Word Formation Types

[Isabella Kells]

Aslanguages evolve and develop all the time, new words emerge to help speakers communicate better. In this lesson, we are going to talk about the word formation processes or WFP to find out how a new word enters a language.

Borrowing or loan word refers to the process where a foreign word is used in the language without being translated. The English language has adopted a large number of words from other languages. Remember that the word does not lose its meaning in the target language.

This happens when typographical rules that only exist in the source language are transferred into the target language. For example, the rule of capital letters in English has entered Spanish, as well as the use of italics for emphasis and certain uses of quotation marks.

Clipping or shortening involves cutting down some parts of a word and forming a shorter word that is a synonym