instantiations. All properties shared by a set of words are specified in the schema, and the individual words inherit these properties from the node that dominates them.

20.4 Inflection

So far, the focus of this chapter has been on lexeme formation. In this section, we will consider the analytical challenges posed by the other domain of morphology, the study of inflectional systems. In a language with inflection, lexemes may have more than one inflectional form. The set of inflectional forms of a lexeme is traditionally represented in the form of a paradigm in which each cell contains a form that expresses a particular array of grammatical features. Inflection has two basic functions. The first is that of creating forms of lexemes with a formal marking for certain grammatical categories such as number for nouns, and tense and aspect for verbs. This kind of inflection is referred to as inherent inflection (Booij 1993 , 1996 ) because the choice of the inflectional form is not governed by syntactic context but by semantic considerations; it reflects the choice of the language user as to what information he or she wants to convey. The other kind of inflection is contextual inflection, inflection that is determined by the syntactic context in which a lexeme occurs. In a language with a case system, for instance, nouns must have a particular case form because they are the head of an NP in a certain syntactic position that requires case marking. In many languages, finite forms of verbs have to agree with person and number properties of the subject NP. Adjectives may have to agree with respect to certain properties (such as gender, case, and (in)definiteness) with the nominal head that they modify. Verbs and prepositions may require specific case markings on their NP-arguments, as is the case for German. The following sentence illustrates both inherent and contextual inflection for Latin. The cases of pure contextual inflection are in bold print:

( dat = dative, abl = ablative). This sentence is from a famous medieval love letter by Heloïse to Abelard (Janson 2004 , p. 139). The verb patere “to be clear” requires its non-subject argument to be marked by the dative case. The ablative marking on amor “love” is a case of inherent inflection (“semantic case”), chosen to express a circumstantial meaning. The corresponding marking on the adjective immoderate , on the other hand, is a case of contextual inflection, required by the rule of agreement between modifying adjective and nominal head. The word sequence complexa sum is the perfective form of a so-called deponent verb, a verb with active meaning but a passive form. In the perfect tense, such deponent verbs have a periphrastic form, consisting of two words, a perfect/past participle and a form of the verb esse “to be”. The participle has inflection for feminine gender since the writer of this sentence, Heloïse, is a female. The subject itself, however, is not expressed by a separate noun. We may still consider this contextual inflection if we take the notion “context” to include the pragmatic context. The ending - a expresses both feminine gender and nominative case. An overt subject for the finite form patet is missing as well. In fact, the form of the verb enables us to reconstruct the subject as a 3rd person singular entity. The verb thus agrees in person and number with an abstract, non-overt subject. Hence, the suffix - t of patet expresses both inherent inflection (tense) and contextual inflection.

The word sum illustrates another morphological phenomenon, that of suppletion. This is the situation of different lexical roots playing a role in filling the cells of the paradigm of a lexeme. Two additional formal complications in inflection are the role of inflectional classes (declinations for nouns and conjugations for verbs), and stem selection. In example (n), the word amor “love” belongs to the “third declination” of nouns which implies that the ablative singular case is expressed by the ending - e , whereas the participle immoderat-us is inflected according to the default declination class for adjectives, hence the corresponding ending - o . In verbal paradigms the stem to which the inflectional endings are attached may have more than one form. The verb patet is a form of the verb patere “to be clear” that belongs to the second conjugation, the verbs with the “thematic vowel” e in between the root and the inflectional endings. The stem form of the participle complexa is /pleks/, whereas the form /plekt/ is used in the finite forms present and past (as in com-plect-or “I embrace”).

This small piece of morphological analysis, which includes the use of notions like suppletion, deponent verb, stem allomorphy, and inflectional class, shows how complex the relation between form and meaning can be in inflectional systems (Aronoff 1994 ).

The contextual inflectional marking on the Latin adjective immoderate is a case of dependent marking since the adjective is dependent on the noun, the head of the noun phrase immoderate amore . There are also languages that mark the head rather than the dependent (Nichols 1986 ). For instance, Hungarian exhibits head marking, as in:

where the noun haz “house” is the head.

The functional distinction between inherent and contextual inflection made above can be used for predicting the order in which the relevant inflectional elements occur in complex words: contextual inflection tends to be peripheral to inherent inflection. For instance, the ablative singular form of the Finnish word for “cat” is kisso-i-lta , with the ablative suffix - lta ordered after the plural suffix - i . Inflection in its turn is peripheral to word formation. When inflectional systems erode, it is usually the contextual inflection that gets lost first. For instance, most Romance languages have lost their case system while preserving the morphological expression of number on nouns, a case of inherent inflection.

The existence of a rich inflectional system implies that a lexeme may have quite a number of forms. Unlike what is the case for lexeme formation, it is therefore not very realistic to assume that all inflected forms of the established lexemes of a language are stored in the lexical memory of speakers, certainly not for languages with rich inflection. Storage of inflected forms is most probable for irregular forms and for regular forms with a certain frequency of occurrence (Booij 1999 a ).

20.5 Interfaces

20.5.1 the interface with phonology.

As we saw above, the basic levels of morphological a n alysis a r e the phonological level, the level of morphosyntactic structure, an d the semantic level. The interface between these three types of information is subject to certain general principles.

As to the interface between phonology and morphology, the morphological structure of a complex word co-determines the phonological form of the complex word, in particular its prosodic structure. In the default case, a word in the morphological sense corresponds to a word in the phonological sense, referred to as the phonological word or the prosodic word. For instance, the English word baker is one prosodic word. The prosodic word is the domain of syllabification (that is, the division of the phonological string of a word into syllables). The syllabification of the word baker is as follows:

(be:.kәr) ω

(the dot indicates a syllable boundary, the ω stands for “prosodic word”). This shows that morphological structure and prosodic structure are not necessarily isomorphic: there is no prosodic boundary that corresponds to the word-internal morphological boundary of this word. Since the suffix - er forms one prosodic word with the stem, we call it a cohering affix. Affixes may also form a prosodic word of their own, however, and are then qualified as non-cohering. Prefixes in Germanic languages are often non-cohering, and a number of suffixes as well. For instances, in careful speech the English word un-able has a syllable boundary before the first vowel of able even though normally a consonant belongs to the same syllable as the next vowel. Hence, un - is a non-cohering prefix (Booij and Rubach 1984 ), and forms a prosodic word of its own. Therefore, unable is a prosodic compound. Suffixes may also be non-cohering. An example is the Dutch suffix - achtig “-like”, as in rood-achtig “red-like, reddish”. The prosodic structure of this word is (ro:d) ω (αx.tә γ ) ω . Consequently, the final /d/ of the first constituent rood with the underlying phonological form /ro:d/ is devoiced since Dutch obstruents are voiceless at the end of a syllable, and the phonetic form of this word is [ro:t. α x.tәx]. Thus, the phonetic form of this adjective contrasts with that of the synonymous adjective rod-ig [ro:dәx] with the cohering suffix –ig /ә γ / in which the voicedness of the underlying /d/ is preserved because it does not occur in syllable-final position. In many languages the lexeme constituents of compounds form separate prosodic words, with the effect that the compound-internal morphological boundary coincides with a syllable boundary. Thus we get audible minimal pairs of the following type (examples from Dutch):

A second example of the influence of morphological structure on the phonetic realization of complex words is that of word stress, one of the most intensively studied aspects of phonology as far as English is concerned. Some English suffixes are stress-neutral, that is, they do not change the stress pattern of their stem, whereas others are stress-shifting, and shift the main stress of the stem rightward. The English suffix - er , for instance, is stress-neutral, unlike the suffix - ee , as can be seen in a pair like emplóy-er vs. employ-ée (cf. the classical study of Chomsky and Halle ( 1968 ), and for a more recent discussion Hammond ( 1999 )). The interaction between phonology and morphology is the main focus of the theory of Lexical Phonology (cf. Booij ( 2000 ) for a survey), and also an important domain of research in Optimality Theory (Kager 1999 ).

20.5.2 The interface with semantics

The basic principle that governs the interface between the formal structure of complex words and their meaning is the principle of compositionality: the meaning of a complex word is a compositional function of the meaning of its constituents and the morphological structure. For instance, the meaning of football is a compositional function of the meanings of foot and ball , and the meaning contribution of the compound structure that can be circumscribed as follows for English compounds, which are right-headed:

[X Y] y ‘Y that has some relation R to X’

Hence, a football is a ball which has something to do with feet. The exact relation between foot and ball does not belong to the domain of linguistic knowledge but is part of our knowledge of the world (of games). We know that the foot is the device used for hitting the ball. This makes clear that the specific semantic interpretation of individual words is underdetermined by the linguistic system as such.

A second form of interface in which semantics is involved pertains to argument structure. The creation of complex verbs may have predictable consequences for the syntactic valency of these verbs. For instance, when we create causative verbs from adjectives, with the meaning “to cause something to become A”, the event expressed by the causative verb presupposes an Agent and a Patient. Hence, such causative verbs will have at least two arguments, and hence be transitive. Thus, the semantics of a class of complex words may have predictable consequences for their syntactic valency. Such rules that predict the relationship between argument structure and syntactic valency are referred to as “linking rules”.

The principle of compositionality takes a syntagmatic perspective on the semantics of complex words. There are clear cases of word formation, however, where we need a paradigmatic perspective in order to account for the meaning of a complex word. The meaning of the Dutch compound huisman “househusband”, for instance, can only be understood when seen as part of the following equation:

vrouw ‘woman’: man ‘man’ = huisvrouw ‘housewife’: huisman ‘househusband’

A huisvrouw is a woman without a paid job who stays at home to take care of the household, a huisman is the male counterpart of such a woman.

The idea that paradigmatic relationships play a role in the semantics of complex words can also be seen in the interpretation of Dutch words ending in the noun boer “farmer”. This word functions as the head of a compound like groenteboer “green-grocer”, reflecting a time when the farmer was both the grower and the retailer of vegetables. In present-day Dutch, the constituent boer has developed the more general meaning retailer, witness compounds like sigarenboer “cigar seller, tobacconist” and tijdschriftenboer “magazines salesman”. Thus, Dutch developed a particular subpattern of NN compounds of the following type:

[[x] n [boer] n ] n ‘seller of x’

which may be qualified as a “constructional idiom” (Jackendoff 2002 ) at the word level: a construction of which one position is lexically filled and another one still a variable.

The same observation can be made for the left constituents of compounds. For instance, in most Dutch compounds that begin with the word hoofd “head”, the meaning of that constituent is “main”, as in hoofd-ingang “main entrance” and hoofd-bezwaar “main objection”. In Maale, an Omotic language spoken in southern Ethiopia, the noun nayi “child” has developed into a word with the general meaning of agent, as in bayi nayi lit. “cattle child, one who brings cattle to grazing area”. This reflects the fact that cattle herding is typically a children's task in that society (Amha 2001 , p. 78). Thus, such compound constituents may develop into affix-like elements (referred to as affixoids).

This implies again that we conceive of the lexicon as a hierarchy of levels: at the bottom the individual coined complex words, at the top the abstract schemas according to which these words have been formed, and intermediate generalizations like (17). In the case of NN compounds, we thus get (at least) three levels):

At each level a construct(ion) instantiates the constructional schema by which it is dominated.

20.5.3 The relation between morphology and syntax

Our approach so far can be qualified as “lexicalism”. This term denotes the set of theories in which morphology is separated from syntax in the sense that the structure of complex words is not dealt with by the syntax but by lexical rules that express generalizations about established and potential complex words. This does not mean that syntax and morphology do not interact, but that syntactic rules cannot manipulate parts of words. This principle is referred to as the principle of Lexical Integrity:

Principle of Lexical Integrity ‘The syntax neither manipulates nor has access to the internal structure of words’ (Anderson 1992 , p. 84)

As argued in Booij ( 2009 ), this principle is too strong, since one should not exclude the possibility that syntactic rules may have access to the internal morphological structure even though manipulation must be excluded. An example that shows that access of syntactic or semantic rules to word-internal structure cannot be completely ruled out comes from Georgian. In Georgian we find expressions such as the following (Harris 2006 ):

The first word sam has to appear in the oblique form because it modifies the word tit “finger” which is part of the second word. That is, both for the purpose of case assignment (to the independent word sam only) and semantic interpretation, sam and tit form a unit. As Harris argues, the word sam cannot be considered a part of the next word even though its form is indeterminate since it could also be a stem form, because recursive modification is not allowed within Georgian compounds. Hence, it should be interpreted as the oblique form of an independent word. This case assignment thus requires access to the internal morphological structure of the second word in (20). The construction in (20) may be compared to that in (21) where the first word bears nominative case, and you get a different interpretation:

In (21), the word form sami agrees in case marking with the second word as a whole, and hence it is a modifier of the whole word. Note, however, that the word tit , being part of a compound, does not receive case marking itself.

The need to access the internal structure of complex words is also shown by scope phenomena: in some cases a modifier may have scope over a sub-constituent of a complex word. This is illustrated in (22) with Dutch phrases in which the pre-nominal adjective modifies only the first noun constituent of the NN compounds. I use Dutch examples here even though the English glosses have the same properties. For Dutch we can be certain that these linguistic units are phrases because the adjectives are inflected, witness the inflectional ending - e :

[A [NN] n ] np

The principle of Lexical Integrity can be used to determine the status of lexical units such as preverb + verb combinations that are found in several Indo-European languages, and also in Uralic languages like Hungarian (Kiefer and Honti 2003 ). The latter language has lexical units such as tévét nez “be engaged in television watching”. The two parts of this lexical unit can be split in certain syntactic contexts, for instance by the negative word nem “not”. The splittability of these units is evidence for their not being words. This is confirmed by the fact that the noun constituent tévét in this example is marked with accusative case by the suffix - t . This assignment of structural case to tévé shows that it must be an independent word. Given the principle of Lexical Integrity, one does not expect structural case assignment to a sub-constituent of a word. Thus, we can make a principled distinction between morphological and syntactic constructs.

This does not imply that syntactic constructs cannot form part of words. In the following Dutch examples, AN phrases are used in the non-head position of complex words. These complex words as such are morphological constructs, but one of their constituents is formed in accordance with the rules of syntax:

[[[oude] a [mannen] n ] np [huis] n ] n ‘old men's home’

[[[vierde] a [klas] n ] np -er] n ‘fourth class pupil’

These cases of word formation do not invalidate lexicalism since the distinction between syntactic and morphological constructs is maintained.

20.6 Morphological classification

Languages may be classified according to the role and nature of morphology in each language (Comrie 1981 ; Haspelmath 2009 c ). A first dimension of classification is the index of synthesis: languages that do not make use of morphology are called analytic or isolating, languages with a lot of morphology are called synthetic. Hence, languages may be ranked on an index of synthesis. Traditionally, Chinese is referred to as an isolating language because it has no, or almost no inflection. Yet, there is no doubt that word formation, in particular compounding, is very productive in this language (Packard 2000 ). Hence, Chinese is not analytic in an absolute sense.

The second index on which languages can be ranked is that of polysynthesis: some languages allow the incorporation of stems, leading to relatively complex words, as illustrated by the following one-word-sentence of Central Alaskan Yupʼik (Mithun 2000 ) p. 923):

Tuntutuq=gguq

tuntu-te-u-q=gguq

moose-catch- indic . intransitive = hearsay

‘He got a moose.’

The third dimension of classification is the index of fusion. In fusional languages, one morpheme may express more than one grammatical feature. Above, we saw that Latin is such a language. Such languages can be contrasted with agglutinating languages in which each bound morpheme corresponds with one grammatical feature. Turkish is the textbook example of an agglutinating language. For instance, case and number in Turkish are expressed by different suffixes, unlike what is the case for Latin:

çocuk-lar-in

child- pl-gen

‘of the children’

These three indices of morphological complexity are useful in given a global characterization of the morphology of a language. One should be aware, however, that languages are not homogeneous with respect to these indices (Haspelmath 2009c ). For instance, many Indo-European languages are fusional in their inflectional system but agglutinating in their derivational morphology. Chinese also illustrates this point since, as mentioned above, it is synthetic as far as word formation is concerned but analytic as far as inflection is concerned.

20.7 Affix ordering

In languages with a reasonably rich morphology affix ordering is an important topic for morphological analysis. The basic question is how we can account for the ordering in which the different types of morphemes have to appear in multiply complex words.

A well-known general principle (Greenberg 1963 ) is that inflectional morphemes are peripheral to derivational morphemes. Within the domain of inflection, contextual inflection appears to be peripheral to inherent inflection (Booij 1993 , 1996 ).

The ordering of inflectional affixes has also been investigated in detail by Bybee (Bybee 1985 a ). Bybee proposed a semantic Relevance Hierarchy for the order of affixes: the more semantically relevant an affix is for the stem, the closer it is to the stem. Hence, derivational morphemes, which have obviously a profound effect on the meaning of the stem are closer to the stem than inflectional ones.

As to the inflectional affixes on nouns, it is predicted that case markers and (in)definiteness markers on nouns will be peripheral to gender markers since they do not have a semantic effect on the stem of the noun. Instead, they relate the noun to its syntactic context.

In the case of verbs, the following hierarchy can be observed for languages with markers for voice, aspect, tense, and agreement:

Voice > Aspect > Tense > Agreement

Voice markers such as passive have a strong semantic effect, and affect the argument structure of the verb. At the other end of the hierarchy, tense has the deictic role of relating the event expressed by the verb to the moment of speaking. Agreement, a case of contextual inflection, also has an external role in that it relates the verb to its syntactic context.

Another example is the ordering of suffixes in the following Maale verb (Amha 2001 , p. 114):

gap-is-é-ne

finish- causative-perfect-declarative

The causative suffix affects the argument structure and hence the syntactic valency of the root gap . Hence, it is closest to the root. The declarative suffix on the other hand expresses a property of the whole sentence since it indicates that the sentence is declarative. That is, it does not modify the semantic content of the verbal root as such and is therefore the most peripheral suffix.

For some languages with complicated sequences of morphemes in words one finds descriptions with templates. A template specifies a number of slots for specific morphemes. This kind of affix ordering is referred to as “position class morphology” (cf. Inkelas ( 1993 ) for a discussion of such template morphology in Nimbo-ran, a Papuan language of New Guinea). For Athapaskan (Amerindian) there is a detailed study that relates the order of affixes to their semantic scope properties (Rice 2000 ).

The order of affixes in a complex word may also reflect the different historical strata of the vocabulary of a language. The Dutch vocabulary, for instance, has a non-native (Romance) stratum besides a native (Germanic) stratum. The basic generalization is that non-native suffixes can attach to non-native (simplex or complex) stems only, whereas native suffixes can attach to both non-native and native stems (Booij 2002 b ). Hence, the predicted order is that native suffixes will be peripheral to non-native ones, as illustrated in (28):

real-iser-ing ‘realization’

controvers-ieel-heid ‘controversialness’

The suffixes - iseer and - ieel are non-native suffixes borrowed from French, whereas the suffixes - ing and - heid are native suffixes of Germanic origin. The non-native suffixes first attach to the (non-native) roots. They cannot be added after a native suffix, since the attachment of a native suffix makes the stem native.

As to English, there is a long debate on how to deal with the constraints on suffix ordering (Hay and Plag 2004 ; Plag 1996 ). This is related to how complex words are processed, discussed in section 20.10 below. The idea is that affixes that are easily and often recognized as parts of complex words tend to be peripheral to affixes that form part of complex words whose internal structure is not so easily parsed. For instance, the English suffix - less is easily parsed out, and attaches freely to all kinds of complex words, whereas - ity that occurs in less parsable words has a more restricted distribution. Hence, a word like *home-less-ity is odd though it is semantically well-formed (Hay 2002 ).

Prosodic properties may also play a role in stacking up affixes. Dutch suffixes that are non-cohering and thus form prosodic words of their own, can easily be attached to already suffixed words—sometimes even to plural forms of nouns—unlike cohering suffixes. For instance, the productive cohering suffix - ig /ә γ / “-ish” cannot attach to adjectives that have a participial form whereas the non-cohering suffix - heid “-ness” freely attaches to such participial adjectives. Hence, the contrast in well-formedness between *woed-end-ig “slightly furious” and woed-end-heid “furiousness”. That is, words can be made longer if the suffix starts a new prosodic word (Booij 2002 a ).

20.8 Diachrony

The use of productive word formation patterns is not the only source of complex words in the lexicon. Complex words may also arise through univerbation, the process in which phrases become words. Many nominal compounds in Germanic languages have a phrasal origin. For instance, the Dutch compound koningskroon “king's crown” originated as a phrase in which the noun koning was marked as the possessor through the genitive case ending - s . The case ending that was thus trapped inside a word was then reinterpreted as a semantically empty linking element or stem extension. The system of linking elements became subsequently part of the compounding system of Dutch.

Word formation processes have the function of expanding the sets of words of lexical categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs). Yet, we also find complex words of non-lexical categories such as prepositions. This is due to the process of grammaticalization, defined as follows by Hopper and Traugott ( 2003 , p. xv): “We define grammaticalization as the process whereby lexical items come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions, and, once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions.” The English preposition during , for instance, has the shape of a present participle of the verbal root dure that we also find in en-dure and duration . The participle could be reinterpreted as a preposition in absolute participial constructions like during the war “while the war lasted”. Thus, the class of English prepositions (prepositions are grammatical morphemes) was expanded with a complex word during . In the word notwithstanding we see a combination of univerbation and grammaticalization.

Grammaticalization can lead to the rise of word formation processes since lexemes can become bound morphemes, prefixes or suffixes, which belong to the class of grammatical morphemes. In French, for instance, the French preposition sur has a prefixal counterpart sur - with the meaning “over”, as in surexposition “overexposure” (Amiot 2005 ). The English suffix- wise as used in money-wise “as far as money is concerned” originates from the noun wise “manner”. Thus, univerbation and grammaticalization are mechanisms of language change that lead to the expansion of non-lexical categories, and to the rise of new derivational processes (Booij 2005 a ; Heine and König 2005 ).

Complex words can also be subject to the process of lexicalization, and thus lose their morphological transparency. The Dutch word aardappel “potato”, for instance, is historically a compound, consisting of the stems aard “earth” and appel “apple”. Yet, it is no longer perceived as a kind of apple, and it is syllabified as a simplex word, without the word-internal morphological boundary coinciding with a syllable boundary: aar.dap.pel , not aard.ap.pel .

Language contact is another source of word formation processes. Dutch, English, and German have borrowed many complex words from French in the course of time, for instance deadjectival nouns ending in – ité , with some phonological adaptation (Dutch - iteit , English - ity , German - ität ). Speakers of these languages could abstract a word formation schema on the basis of a number of such loans and the corresponding adjectives, and use these productively. Thus, Dutch now has a number of nouns in - iteit for which there is no French counterpart since they have been coined in Dutch on the basis of a Dutch adjective, such as stommiteit “stupidity” derived from stom “stupid”. Similarly, the English deverbal suffix - ee derives from the French passive participle ending - é , but has now gone its own way and combines with English verbs, as in standee derived from the verb stand .

Word formation processes can also be lost. In the course of time a word formation process can lose its productivity, with the effect that no more words of that type are coined. This means that we might still find a number of instantiations of the relevant word formation schema, but no extension of that class. The Dutch suffix - lijk for instance, which is similar in function to the English suffix - able in coining deverbal adjectives, lost its productivity, and the role of coining new deverbal adjectives is taken over by the productive suffix - baar “-able”.

As mentioned above, inflectional systems may be subject to strong erosion. Most Romance and Germanic languages have lost their case system for nouns and agreeing adjectives. Verbal inflection may also change considerably. Afrikaans, a daughter language of Dutch spoken in South Africa, lost most of its verbal morphology, with the effect that there is only one verb form left. Past tense in this language is expressed periphrastically, as illustrated in (29):

Ek het geloop

I have walked

‘Ί walked.’

This kind of inflectional erosion is due to the effect of contact between speakers of Dutch and speakers of African languages and Malay in South Africa. The simplification of the inflection of nouns in English (loss of case and gender marking) may also be due to the effect of language contact between Anglo-Saxon speakers and Viking invaders.

Language change may lead to the rise of constructions with specific morphology. Consider the following English phrases, and their labeling (Rosenbach 2006 , 2007 ):

Determiner genitive: John's book, the young girl's eyes

Descriptive (classifying) genitive: a men's suit, the lawyer's fees

The morpheme - s in these constructions derives historically from a genitive case ending. After the loss of the case system, this use of - s for the marking of specifiers in certain types of noun phrases persisted. Hence, this use of the - s is a case of construction-dependent morphology (Booij 2005 b ). Another example is the use of the old dative suffix - en in Dutch collective constructions such as

This use of the suffix - en does not follow from synchronic case marking but is the residue of case marking in an earlier stage of Dutch. Morphological elements can be “trapped” in a construction, and thus become dependent on that construction.

As mentioned above, individual complex words may lose their internal morphological structure in the course of time, a form of lexicalization. The Dutch denominal adjective natuur-lijk “natural” has acquired the additional meaning “of course” when used as an adverb, just like English naturally . The word has become opaque, and speakers may no longer feel a relationship with the base noun natuur “nature”. This independence of the highly frequent adverb natuurlijk /na:ty:rlәk/ manifests itself in the fact that its phonetic form is often reduced to forms like [ty:rlәk] or even [ty:k]. This contrasts with the use of this word as an adjective with the regular meaning “natural”. Used with that meaning, the word's phonetic form cannot be reduced, and it must be pronounced as [na:ty:rlәk].

Words may also lose their morphological transparency because the base word was lost in the course of time. In the English verb begin , for instance, we might still recognize a prefix be -, but the root gin is no longer used as a verb. Hence, we might conclude that this verb has become a simplex one. In some cases there is reason to speak of words that are only formally complex. Such formal complexity may be the result of the loss of the base word, or of borrowing, as happened in English through the influx of Latinate verbs. English verbs in - ceive such as conceive, perceive , and receive share the property that their corresponding nominal ends in - cept-ion , and their corresponding adjective in - cept-ive . For that reason, we would like to assume that these verbs consist of two constituents, a prefix and a root. Yet, there is no systematic form—meaning correspondence involved in such sets of similar words.

20.9 Processing Complex Words

The processing of complex words is an important domain of psycholinguistic research. The main debate concerns the balance between computation and storage of complex word forms. One position, which has been most eloquently defended by Steve Pinker (Pinker 1999 ) is that complex words that are irregular are stored in the lexicon, but that regular forms are computed online when the utterance is being processed. For instance, the inflectional forms of English regular verbs are assumed not to be stored, unlike those of the irregular verbs. The different patterns of irregular verb forms may however be recognized and stored in a kind of associative memory.

This view of the balance between storage and computation has been challenged by many psycholinguistic research results. It appears that fully regular forms may induce frequency effects. If a word form has a relatively high frequency of use, this will speed up the processing of that word in processing tasks such as lexical decision tasks. In such tasks subjects have to decide whether a letter sequence shown on a screen is a correct word of the language. The idea behind the frequency effect is that the frequent use of a word heightens its resting activation level (or “lexical strength”), and thus the word is recognized faster. A frequency effect is only possible if the relevant words or word forms are stored, and hence can be subject to frequency effects. Thus, we can conclude that regular word forms may be stored.

These findings can be modeled in a dual route model with competition. When the meaning of a complex word has to be understood, there are two routes available: the complex word is either retrieved directly from lexical memory, or first decomposed into its morphological constituents, on the basis of which the meaning is then computed. Since both routes are available, they will compete. If a complex word is an established one, with a high frequency, and thus with a high resting activation level, the direct route will win. If the word to be understood is a completely new one that is not stored, or has a low frequency of use, the decompositional route will be the fastest (Baayen et al. 1997 ).

At a more fundamental level, the issue is whether we are justified to make a distinction between symbolic rules or schemas on the one hand, and representations on the other. The distinction between rule and representation is denied in connectionist approaches to language structure. These issues are too complex to be discussed in this chapter; however, see Bybee and McClelland ( 2005 ) for a recent general discussion of the issues involved.

Other important results of psycholinguistic research are its findings concerning the structure of the lexicon. It is clear that the lexicon is not a list but rather a network of relationships between words, relations along different dimensions such as phonology, semantics, and morphological structure. The lexicon is a web of words. This means that the paradigmatic relationships between words (either simplex or complex) are essential for understanding how morphology works.

An example of the role of paradigmatic structure is the family size effect (Baayen and Schreuder 2003 ): a simplex word is more easily processed the larger the number of words derived from it (its morphological family) is. This effect presupposes that a word is linked to its derivatives in the lexicon. Another paradigmatic effect is that the choice of a linking element in Dutch compounds can be very well predicted on the basis of the constituent family of the left and the right constituent. For instance, subjects tend to choose the linking element - en for a new compound that begins with the constituent rat “rat” since - en is the preferred linking element in established compounds that begin with rat .

The processing of complex words can also be investigated through naturalistic data such as slips of the tongue, which give a clue as to how complex words may be represented in the mental lexicon. When a complex word is stored, it might be stored including its internal morphological structure. In the following slips of the tongue, two morphemes have been exchanged, which suggests that the internal structure of such words is indeed available (Cohen 1987 ):

Thus, speech errors can provide linguistic evidence for the way in which complex words are stored in lexical memory.

20.10 Morphological Productivity

A much discussed notion in morphological research is the notion of productivity. Morphological processes differ in the extent to which they are used for coining new words or word forms. The classical example from the domain of inflection is the difference between the regular formation of past tense forms of English, which is productive and applies to newly coined verbs, and the class of irregular verbs, which form their past tense by means of vowel change and occasionally consonantal changes as well, a case of internal modification ( sing-sang, bring-brought , etc.). In the domain of word formation, one may observe that new deadjectival nouns ending in - th are hardly ever formed by speakers of English, whereas new deadjectival nouns ending in - ness can be made readily: coolness is more readily coined than coolth .

Quantitative measures of productivity make use of the notion “type frequency”. A productive process will result in a large number of different types. For instance, in English the number of types of past tense forms of regular verbs is much higher than the number of types of irregular past tense forms, and the number of types of nouns in - ness is much higher than that in - th . Baayen makes use of the notion “hapax” in measuring quantitative productivity: the number of types of a particular type of complex word that occur only once in a given corpus (that is, the number of hapaxes) is a good measure of the productivity of the morphological process involved (Baayen 1992 ).

One approach to this phenomenon of differences in productivity is to consider it as a property of the language system: some morphological processes are unproductive (hence, the relevant set of words cannot be expanded), whereas other processes are productive, and may lead to new words or word forms. The actual, quantitative productivity of a productive process is then determined by two types of factors: the number of potential bases to which the process can apply (system-internal factors), and pragmatic, system-external factors such as the need for a particular word. This is the position taken in Bauer ( 2001 ). The number of potential bases depends on the number of linguistic constraints on the morphological process involved: the more constraints there are, the fewer chances that the process can apply and create new forms.

However, Baayen ( 1992 , 2008 a ) and Bybee ( 1995 ) have argued that productivity is inherently a gradual notion. Even in the case of processes with a very low productivity, the relevant class of words can occasionally be extended. For instance, one may come across the word coolth in language corpora.

As to the non-systemic factors, the productivity of word formation processes may depend on factors such as written vs. spoken language, specific registers, and speech communities. Certain types of word formation are used productively in written language only. The suffix - ity is typically used productively in scientific and technical discourse (Baayen 2008 a ).

Processing factors also play a role in productivity. The output of a word formation process is morphologically more transparent and will be readily decomposed in processing if the frequency of the derived word is lower than that of the base word. Decomposition of complex words will strengthen the accessibility of the corresponding morphological schema, and thus increase productivity (Hay and Baayen, 2002 ).

20.11 Tools for Morphological Research

A primary source of information about morphology is formed by the descriptive grammars of individual languages which usually give a description of inflection and word formation. The availability of such grammars is essential for typological research. An excellent manual for morphological description is Payne ( 1997 ).

Typological databases are mainly based on such descriptive grammars. Among others, the following databases on morphological typology can be found on the internet:

Surrey Morphology Group: http://www/surrey.ac.uk/LIS/SMG

Universals Archive of the University of Konstanz: http://typo.uni-konstanz.de/archive/intro

The Morbo database on compounding, University of Bologna: http://morbo.lingue.unibo.it .

It is important that, in morphological analysis, linguists use the same conventions, and the same glossing rules. The Leipzig glossing rules are used as a standard these days. They can be found on http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php. Tools for language description are available on www.eva.mpg.de/lingua . Other tools including the Ethnologue survey of languages can be found on www.sil.org .

Sources for the outputs of word formation are the dictionaries of individual languages. Searching for morphological information has been made much easier thanks to electronic dictionaries, many of them online. However, the role of dictionaries in morphological research is now strongly being reduced in favor of corpora of language use. Corpora do not suffer from the restrictions of dictionaries that the data are filtered by the lexicographer, and are always lagging behind as to what happens in actual language use. In fact, present-day good dictionaries are based on corpora as well. Moreover, corpora provide the possibility to investigate how the productive use of morphological processes correlates with factors of language use and properties of language users. Therefore, corpus-based linguistic research has become indispensable for adequate morphological research (Baayen 2008 a ).

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Article contents

Blending in morphology.

• Natalia Beliaeva Natalia Beliaeva School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.511
• Published online: 23 May 2019

Blending is a type of word formation in which two or more words are merged into one so that the blended constituents are either clipped, or partially overlap. An example of a typical blend is brunch , in which the beginning of the word breakfast is joined with the ending of the word lunch . In many cases such as m ot el ( m ot or + h ot el ) or bl izza ster ( bl izza rd + d isa ster ) the constituents of a blend overlap at segments that are phonologically or graphically identical. In some blends, both constituents retain their form as a result of overlap, for example, st op tion ( st op + op tion ). These examples illustrate only a handful of the variety of forms blends may take; more exotic examples include formations like Thankshallowistmas ( Thanksgiving + Halloween + Christmas ). The visual and audial amalgamation in blends is reflected on the semantic level. It is common to form blends meaning a combination or a product of two objects or phenomena, such as an animal breed (e.g., zorse , a breed of zebra and horse ), an interlanguage variety (e.g., franglais , which is a French blend of français and anglais meaning a mixture of French and English languages), or other type of mix (e.g., a shress is a type of clothes having features of both a shirt and a dress ).

Blending as a word formation process can be regarded as a subtype of compounding because, like compounds, blends are formed of two (or sometimes more) content words and semantically either are hyponyms of one of their constituents, or exhibit some kind of paradigmatic relationships between the constituents. In contrast to compounds, however, the formation of blends is restricted by a number of phonological constraints given that the resulting formation is a single word. In particular, blends tend to be of the same length as the longest of their constituent words, and to preserve the main stress of one of their constituents. Certain regularities are also observed in terms of ordering of the words in a blend (e.g., shorter first, more frequent first), and in the position of the switch point, that is, where one blended word is cut off and switched to another (typically at the syllable boundary or at the onset/rime boundary). The regularities of blend formation can be related to the recognizability of the blended words.

• portmanteau words
• word formation
• prosodic structure
• recognizability

1. Blends in Word Formation: An Overview

Brexit ( Britain + exit ), Trustafarians ( trust fund + rastafarians ), affluenza ( affluent + influenza ), and other blends were listed among top words of the first fifteen years of the 21st century , according to the Global Language Monitor ( 2015 ). These and other numerous blends in advertisements, headlines, blogs, and various other media, illustrate that blend words occupy an important niche in contemporary vocabulary. This is not to say that blending is a new phenomenon in word formation. Examples of early attested blends are rebuse ( rebuke + abuse ) from Early Modern English (Pound, 1914 , p. 6), écornifler ‘to nose about and steal’ ( écorner ‘to cut off’ + nifler ‘to sniff’) from Middle French, and pstrokaty ‘motley’ ( pstry ‘multicoloured’ + srokaty ‘piebald’) from Middle Polish (Renner, Maniez, & Arnaud, 2012 , p. 1).

Blends underwent a boost in popularity in the late 19th century . The novel Through the Looking Glass ( 1871 ) by Lewis Carroll, containing the now classical blends like mimsy ( miserable + flimsy ) and galumph ( gallop + triumph ), catalyzed the use of blends, particularly in English. Carroll’s work also gave rise to the term ‘portmanteau word’, which is used in morphological studies either as a synonym of ‘blend’, for example, in Pound ( 1914 ) and Thurner ( 1993 ), or as its hyponym, denoting a certain type of blend, for example, in Algeo ( 1977 ), Piñeros ( 2004 ), or Tomaszewicz ( 2012 ) (see section 2.2 for details).

It is worth noting that the academic works of the late 19th century utilized the term ‘blend’ mainly for speech errors. For example, in Meringer and Mayer ( 1895 ) the term ‘blend’ labels slips of the tongue such as evoid , a blend of phonologically and semantically similar words avoid and evade . However, in early- 20th-century literature the term ‘blend’ acquired the meaning it has in contemporary morphology, that is, to name a new word formed by fusing two known words into one. Blends listed in Wood ( 1911 ), such as brunch ( breakfast + lunch ) and canoodle ( canoe + paddle ), suggest intentional formation of blends to convey a specific meaning (e.g., a meal that includes both breakfast and lunch), or to use one word for a complex action (paddle a canoe). The distinction between speech errors and intentional blends is discussed in Kelly ( 1998 ), and a comprehensive summary of phonological and semantic differences between speech errors and intentional blends is provided in Gries ( 2004b , 2012 ). Henceforth, the distinction between error blends and intentional formations will not be pursued here, the main focus of this article being on blending as a morphological phenomenon.

Blending as a type of word formation is fascinating because blends are incredibly diverse (as emphasized in Dressler, 2000 ; López Rúa, 2004 ; Mattiello, 2013 ; and other studies), and at the same time surprisingly predictable (as argued by Bat-El, 1996 ; Plag, 2003 ; Gries, 2012 ; and other scholars). Particular patterns have been observed in terms of the selection of the words that are blended and the formal structure and the semantics of blends. The formal and semantic properties of the words that become blend constituents are considered in detail in section 2 . The process of blending and the structure of blends are elaborated on in section 3 . The domains of use are outlined in section 4 , and section 5 provides an overview of blending across different languages. Section 6 characterises blends as a morphological phenomenon.

2. What Can Be Blended?

2.1 formal properties.

Blends are formed by fusing two (or sometimes more) words together, so that part of the material of these words is lost. This distinguishes blends from other types of word formation, although using just this definitional feature may not be enough to discriminate between blends and, for example, initialisms. The boundaries of the category are, therefore, fuzzy, and determining whether a given formation is a blend requires considering multiple factors, which are discussed in section 3 . The words that are blended will henceforth be referred to as source words , as it is the most widely accepted term in the relevant literature (Cannon, 1986 ; Kubozono, 1990 ; Lehrer, 1998 ; Kemmer, 2003 ; Gries, 2004b ), some of the alternatives being component words (Kelly, 1998 ), input words (Brdar-Szabó & Brdar, 2008 ), formatives (Fradin, 2000 ), or source forms (López Rúa, 2004 ). The latter term is justified to use when a blend is formed using units larger (see 1c–d) or smaller (1f) than words.

As exemplified in 1, various language units may participate in blending: abbreviations (1a–b), phrases (1c), complex names (1d–e), and neoclassical combining forms (1f). These cases are marginal in the sense that their constituents deviate from the majority of attested blends (note that 1d–f, presumably creative coinages, could have been formed to stand out in order to attract more attention).

The words to be blended are not selected at random. As have been shown in Kubozono ( 1990 ), Kelly ( 1998 ), Gries ( 2004a ), and other studies, the source words of many blends display a certain degree of phonological or graphical similarity. In most cases, the locus of similarity is where the switch point occurs, that is, where the switch from one source word to the other takes place. The source words of blends like m ot el ( m ot or + h ot el ), m ock buster ( m ock + bl ock buster ) and j umb rella ( j umb o + umb rella ) contain identical segments (indicated henceforth by bold type), and this is where the two splinters overlap in the resulting blends. In some blends, the overlap is purely phonological, as in bur q ini ( bur q a + bi k ini ), or in faux bia ( faux + pho bia ), which, in fact, can be recognized as a blend only in written form because, phonologically, it fully coincides with its second source word. On the other hand, graphical overlap may not be entirely reflected in pronunciation, as in ma scar y ( ma scar a + scar y ), where the second vowel is pronounced as in scary / ˈskeə.ri/, and not as in mascara /mæsˈkɑː.rə/. The similarity between the source words may not necessarily be limited to the switch point. In fact, there are many blends where similar phoneme / letter strings, are located elsewhere, as shown in ( 2 ).

Blends in 2a–c and 2e are formed from words with similar initial segments. The source words of blends in 2a–b have more than one initial letter and phoneme in common, and the source words in 2c and 2e share the same first letter plus the stressed vowel. In 2c, more similarity is observed on the graphical level because the initial phonemes of song and shoplifting are different. The contrast between phonological and graphical similarity is even more obvious in 2d, where the first source form is the abbreviation of ‘World Wide Web’ that is used in web addresses and is often pronounced as /ˌdʌb.dʌbˈdʌb/, a shorter variant of /ˈdʌb.l ̩.juːˌdʌb.l ̩.juːˈdʌb.l ̩.juː/. Thus, the source forms in 2d share the first phoneme, although no graphical similarity is observed. Different locus of similarity is exemplified in 2f–h: the source words of these blends share the final phoneme / letter strings. The locus of similarity in blends can therefore be different, although the analysis in Gries ( 2012 ) demonstrates that in most blends the similarity tends to be concentrated around the switch point.

Importantly, in 2g–h the similarity is due to the fact that the source words belong to the same syntactic category and therefore contain the same suffixes (the present participle suffix - ing in 2g, and the adverbial suffix ‑ nie added to loan base ending in ‑ jal in both source words in 2h). As pointed out, for example, in Kubozono ( 1990 ), Kelly ( 1998 ), and Renner ( 2006 ), most blends are formed from the words of the same part of speech, though other types of grammatical structure are also popular, for example, adjective + noun. In English, noun is the most frequent category of blends, followed by adjective and verb (Bauer, Lieber, & Plag, 2013 , pp. 459–460). Noun dominance is also observed in other languages such as Hebrew (Bat-El, 1996 ), Greek (Ralli & Xydopoulos, 2012 ), and Russian (Hrushcheva, 2011 ). Most frequent combinations of source words according to their grammatical category are exemplified in ( 3 ), based on the classification in Bauer et al. ( 2013 , p. 459):

Among other syntactic structures that are attested are, for example, adverb + adverb in 2h, or adverb + verb in the Greek blend ipulegízo ‘approach in an insidious manner’ ( ípula ‘insidiously’ + prosegízo ‘approach’) (Ralli & Xydopoulos, 2012 , p. 39). As noted in Renner ( 2015a , p. 126), sometimes blends allow grammatical structures that are otherwise illicit in the relevant language, for example, noun object preceding the verb in the French blend cadonner ‘give as a present’ ( cadeau ‘present’ + donner ‘give’). Such cases, however, are marginal, and the order of the blend constituents may then be determined by factors other than syntactic, such as the locus of similarity or phonotactics (see section 3.1 for discussion).

2.2 Semantic Properties

The selection of the source words of blends is also subject to restrictions on the semantic relationship between them. In Algeo ( 1977 ), blends are classified into two main categories: syntagmatic and associative (see Figure 1 ). According to Algeo, syntagmatic or telescope blends result from “a combination of two forms that occur sequentially in the speech chain” ( 1977 , p. 56), while the source words of associative or portmanteau blends are “linked in the word-maker’s mind and thence in his language” ( 1977 , p. 57). The latter category is further subdivided into: ( 1 ) synonymic blends, ( 2 ) blends that combine words from the same paradigmatic class— paradigmatic or dvandva blends, and ( 3 ) jumble blends, the source words of which “are associated with one another, but not by paradigmatic equivalence” ( 1977 , p. 58). An example of an alternative, but largely compatible, classification scheme is Renner ( 2006 ), where the category of tautologous blends denotes synonymic relations between the source words. Renner’s taxonomy also includes different kinds of semantic relations of words belonging to the same paradigm, in particular, additional relations, as in smog (both smoke and fog), and hybrid relations, as in zorse (a hybrid between zebra and horse).

Figure 1. Semantic relations realised in blends, based on the classification in Algeo ( 1977 ) and Renner ( 2006 ).

The problem with the semantic taxonomy is that in some cases it may be unclear whether the blend is a telescope or a portmanteau, and also that several semantic relations may be realized in one blend, as shown in ( 4 ). The blends in 4a–b originate from phrases and therefore can be classified as telescope blends. On the other hand, 4c–e are portmanteau blends realizing different kinds of paradigmatic relations. However, it is likely that 4c originates from the phrase meat and potatoes , that is, has syntagmatic origin in addition to realizing additive relations. This may also be the case with 4e. An example of a blend with an unclear categorical status is 4f, which can be analyzed as either a telescope of sham amateur meaning ‘one who pretends to be an amateur but is really a professional’, or as a portmanteau of sham and amateur meaning ‘one who tries to deceive but is amateurish’. Finally, 4g has a metaphorical, rather than purely syntagmatic, origin, although its source words are in determinative relations, rather than paradigmatic.

The distinction between telescope and portmanteau blends has been reconsidered by many linguists. Some, among them Bauer ( 1983 ), Devereux ( 1984 ), and Cannon ( 1986 ), include both portmanteau and telescope words in the category of blends. Other researchers, such as Kubozono ( 1990 ) and Berg ( 1998 ), restrict the category to portmanteaus only. Such categorical restriction is problematic because the semantic type of a given blend may be ambiguous. The quantitative analysis in Gries ( 2012 ) shows that the source words of most blends have paradigmatic relations, for example, are synonyms, co-hyponyms, or belong to the same semantic frame. Moreover, the analysis of frequencies of source word combinations in Beliaeva ( 2014 ) demonstrates that blends are less likely to be formed as contractions of existing combinations of their source words than clipping compounds such as digicam (which is a clipping of digital camera— see also section 3.2 on the distinction between blends and clipping compounds). As noted in Bauer ( 2012 , p. 18), the problem of interpreting blends as either having a semantic head (i.e., telescope) or coordinative (portmanteau) is of the same nature as the problem of interpreting compounds like fighter-bomber as either headed or coordinative (see also Bauer & Tarasova, 2013 for a discussion of the semantic relationships between the elements in a compound). Nevertheless, it is justified to distinguish between the syntagmatic origin and paradigmatic origin blends, as suggested in Bauer ( 2012 ), because such semantic analysis provides insights into the onomasiological nature of blends and can be related to the purposes and contexts of their use.

3. How Are the Source Words Blended?

3.1 ordering of the source words.

The order in which the source words are arranged in a blend is conditioned by the semantic properties of the blend (as defined in section 2.2 ) and the properties of the source words themselves. In syntagmatic blends, the order of the source words is likely to be determined by the position of the semantic head, as in floordrobe ( floor + wardrobe ), which is a form of storage for clothing (Urban Dictionary, n.d. , ‘Floordrobe’, n.p.) rather than a type of floor. The position of the head, in its turn, varies across languages, for example, English, Serbian, and Korean blends are predominantly right-headed, while in French and Modern Hebrew left-headed blends are as common as right-headed ones (Renner, 2015b , p. 106). In the absence of predetermined order, as is the case with paradigmatic blends, other factors may determine the order of the constituents. As discussed in Kelly ( 1998 ) and recapitulated in Bauer ( 2012 ), these properties of the source words are relevant (examples from Bauer, 2012 , p. 12):

Length: shorter first, e.g., donkephant ( donkey + elephant );

Frequency: more frequent first, e.g., smog ( smoke + fog );

Prototypicality: more prototypical first, e.g., spork ( spoon + fork );

Pragmatics: e.g., in brunch , the order of constituents corresponds to temporal order of breakfast and lunch.

Another factor that influences the ordering of the source words is the tendency to maximize similarity between the blend and each of its source words. That is, if the source words have identical segments they tend to be blended in such a way that those segments are retained in the blend. In some cases, the considerations of maximal similarity overrun the influence of other factors (e.g., syntagmatic order or source word length). For example, in the English blend epipha n ot ‘not an epiphany’ and in the Polish blend refor ma toł ‘stupid reformer’ ( refor ma ‘reform’ + ma toł ‘moron’) the order of the elements does not correspond to the syntagmatic order. Instead, in both blends the source words are arranged in such a way that identical segments overlap (henceforth, overlapping segments in the examples are in bold type) Similarity is not limited to the phonemic level but also encompasses the prosodic level (Piñeros, 2004 ). For example, in a Spanish blend crucid rama ‘a serious mess’ ( crucig rama ‘crossword’ + d rama ‘drama’) the shorter source word is integrated into the prosodic structure of the longer word such that the similarity between the blend and its source words is maximal. Thus, more than one relevant factor is at play in determining the ordering in each particular case (see, e.g., Piñeros, 2004 for an optimality theory [OT] analysis of the ordering of constituents in Spanish blends, and Tomaszewicz, 2012 for a similar analysis of English blends).

3.2 Structural Classification

In a typical blend, the beginning of the first source word is merged with the ending of the second one, as expressed as a formula in Plag ( 2003 , p. 123): AB + CD = AD. However, this mechanism can be realized in a plethora of ways. First of all, a source word can either be fully retained in the blend, or be curtailed into a splinter (the term commonly used in literature, e.g., in Adams, 1973 ; Cannon, 1986 ; López Rúa, 2004 ; to name word parts that become blend constituents). For example, the blend chairdrobe contains its first source word chair in full, and the splinter ‑( r ) drobe from the second source word wardrobe . The splinters do not coincide with existing morphs (cf. the suffix ‐‑ ic in alcoholic and the splinter ‑( a ) holic in the blend workaholic ). A splinter, however, can be used in several blends (e.g., floordrobe ) and eventually may acquire the status of a morph. Thus, a splinter, ‑( a ) holic ( shopaholic, chocoholic ) was listed as a suffix in dictionaries in the early 21st century ( Cambridge English Dictionary Online , n.d.; OED Online , n.d.). If a splinter thus becomes a productive affix, new words that it forms are affixations rather than blends.

With regard to the ways a word AB can be merged with a word CD to make a blend AD, a variety of outcomes is possible depending on: (a) whether or not there is overlap, and (b) whether or not the source words are preserved in their entirety in the blend. The classification in ( 5 ) lists the attested structural types of blends, based on Gries ( 2004a , p. 415), which is compatible with earlier classifications in Algeo ( 1977 ), Cannon ( 1986 ), and other studies (overlapping segments are in bold type):

Although such classification accounts for most blends, it does not exhaust the possible ways a word AB can be blended with a word CD. An example of a different (although rarely attested) structure is the blend fr o (hawk) < (a)fr o + (m) o hawk which contains two final splinters.

The blends in ( 6 ) are structurally similar to the examples in 5d, but in each case the first splinter retains no other phonological and graphical material than the segment overlapping with the second source word. This may complicate the processing of the blend, which is why such formations are classified as cryptoblends in Renner ( 2015a , p. 125).

In other attested formations, a fragment from the middle of one source word is replaced by the other source word or its part ( 7 ). Blends of this kind are referred to as infixed blends in Bauer ( 2012 ) or intercalative blends, for example, in Kemmer ( 2003 ) and Gries ( 2004b ). This may not include any phonological or graphical overlap, as in 7a, but in a number of cases one word replaces a phonologically or graphically similar segment of another, as in 7b–h. Occasionally, only a fragment of one source word is intercalated into the other, as in 7f–g. In 7h, the fragments of an abbreviation are intercalated into the other source word, which has two similar graphemes. The examples in 7g–h illustrate the fact that blends tend to maximally preserve identical segments of their source words even if the similarity is not concentrated in one segment.

The presence of the abbreviation KPN in the blend KoPuNa is more evident in written form (capitalization is retained in the blend, which enhances recognizability). In some blends, one of the source words can be recognized only in graphic form, which is the reason why they are called graphic blends (Konieczna, 2012 ). Each of the blends in ( 8 ) is pronounced as one of its source words, and the presence of the other becomes noticeable due to spelling conventions (8a), or has to be made noticeable by graphical means such as parentheses in 8b or capital letters in 8c–d.

In addition, blends can be formed of more than two source forms. For example, 9a–b are three-splinter blends, and occasionally blends containing more than three splinters are attested. An example of a six-splinter blend is 9c, an inclusive term referring to the December holidays (Renner, 2015a , p. 126).

Finally, in some studies the category of blends includes items formed by concatenation of initial segments of the source words (e.g., López Rúa, 2004 and Mattiello, 2013 for English, Konieczna, 2012 for Polish), exemplified in ( 10 ). Such items may contain splinters from two (10a–c) or more (10d–e) source words. Formations retaining only one or two initial letters of each source word (10b, d–e) are very similar to acronyms, and can be classified as borderline cases between blends and acronyms (López Rúa, 2004 ).

In regard to the examples in ( 10 ), also classified as ‘clipping compounds’ or ‘complex clippings’, there is evidence in literature that they differ from most blends in terms of their origin (Beliaeva, 2014 ), structural characteristics that are related to the recognizability of the source words (Gries, 2006 , 2012 ; Beliaeva, 2014 ) and processing (Beliaeva, 2016 ). Nevertheless, even not taking clipping compounds into consideration, blends are variable enough to conclude that the category is fuzzy. The existence of such examples as the ones in 6–9 is pointed out in some studies to support the claim that blends are “minimally predictable” (Mattiello, 2013 , p. 96) and therefore must be analyzed as an extragrammatical phenomenon (Dressler, 2000 ; Mattiello, 2013 ). However, despite the observed formal diversity, blending involves a considerable degree of regularity, as will be discussed in section 3.3 .

3.3 Formal Regularity

One obvious regularity that is postulated in the literature as a defining feature of blends is that most blends combine the initial part of one word with the final part of another. Other structures discussed in section 3.2 are much less frequent by comparison, as demonstrated in several empirical studies such as Kubozono ( 1990 ) and Gries ( 2006 , 2012 ) for English blends, and Ronneberger-Sibold ( 2012 ) for German, Farsi, and Chinese blends. In addition, the structure of blends is “constrained by semantic, syntactic and prosodic restrictions”, as summarized in Plag ( 2003 , p. 125). Semantic properties of blends and the most frequently attested grammatical structures were discussed in section 2.1 . In terms of the prosodic structure, blends tend to conform to the phonotactic requirements of the particular language, as has been observed in studies on typologically different languages, for example, in Cannon ( 1986 ), Kubozono ( 1990 ), and Plag ( 2003 ) for English, in Bat-El ( 1996 ) for Hebrew, in Piñeros ( 2004 ) for Spanish. The phonotactic constraints on blend formation concern ( 1 ) the syllabic length of the blend in relation to the length of its source words, ( 2 ) the stress pattern, and ( 3 ) the placement of the switch point in relation to syllable constituents.

3.3.1 Length

The number of syllables in the blend doesn’t deviate much from the length of the longest of its source words. That is, if both source words have an equal number of syllables, the tendency is for the blend to have the same number of syllables, as in 11a–c, or one syllable more, as in 11d–g.

If the source words are not of the same length, the longest of them determines the blend length (that is, the first source word in 12a–b, and the second source word in 12c–d). Longer blends are also attested, although, as explained in section 2 , such cases are rare. For example, the blends in 12e–f are one syllable longer than the longest of their source word, which in both cases is due to the preservation of the overlapping segments.

Importantly, the correspondence between the number of syllables in the blend and in the longer source word is also relevant for structurally less typical blends such as cryptoblends in ( 6 ), intercalative blends in 7a–c, 7e–f, 7g, and graphic blends in ( 8 ) (but not clipping compounds in ( 10 )).

3.3.2 Stress

The position of the stress in the blend typically corresponds to that in at least one of the source words (in languages with flexible stress: see Bat-El & Cohen, 2012 and Gries, 2004a for English; Piñeros, 2004 for Spanish; Tomaszewicz, 2012 for English and Polish). Blends tend to retain the prosodic contour (that is, the overall number of syllables and the main stress position) of the longer source word (Cannon, 1986 ), or the second source word (Bat-El, 1996 ; Gries, 2004a ; Bauer, 2012 ). Given the considerations in section 3.1 , the two cases often coincide. For example, in 13a the stressed syllables from both source words are retained in the blend, but the prosodic contour corresponds only to that of the second word. The stress pattern of the blend can repeat that of the second source word if it has more syllables than the first one (13a–c), or the same number of syllables (13d). However, in 13e the first source word is longer, and therefore it provides the stress pattern for the blend. Intercalative blends like 13f (see also 7a–c, 7e) preserve the prosodic contour of the longer source word. In blends that are longer than each of their source words, the stressed syllable of at least one of the source words remains stressed in the blend; for example, the second source word provides the stress in 13g.

As shown in ( 13 ), the stress in blends is subject to different factors such as the length of the source words, their stress, and the way they are blended. The interplay of those factors is analyzed, for example, in Bat-El and Cohen ( 2012 ) and Tomaszewicz ( 2012 ). These and other authors acknowledge that the prosodic contour of the second source word tends to be preserved more often. The blends that retain the prosodic contour of one (usually the second) of their source words are classified in Ronneberger-Sibold ( 2012 ) as contour blends , and the corpus analysis therein shows that contour blends prevail in German, Farsi, and Chinese. This is compatible with the analysis of Spanish blends in Piñeros ( 2004 ), and with the properties of experimentally induced blends (see, e.g., Arndt-Lappe & Plag, 2013 on English and Borgwaldt, Kulish, & Bose, 2012 on Ukrainian). The position of the main stress is also related to headedness. That is, the source word that provides the stress pattern of the blend tends to be interpreted as its morphological and semantic head, as demonstrated in Shaw, White, Moreton, and Monrose ( 2014 ) and Moreton, Smith, Pertsova, Broad, and Prickett ( 2017 ) for experimentally induced blends. The effect of headedness is, however, closely intertwined with that of ordering (e.g., the second source word is usually the head word in languages like English). The preservation of the prosodic contour is featured in Piñeros ( 2004 ), Gries ( 2012 ), and other studies as an important factor contributing to recognition of the source words in the blend. Thus, preserving the stress pattern compensates for the loss of the word beginning by the second source word (see, e.g., Whitney, 2001 and White, Johnson, Liversedge, & Rayner, 2008 for experimental findings demonstrating the importance of word beginning for recognition).

3.3.3 Switch Point Placement and Prosodic Structure

Switch points in blends are placed at “major phonological joints” (Kelly, 1998 , p. 585). That is, they tend to fall on syllable boundaries or, failing to do that, at the boundaries of sub-syllable elements, most often between onset and rime (Kubozono, 1990 ; Kelly, 1998 ; Plag, 2003 ; Bauer, 2012 ).

If there is a phonological or graphical overlap between the source words, it is likely to define the switch point (Cannon, 1986 ; Bauer, 2012 ; Gries, 2012 ). As exemplified in ( 14 ), the switch point is realized as an overlapping syllable (14a–b) or a sub-syllable element (nucleus in 14c and coda in 14d; overlapping segments are in bold type). In each case, the syllables that contain similar elements are merged into one syllable in the blend.

Correspondingly, the switch point tends to fall on the syllable boundary if there is no overlap between the polysyllabic source words (15a–b). Otherwise, if the switch point falls within a syllable, the first source word provides the onset, and the second source word provides the rime. This concerns both polysyllabic (15c) and monosyllabic (15 d–e) blends. The switch point placement within the onset is also attested, for example, in 15f.

In addition to phonotactic constraints, the position of the switch point is related to the prosodic structure of the blend. In polysyllabic blends, the switch point tends to be placed within the stressed syllable of the second source word (14c, 15c), or at its left boundary (15a–b), so that the stressed vowel of the second source word is retained in the blend (see also Arndt-Lappe & Plag, 2013 ; Shaw et al., 2014 for more detailed discussion and experimental evidence). In the rare cases when the switch point falls within the syllable onset, blends may also violate phonotactic constraints. Thus, in 16a the complex onset contains an affricate, which is contrary to English phonotactics (Harley, 2001 ), and in 16b the blend starts with a consonant cluster, which is illicit word-initially in Modern Greek (Ralli & Xydopoulos, 2012 , p. 43).

The fact that one can find counterexamples violating constraints is in itself in accordance with the reality of any living language. In addition, the possibility of structural and phonological transgression in blends is pointed out in Renner ( 2015a ) as a factor that enhances the blends’ playfulness. The violation of constraints attracts attention, which is important in many contexts where blends are used (see section 4 ).

3.4 Recognizability

The regularities of blend formation discussed in section 3.3 are related to the recognizability of the source words. On the one hand, the source words are blended “so as to maximize overlap in the middle of the fusion section and maximize phonemic / graphemic similarity elsewhere as much as is still possible” (Gries, 2012 , p. 164). On the other hand, the similarity should not go beyond certain limits, that is, both words have to remain recognizable. As a result, most blends are formed in such a way that one source word retains its beginning, and the other its ending and the prosodic contour, which are essential for recognizability (cf. Arndt-Lappe & Plag, 2013 ; Shaw et al., 2014 ).

The constraints concerning the number of syllables, the main stress, and the switch point placement can be extrapolated to blends of seemingly exotic types. Thus, in most infixed blends such as the ones in ( 7 ), the source words are merged where they are maximally similar to each other. In the absence of overlapping segments, the shorter source word replaces a segment of the longer source word in such a way that the blend inherits the prosodic contour of the latter. As a result, one source word retains its beginning, ending, and prosodic contour, which are crucial for recognizability, and the other is preserved in full. In the few cases when the word that is inserted is not fully preserved (e.g., 7f–g), its prosodic contour is retained.

Likewise, the structure of cryptoblends in ( 6 ) favours not only the preservation of the second source word, but also the recognizability of the first source word. In particular, the second source word in each case is clipped in such a way that the beginning of the blend coincides with the beginning of the first source word.

It is worth noting that in OT analyses of the constraints determining the structure of the blends, for example, in Piñeros ( 2004 ) and Tomaszewicz ( 2012 ), the recoverability of the source words is a key factor of the well-formedness of a blend. The results of the corpus analysis in Gries ( 2006 , 2012 ) show that the switch point in blends is related to the cognitively relevant ‘uniqueness point’ marking the amount of phonological / graphical material needed to uniquely identify the word. This is compatible with the results of experimental studies in Beliaeva ( 2015 , 2016 ), which demonstrate that the cognitive processing of blends involves the activation of their source words in the readers’ lexicon.

4. The Use of Blends

It has been often pointed out (Dressler, 2000 ; López Rúa, 2004 ; Renner, 2015a ) that blending implies wordplay. Renner ( 2015a ) reiterates that coining a blend is an act of wordplay in the sense that it involves “an intentional and formally ingenious way of associating the semantics of two or more words in a new morphological object” (Renner, 2015a , p. 119). It is not surprising, therefore, that blends are often used as expressive means in various domains including slang (17a), popular media (17b), political terms (17c), professional vernacular (17e–f), company names (17g), names of musical bands (17h), and other cultural groups (17j). In media contexts, blends can be accompanied by visual amalgamations illustrating their meaning.

Wordplay is not the only driving force of blend formation. Coining a blend to name an object or fact of reality can also be motivated by the nature of the object. For example, blends are often coined to name real objects or phenomena composed of two or more components, for example, animal hybrids (18a), language varieties (18b), geographical regions (18c), food or drink mixtures (18d), clothing items (18e), and the like.

Figure 2. Images associated with lexical blends.

More than two splinters in hybrid names like the ones in ( 18 ) reflect the nature of the hybrids. For example, 18c refers to the merged holiday including Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas (Urban Dictionary, n.d. ). Moreover, the structure of the blend can reflect the actual relationships between the denotata. For example, the proportions of the source words retained in the names of apricot-plum hybrids reflect the genetic profile of the hybrids: plumcot denotes a hybrid of half apricot and half plum, aprium an apricot-rich hybrid and pluot a plum-rich hybrid (Renner, 2015a , p. 124). Similarly, the order of the splinters in an animal hybrid name indicates the breeding type: liger denotes a cross between a male lion and a female tiger, and tigon a cross between a male tiger and a female lion.

5. Blends in Different Languages

As hypothesized in Brdar-Szabó and Brdar ( 2008 ), blends are possible in any language where clipping and compounding is also possible. Although blending “is mainly a feature of Indo-European languages” (Štekauer, Valera, & Kőrtvélyessy, 2012 , p. 132), blends are attested in a variety of languages not limited to those mentioned in this article (see, e.g., Dobrovolsky, 2001 on Malay; Kang, 2013 on Korean; and Lepic, 2016 on American Sign Language). In different languages, the phonotactic restrictions on blending diverge; for example, Chinese blends can combine whole syllable only (Ronneberger-Sibold, 2012 ).

In some languages the morphological model of blending was incremented as a result of language contact. In particular, the influence of English loans is documented in the literature (see, e.g., Konieczna, 2012 on English influence in Slavic languages). Language interference also results in the manifestation of transliterated blends (19a) and cross-linguistic blends (19b–c).

6. Blending and Other Word Formation Processes

Despite the apparent formal diversity of blends, the process of blend formation involves a considerable degree of regularity and predictability, primarily in terms of the choice of the source words, their ordering, and the way they are blended. Merging two (or more) words into a blend demands maximal recognizability of each while at the same time conforming to the phonotactic requirements of a particular language. This concerns even the structurally less common formations such as the examples in 6–9. The recognizability of the source words can be regarded as a feature that defines the stance of blending in relation to other word formation processes. On the one hand, the constituents of blends are markedly more recognizable than the ones in clipping compounds or acronyms (Gries, 2006 ; Beliaeva, 2014 , 2016 ). On the other hand, leaving both the source words intact would result in producing a compound instead of a blend. According to Bauer et al. ( 2013 ), blends are similar to compounds in all aspects but the phonotactic structure (although other important differences, particularly in semantic relations between the source words are pointed out in Renner, 2015b and other studies). The particularities of the structure, however, result in more cognitive effort required to process blends (Beliaeva, 2016 ), which makes them attention-catching, and therefore appropriate to use as expressive means of language (Mattiello, 2013 ; Renner, 2015a ). The playful nature of many blends, in its turn, explains their dissemination in particular contexts of use such as political media and advertisement.

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The Importance of Word Formation Knowledge

This essay example focuses on explaining the importance of word formation processes. You can learn more about different types of word formation and the causes of miscommunication with our word formation essay.

Importance of Word Formation for Supporting Clear Communication

• Causes of Misunderstanding in Communication

Word formation processes and creation of meanings can occur in very many ways so teachers should learn to incorporate these processes to facilitate learning. For instance, language learners normally use compounding as a way of making new meanings from simpler words (free morphemes). For example, waterfall is derived from the free morphemes water and fall. Teachers can therefore contribute towards better and faster second language learning by finding out some of the simpler words that their students know and then teach them how to combine these morphemes to create compounded words (Dixon & Aikhenvald, 65).

The same concept can be applied during the process of derivation (where derivation refers to the addition of prefixes like mis- and pre- and suffixes like -less, -able to words) examples of derivation processes include misrepresent, unprepared, meaningless, reliable from represent, prepare, meaning and rely. Teachers need to start working with the simple words that students know and then teach them about the rules applicable in deriving meaning from them. They need to show the interrelationship between the derived words and the simpler ones. For example misrepresent is the opposite of represent and reliable is an adjective used to describe someone who one can rely on.

In derivation, some language learners may utilize their own creative capabilities in order to create meaning. In other words, they can create words that they had never heard before using this methodology. Teachers need to tap into this tendency by looking for ways in which they can encourage spontaneous word derivation. Native and non native speakers can utilize this potential so it is not restricted to just one group (Vizmuller-Zocco, 45). Creative word formation can be encouraged through other classroom activities that encourage development of this skill such as through the use of games.

Teachers need to know what students think about the activities, tasks and challenges in their classroom. This is because it is essential for students to fully understand what is expected of them in a linguistics class. Teachers can do this by asking them questions directly in class. Alternatively, they may request students to write journals that cause them to reflect upon their learning within the classroom (Tjeerdsma, 78).

Teachers can also create an environment of cooperation in their classroom by being approachable while at the same time being direct. This would ensure that students are clear about the expectations of the class and they will be better able to communicate clearly (Paralink, 5).

Causes of misunderstanding in communication

Communication misunderstandings are often caused by a lack of awareness of the requirements within a class. Some students simply may not know the parameters or standards that will be used to assess them. Therefore, they will take on tasks in the classroom without having a clear cut direction of what is expected of them. This misunderstanding in communication is brought on by the lack of creation of classroom goals (OGrady, 13).

Alternatively, communication misunderstands may be caused by differing expectations of what a class is all about (Bybee, 35). When students have very divergent views of what a class is all about, they may start conferring with one another and this may lead to further confusion amongst them. Since interpretations of a class can be different, it is always best when teachers know about this and then work towards eliminating those discrepancies.

Works Cited

Dixon, R. & Aikhenvald, A. Word: a cross linguistic typology. Cambridge: Cambridge university press, 2007.

Bybee, L. A study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1985.

Vizmuller-Zocco, J. Linguistic creativity and word formation. Italian teachers Journal, 13(1985): 45.

Tjeerdsma, B. Enhancing classroom communication between teachers and students. Physical education, recreation and dance journal, 68 (1997): 78.

Paralink. The importance of clear communication. 2005. Web.

O’ Grady, D. Drilling down to the depths of clear communication. 2010. Web.

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6.6 Creating New Words

Check Yourself

Video script.

Back in Chapter 1 we learned that mental grammar is generative , that is, it allows users to create, or generate, brand new words and sentences that have never been spoken before. And in fact, one of the fastest ways that languages change, and the easiest way to observe, is by new words entering the language.

There are all kinds of different ways that new words can make their way into a language. It’s possible to coin a new word, that is, to create a completely new form that hasn’t existed before. So I made up this form vrang ; I don’t know what it means because I just made it up. But that was pretty hard to do — any new form I tried to make up turned out to have some obscure definition. So brand new coinages are possible, but they don’t actually happen very often.

One way that English gets a lot of new words is by borrowing them from other languages. For example, the Welsh word hiraeth means longing or yearning. It’s become common enough for English-speakers to use this Welsh word that in 2020, the Oxford English Dictionary added it. You can probably think of many other common English words that started out as borrowings from other languages and became deeply embedded in the English lexicon, like anime , from Japanese, limousine from French, and boomerang from Australian Indigenous languages.

Of course, one of the most obvious ways to derive a new words is with an affix. You might recognize the suffix – ology , which usually means “the study of”. So mythology involves studying myths, criminology is the study of criminality, and epidemiology is the study of epidemics. The Oxford English Dictionary recently added garbageology , the study of a society or community by investigating what people consider to be garbage.

In English, affixation is one of the most productive ways to derive new words: No matter what the word is, you can almost always add an affix to derive a new, related word from it. Some other new affixed words that have found their way into the dictionary are enoughness , farmette (a small farm), and unfathom .

Another extremely productive way of deriving new words in English is by compounding , that is, by taking two existing words, both of which are free morphemes, and sticking them together. For example, the year 2020 saw the words plant-based , jerkweed , and delete key added to the dictionary. You can learn more about compounds in Chapter 7.

So we can say that productivity is a property of morphological processes in the grammar of a language. A given process is productive if it’s one that the language uses a lot, and uses to generate new forms. For example, in English the plural morpheme spelled – s is extremely common, and we see it on words like socks , cars , bananas , stars , and thousands of others. In contrast, a plural affix – en is very rare in English: we see it on the plural forms children , oxen , and the very old-fashioned word brethren , but pretty much nowhere else. And if we coin a new word, like vrang , and then decide we have more than one vrang, the plural we use is going to be vrangs , not vrangen .

If you look through the lists of new words that get added to dictionaries each year, you’ll see that besides affixation and compounding, there are other morphological processes that occur in English. Here are some of them.

One thing that English does a lot is take a word from one syntactic category and just move it to another category with a new meaning. For example, the old meaning of ghost is the noun meaning, and then there’s the newer verb meaning, where if you ghost someone you just stop replying to their messages and kind of disappear from their life. Not very nice! Likewise, catfish and sundown have newer, verb meanings that are different from their original compound noun meanings.

Acronyms pretty frequently make their way into English and some of them stick around, especially in typed form online, like a link that’s not-safe-for-work, the classic LOL , and of course, “too long ,didn’t read”.

Clipping happens when we take a long word and just clip part of it off. Usually the meaning doesn’t change, but often the clipped form becomes much more frequent then the long form. Does anyone even know that fax is shortened from facsimile? And certainly no-one talks about electronic mail anymore.

A few years ago clipping had a brief moment in the way some young people talked, so you might have an outfit that’s totes adorbs , or a relaish that’s not serious, just cazh . This trend seems to have lost its popularity, the way language fads often do.

The word-formation process that I’ve left for last is my favourite because I find a lot of them so funny. That’s the blend , or portmanteau , the process whereby two words are kind of jammed together, but not in a compound. Instead some parts of the two words overlap with each other, like when spoon and fork combine to make spork . The best blends, the ones that stick around in the language and become permanent, seem to share a syllable like the second syllable in both hungry and angry , or at least share some segments and the rhythmic pattern, like athleisure . And then there are some that just seem to be trying too hard, peanutritious , Christmasketball , and (shudder) covidpreneur . I’m no prescriptivist, but I hope these words die a quick death.

All these words are examples of the generativity of grammar. Languages are constantly adding new words, using the productive morphological processes that are part of the grammar. Pay attention to the new words you discover as you read and listen, and see if you can figure out how they’re formed.

Essentials of Linguistics Copyright © 2018 by Catherine Anderson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Word Formation Processes | 9 Essential WFP

The ‘Word Formation Process’ is regarded as the branch of Morphology, and it has a significant role in expanding the vocabulary that helps us communicate very smoothly. The main objectives of the word-formation process are to form new words with the same root by deploying different rules or processes.

In other words, we can say that the word-formation process is a process in which new words are formed by modifying the existing terms or completely changing those words.

9 Essential Word Formation Processes

Quick Navigation

Let us see the fundamental word-formation processes in linguistics:

‘Derivation’ is a significant word-formation process that attaches derivation affixes to the main form to create a new word. Affixes (prefixes or suffixes) are regarded as bound morphemes.

A morpheme is the smallest meaningful syntactical or grammar unit of a language that cannot be divided without changing its meaning. In contrast to the free morpheme, a bound morpheme doesn’t have any independent meaning, and it needs the help of a free morpheme to form a new word.

Let us see some examples of derivation in the below table:

Back Formation

‘Back-Formation’ is a word-formation process that eliminates the actual derivational affix from the main form to create a new word. However, Back-Formation is contrary to derivation in terms of forming new words. Let us see some examples of Back-Formation in the below table:

In conversion, a word of one grammatical form converts into another without changing spelling or pronunciation. For example, the term ‘Google’ originated as a noun before the verb .

A few years ago, we only used the term as a noun (search it on Google), but now we say ‘Google it. Let us see some examples of conversion in the below table:

Compounding

‘Compounding’ is a word-formation process that allows words to combine to make a new word. Compounding words can be formed as two words joined with a hyphen. Let us see some examples in the below table:

‘Clipping’ is another essential word-formation process that reduces or shortens a word without changing the exact meaning. In contrast to the back-formation process, it reserves the original meaning.

Clipping is divided into four types. They are:

• Back Clipping
• Fore Clipping
• Middle Clipping
• Complex Clipping

Every Clipping has different roles in words when they are assigned. Back Clipping removes the end part of a word; Fore Clipping removes the beginning part of a word; Middle Clipping reserves the middle position. Finally, Complex Clipping removes multiple pieces from multiple words.

Let us see some examples in the below table:

In the ‘Blending’ word-formation method, the parts of two or more words combine to form a new word. Let us see some examples in the below table:

Abbreviation

‘Abbreviation’ is another famous and widely used word-formation method used to shorten a word or phrase. In the modern era, ‘Abbreviation is becoming more popular. Nowadays, people used to use it everywhere. Let us see some examples in the below table:

An Acronym is a popular word-formation process in which an initialism is pronounced as a word. It forms from the first letter of each word in a phrase, and the newly formed letters create a new word that helps us speedy communication. For example, ‘PIN’ is an initialism for Personal Identification Number used as the word ‘pin.’

However, let us see some other famous examples of acronyms in the below table for a better understanding:

‘Borrowing’ is another word-formation process in which a word from one language is borrowed directly into another language. Let us see some English words which are borrowed from another language:

Now we know that Word-Formation Processes are the methods by which words are formed by deploying different types of rules. We can create new words by following the above word-formation methods.

We need to do one thing: we have to follow the fundamental rules or processes of word formation.

Azizul Hakim is the founder & CEO of englishfinders.com . He is a passionate writer, English instructor, and content creator. He has completed his graduation and post-graduation in English language and literature.

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Word Formation Processes in English: 10 Types with Examples

Luis @ kse academy.

• noviembre 5, 2022

Word formation is a very important aspect of most languages, and English is no exception. The term «word formation» refers to the processes through which new words are created. Given its significance in the English language and in Cambridge English exams, this short article will outline the basic word formation processes. Let’s go!

Compounding

It means creating a word by adding up two or more different words. Compound words have a new meaning, which is obviously related to the meanings of the other words. For example:

• book + case = bookcase
• sign + post = signpost
• watch + man = watchman

Not all compound words are written together. Sometimes they can by hyphenated (con guión) or separate, such as «traffic lights» or «ice-cream». Some, such as «ice-cream» can be written with our without a hyphen.

Derivation: prefixes and suffixes

This process is normally done through suffixation or prefixation, that is to say, adding a  suffix  or a  prefix . For instance:

• urgent  (adjective)  + -cy = urgency  (noun)
• ir- + responsible  (adjective)  +   -y  =  irresponsibly  (adverb)
• national  (adjective)  + -ise = nationalise

Conversion happens when a word changes from one word class to another. For instance, the verb to google is formed from the noun Google ; or the noun read (as in a good read ) is formed from the verb to read . For example:

• I emailed this document to John. ( emailed is a verb formed from the noun email )
• He was bullied at school as a child. ( bullied is a verb formed from the noun bully )

This involves taking a part of two different words to make a new word, like merging two words based on the sounds of these words. This is extremely popular in the English language, and it produces hundreds of new words every year whose meanings is a mixture of the meanings of the original words. In some cases, these are informal, but there are many that have become a natural part of standard English. Let’s see some examples:

• channel + tunnel = chunnel 
• motor + hotel = motel
• work + alcoholic = workaholic

Abbreviation

When we abbreviate a word, we form another word by shortening it or simply by using only part of the word:

• Perambulator –> pram
• Veterinary –> vet

In general, we can talk about two types of abbreviation: clipping and acronyms.

This means literally clipping the word, which means «cutting» the word to make it shorter. This normally makes the word more informal and/or appealing. Some examples are:

• advertisement = ad
• hamburger = burger
• demonstration = demo

Acronyms, which are a form of abbreviation, are words formed by using only the first letter(s) of the words. By creating an acronym, we are reducing the meaning of a whole phrase o sentence to a single word. Let’s see some popular examples:

• laughing out loud = LOL
• United Nations = UN
• radio detection and ranging = radar

Novel creation

This basically means coming up with a completely new word without any of the processes above. These words are typically referred to as «neologisms». Some examples are:

Creative re-spelling

This involves spelling a word differently in order to make it more practical, attractive, or to fulfil some particular aim, usually commercial. For example:

• because –> bcoz
• light –> lite
• forever –> 4eva
• Combat –> Kombat

In linguistics, a loan happens when we take a word directly from a foreign language. Some examples of loan words in English are:

In general, when we loan a word, the spelling doesn’t usually change. However, some other changes may occur, like creating a plural form which doesn’t exist in the original language. As for pronunciation, we usually pronounce them with an «English accent», so it varies slightly from the original pronunciation.

As far as Cambridge English exams go, it’s derivation (prefixes & suffixes) that concerns us most, as it is present in two of the parts of the section of Use of English B2 and Use of English C1 .

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• Word Formation

Word Formation - Learn What It Is, Types and Rules with Examples

How are words formed? Are there any rules by which words are formed? Let’s find out. This article will walk you through what word formation is, the various types of word formation and the rules to be adhered to when forming words. The number of examples given will make your learning process more effective and easier. Check it out.

Table of Contents

What is word formation, types of word formation with examples, rules to be followed when forming words, test your understanding of word formation, frequently asked questions on word formation in english.

The English language is known for its wonderful quality of the way in which words and sentences are formed and used. Formation of new words from an existing root word by adding a syllable or another word is the general process; however, there are multiple ways in which it can be done.

The formation of words is classified into four types based on how the process of formation is carried out. They are:

• By adding prefixes
• By adding suffixes
• Converting from one word class to another
• Forming compound words

Let us look at each type of word formation in detail.

Adding Prefixes

The term ‘prefix’ refers to one or more alphabets added to the stem of a word, mostly to make it negative. The most commonly used prefixes include ‘in-’, ‘un-’, ‘dis-’, ‘im-’, ‘ir-’, etc. Look at the examples given below for a clearer understanding of how prefixes are used to form new words.

Examples of Word Formation by the Addition of Prefixes

• Discipline – indiscipline
• Just – unjust
• Tidy – untidy
• Respect – disrespect
• Understand – misunderstand
• Comfortable – uncomfortable
• Comfort – discomfort
• Responsible – irresponsible
• Honest – dishonest
• Happy – unhappy
• Polite – impolite
• Experience – inexperience
• Practical – impractical
• Important – unimportant
• Legal – illegal
• Ethical – unethical
• Potent – impotent

Adding Suffixes

A suffix is a short syllable added at the end of a base word. The addition of suffixes usually changes the word class of the particular word. The most common suffixes include ‘-ment’, ‘-ness’, ‘-ity’, ‘-ous’, ‘-tion’, ‘-sion’, ‘-al’, ‘-able’, ‘-ible’, ‘-ive’, ‘-ly’, ‘-ate’, ‘-er’, ‘-or’, etc. Check out the following examples to see how suffixes are added.

Examples of Word Formation by the Addition of Suffixes

• Comprehend (verb) – comprehension (noun) – comprehensible (adjective)
• Inform (verb) – information (noun) – informative (adjective)
• Invest (verb) – Investment (noun) – Investor (noun)
• Write (verb) – writer (noun)
• Authorise (verb) – authorisation (noun)
• Move (verb) – movement (noun)
• Add (verb) – addition (noun)
• Happy (adjective) – happiness (noun)
• Conserve (verb) – conservation (noun)
• Wide (Adjective) – widen (verb)
• Manage (verb) – manageable (adjective) – manager (noun)
• Courage (noun) – courageous (adjective)
• Brave (adjective) – bravery (noun)
• Profit (noun) – profitable (adjective)
• Quick (adjective) – quickly (adverb)
• Happy (adjective) – happily (adverb)
• Sad (adjective) – sadness (noun)

The process of conversion focuses solely on changing the word class of the particular word. If you have noticed, you would have seen how some nouns are used to perform the role of a verb or an adjective acting like a noun just by the addition of another word or slightly altering the spelling of the actual word.

Examples of Word Formation by Conversion

• The rich should help the poor.

Adjectives such as ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ are used as nouns by using them with the article ‘the’.

• Everyone is talented.

‘Talented’ – a past participle is used as an adjective in the above sentence. The word is formed by adding the suffix ‘ed’ to the end of the noun ‘talent’.

• There will definitely be a lot of ups and downs in life.

Prepositions ‘up’ and ‘down’ are used as nouns by adding ‘s’ to the end of it.

• He texted me about the meeting only at the last minute.

The noun ‘text’ used to refer to a text message sent on a phone is used as a verb in the sentence by adding an ‘ed’ to the end of the word.

• The financial aid had to be approved before we could make a decision.

The noun ‘finance’ is used as an adjective by adding ‘ial’ to the end of it and the verb ‘decide’ is used as a noun by removing ‘de’ and adding ‘sion’ to the word.

Forming Compound Words

Compound words are formed by combining one part of speech with another to form a specific word class. There are many ways in which compound words are formed. Verbs are combined with adjectives to form compound verbs, a present participle is combined with a noun to form a compound noun, two nouns are combined to form a compound noun, an adjective and a noun are combined to form a compound noun, an adverb is combined with a noun to form a compound noun, an adjective is combined with a past participle to form a compound adjective and so on. Take a look at the following examples and go through the articles on compound nouns , compound words and compound adjectives to understand how they work.

Examples of Word Formation by Compounding

• Over (adverb) + load (noun) – Overload
• White (adjective) + wash (verb) – Whitewash
• Black (adjective) + board (noun ) – Blackboard
• Cup (noun) + board (noun) – Cupboard
• Short (adjective) + hand (noun) – Shorthand
• Swimming (present participle) + pool (noun) – Swimming pool
• Three (adjective) + legged (past participle) – Three-legged
• Break (verb) + Down (preposition) – Breakdown
• Up (preposition) + town (noun) – Uptown
• Copy (verb) + writer (noun) – Copywriter
• Sun (noun) + rise (verb) – Sunrise
• Count (verb) + down (preposition) – Countdown
• Flash (verb) + mob (noun) – Flash mob
• Master (noun) + piece (noun) – Masterpiece
• Round (adjective) + table (noun) – Round-table

Formation of words can be a very interesting exercise, but you have to be really careful when you are adding inflections or affixes. There are a few things you will need to bear in mind when you are forming words. Take a look at the following points to learn what they are.

• Before making any change to the stem of the word, try to analyse what is the kind of meaning you want the word to convey and what role the word will have to play in the sentence.
• In most cases, the beginning of the base word remains the same. Only when prefixes are added the word has a syllable added to the beginning of it. Notice that even in this case, the word is retained as such.
• When suffixes are added, there are many instances where you will have to remove the last one or more alphabets of the word and add the suffix. However, there are words like ‘movement’ where the suffix is just added without any change in the spelling of the base word.
• Here is one way to easily know which suffix has to be added to form a particular word class – most often, nouns end in ‘er’, ‘or’, ‘ist’, ‘ian’, ‘ion’, ‘ment’, ‘ness’, and ‘ity’; verbs end in ‘ise’, ‘ate’ and ‘en’; adjectives end in ‘able’, ‘ible’, ‘ive’, ‘ic’, ‘ed’, ‘ing’ and ‘al’; and adverbs normally end in ‘ly’.
• When words are formed by conversion, be very careful. Make sure you know that you are converting them accurately and using them in the sentence properly.
• When forming compound words, see to it that you hyphenate them if necessary, use the right combination of words and do not just mix and match any word.
• Changing from one tense to another also can also be considered a type of word formation, as the word is inflected to indicate the twelve different tenses in the English language.
• Forming degrees of comparison can also be put under word formation. In this case, the comparative and superlative degrees are formed by adding ‘er’ and ‘est’ to the end of the adjective. The comparative and superlative degrees of polysyllabic words are formed by using ‘more’ and ‘most’, respectively, along with the adjective.

Exercise 1 – Add Prefixes and Suffixes

Add prefixes and suffixes to the following words.

1. Passion____

2. Remember____

3. ____conscious

4. Sense____

5. ____acceptable

6. Entertain____

7. ____representation

8. Neat____

9. Invent____

10. ____interpret

Answers for Exercise 1

1. Passionate

2. Remembrance

3. Unconscious/Subconscious

4. Sensible/Senseless

5. Unacceptable

6. Entertainment

7. Misrepresentation

8. Neatly/Neatness

9. Invention

10. Misinterpret

Exercise 2 – Conversion of Words

Go through the following words and convert them as directed.

1. Money (convert into adjective)

2. Brave (convert into noun)

3. Clean (convert into noun)

4. Prayer (convert into adjective)

5. Resemblance (convert into verb)

6. Slow (convert into adverb)

7. Treat (convert into noun)

8. Confession (convert into verb)

9. Vary (convert into adjective)

10. Beauty (convert into verb)

Answers for Exercise 2

1. Monetary

3. Cleanliness

4. Prayerful

5. Resemble

7. Treatment

9. Various/variable

10. Beautify

Exercise 3 – Form Compound Words

Go through the words in the box given below and use them to form ten compound words.

1. _______ confident

2. Washing _______

3. Time _______

4. Under _______

5. _______sufficient

6. Up_______

7. _______set

8. Suit_______

9. _______over

10. _______thrift

Answers for Exercise 3

1. Overconfident

2. Washing machine

3. Timetable

4. Underestimate

5. Self-sufficient

8. Suitcase

9. Makeover

10. Spendthrift

What is word formation?

Word formation is the process by which new words are formed by adding an affix, another word or converting from one word class to another by removing and adding alphabets.

What are the four types of word formation?

The four types of word formation include:

• Addition of prefix
• Addition of suffix
• Conversion from one word class to another

Give some examples of word formation.

Here are some examples of the various types of word formation for your reference:

• Practical – impractical (prefix)
• Purpose – purposeful (suffix)
• Silent – silence (conversion)
• Dining + room – Dining room (compound word)
• Small – smaller – smallest (degrees of comparison)

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Word Formation - Compounding Words, Blending and Clipping

• Heather Marie Kosur
• Categories : Esl lesson plans for all grade levels
• Tags : Teaching english as a second language

Word Formation

Word formation occurs when compounding, clipping or blending existing words to create new words. Below we will cover the definition of these terms and give you several examples of each.

Compounding Words

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Compounding words are formed when two or more lexemes combine into a single new word. Compound words may be written as one word or as two words joined with a hyphen. For example:

• noun-noun compound: note + book → notebook
• adjective-noun compound: blue + berry → blueberry
• verb-noun compound: work + room → workroom
• noun-verb compound: breast + feed → breastfeed
• verb-verb compound: stir + fry → stir-fry
• adjective-verb compound: high + light → highlight
• verb-preposition compound: break + up → breakup
• preposition-verb compound: out + run → outrun
• adjective-adjective compound: bitter + sweet → bittersweet
• preposition-preposition compound: in + to → into

Compounds may be compositional, meaning that the meaning of the new word is determined by combining the meanings of the parts, or non-compositional, meaning that the meaning of the new word cannot be determined by combining the meanings of the parts. For example, a blueberry is a berry that is blue. However, a breakup is not a relationship that was severed into pieces in an upward direction. Compound nouns should not be confused with nouns modified by adjectives, verbs, and other nouns . For example, the adjective black of the noun phrase black bird is different from the adjective black of the compound noun blackbird in that black of black bird functions as a noun phrase modifier while the black of blackbird is an inseparable part of the noun: a black bird also refers to any bird that is black in color while a blackbird is a specific type of bird.

Clipping Words

Clipping is the word formation process in which a word is reduced or shortened without changing the meaning of the word. Clipping differs from back-formation in that the new word retains the meaning of the original word. For example:

• advertisement – ad
• alligator – gator
• examination – exam
• gasoline – gas
• gymnasium – gym
• influenza – flu
• laboratory – lab
• mathematics – math
• memorandum – memo
• photograph – photo
• public house – pub
• raccoon – coon
• reputation – rep
• situation comedy – sitcom
• telephone – phone

The four types of clipping are back clipping, fore-clipping, middle clipping, and complex clipping. Back clipping is removing the end of a word as in gas from gasoline . Fore-clipping is removing the beginning of a word as in gator from alligator . Middle clipping is retaining only the middle of a word as in flu from influenza . Complex clipping is removing multiple parts from multiple words as in sitcom from situation comedy .

Blending Words

Blending is the word formation process in which parts of two or more words combine to create a new word whose meaning is often a combination of the original words. Below are examples of blending words.

• advertisement + entertainment → advertainment
• biographical + picture → biopic
• breakfast + lunch → brunch
• chuckle + snort → chortle
• cybernetic + organism → cyborg
• guess + estimate → guesstimate
• hazardous + material → hazmat
• motor + hotel → motel
• prim + sissy → prissy
• simultaneous + broadcast → simulcast
• smoke + fog → smog
• Spanish + English → Spanglish
• spoon + fork → spork
• telephone + marathon → telethon
• web + seminar → webinar

Blended words are also referred to as portmanteaus.

Word Formation Sample Downloads

For more complete lists of English words formed through compounding, clipping, and blending, please download the following free printable vocabulary lists:

• Compound Noun List: English Compound Nouns
• List of English Clipped Words
• List of English Blend Words

This post is part of the series: Word Formation: Creating New Words in English

The articles in this series define and exemplify the most common word formation processes, or the creation of new words, in English including derivation, back-formation, conversion, compounding, clipping, blending, abbreviations, acronyms, eponyms, coinages, nonce words, borrowing, and calquing.

• Word Formation: Derivation and Back-Formation
• Word Formation: Conversion
• Word Formation: Compounding, Clipping, and Blending
• Word Formation: Abbreviations, Acronyms, and Eponyms
• Word Formation: Coinages, Nonce Words, Borrowing, and Calquing

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Essay: Minor word-formation processes in English: abbreviation, clipping, blending, and back-formation

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‘Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.’ – Edward Sapir

Linguistics is the scientific study of language.There are three aspects to this study: language form, language meaning, and language in context (Wikipedia:Linguistics).There is a separate name for the study of words structures, their forms and rules : Morphology.If we want to elaborate on the word-formations we have to know what a word really is.Well, of course we all know what a word is but we are not exactly aware of its structure. Words are the smallest units of language.They can function as a separate units ( so they are independent), they do not depend on the other words and they can easily change position. Some words are structured from two or more pieces ( Comlex words e.g. lonely) or their structure is in one piece and we cannot divide it ( e.g. play ).the smallest gramatical units of language are called morphemes.

In the world of linguistics, word-formation is the creation of a new word (wikipedia:word formation). In some way it is a contrast to the semantic change in wich the meaning of the single word changes. With understaning word-formation in great depth we have to know the basics of ethymology wich is the history of words, their orgins and how their form and meaning have changed over time (wikipedia:ehymology). There are a lot of types of word formation. We can distinguish for instance : Derivations, Neologisms, Compoundings,Affixations, Clippings, Blendings, Abbreviations or Back formations. But now, we will take a closer look at the last four types .

Clipping is a type of Abbreviation but here the part of the word is ‘clipped’ off the rest part of it. The meaning of this ‘shortened’ word means exactly the same as its original form. For example the clipping ‘burger’ is created by clipping off the beginning of the word hamburger’. This word formation procceses are not classified as words belonging to the standard vocabulary of language. Those are terms of special groups where a hint is crucial to understand the whole meaning e.g. exam(ination), lab(oratory) etc.

We can distinguish four types of Clipping :

1. Back clipping 2. Fore-clipping 3. Middle clipping 4. Complex clipping

Back clipping is probably the famous one. In this type of clipping the beginning is saved and this is the last part, syllable of the word which is clipped off : doc (doctor), gym (gymnasium).

Fore-clipping is the opposite of the back clipping. The final part is kept : net (internet), bot (robot).

Middle clipping ,as the name suggests, is the retention of the middle part of the word : fridge (refrigerator), jams(pyjamas).

Complex clipping are used in compounds. One part od the original compound stays the same : cablegram ( cable telegram), op art (optical art ).

Blending i.e. a blend word or just a blend is a word created from the part of two or more other separate words.these part are sometimes, but nt always, a morphemes (wikipedia:Blend word). Typically it is a beginning of the one word and the end of another : smoke and fog -> smog, gasoline and alcohol : gasohol.

John Algeo, the Professor Emeritus of English in the University of Georgia proposed to divide blending into three categories :

1.Phonemic Overlap: a syllable or part of a syllable is shared between two words 2.Clipping: the shortening of two words and then compounding them 3.Phonemic Overlap and Clipping: shortening of two words to a shared syllable and then compounding (wikipedia : blend word)

The blend words are formed in the different methods. The beginning of the word with the end of another, the beginning of two words are linked or the sounds from the two words are blended for example ‘slithly’ which was created from the lithe and slimy. Blend words can be easily mistaken with the compound words.But in the compound words the meaning of the created word may be different from its original parts in isolation for example ‘darkroom’ doesnt mean that the room is dark but is is a room in which photographic materials are processed. Blended words are also referred to as portmanteaus (brighthubeducation/word formation).

Abbreviation is a shortened phrase or a single word which we use everyday .Those were mainly created to save the space ( space-saving). They usually contain the letters or a group of letters taken from the particular word but not always, they can be created by substitution or other alliteration. Abbreviations are often classified into three types: letter-based, syllable-based , and hybrid (dictionary.com/abbreviations)

In English abbreviations were used practically from the beginning. In the old English poem Beowulf we can find some abbreviations (e.g. & for and).Then in 16 century and later the use of abbreviations rose with the standardisation of English language.For example, the name of the famous furniture company IKEA is an abbreviation of the : Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd. So, here we have the first letters of the every single word taken from the whole name and each letter is pronounced but not as a sentence.

There are a lot of types of abbreviations. An acronym is an abbreviation formed from the initial components in a phrase or a word for instance : AIDS, NATO (wikipedia:acronym). A plural abbreviation can be created by doubling initial letters : pp (pages). An initialism is an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of its various word elements, but it is read as a series of letters: ATM, BBC (dictionary.com/abbreviations). Aphesis is simply omitting an unstressed vowel from the beginning of the word : ’cause (because). Similarly to the Aphesis but not exactly the same is Apheresis when the first syllable or syllables are omitted : phone (telephone).

The last one is back-formation and it is the process of creating a new lexeme, usually by removing actual or supposed affixes (wikipedia:back-formation). The term back-formation was created by James Murray, Scottish lexicographer and who was also the primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary from 1879 until 1915 (wikipedia:James Murray)

Back-formation is different from Clipping because it can change the meaning or the part of speech whereas clipping is just a shortening from a longer word without changing signification. Back formation has given us a common words such as televis (from television ), aggress ( from aggression) or housekeep (from housekeeper ) and so on. Mostly, changes occurred at the end of the word. Back-formations based on the changes at the beginning so by dropping prefixes are rather less common.

Word formations are very important and have brought a lot to the world of linguistic practically from the beginning of our civilisation. The desire to simplify the system of language heavily influenced the development of creating new words. These are very helpful and important for people in common usage and are making their lives better and for sure easier. Those also enrich people’s vocabulary and broaden their knowledge about the language.

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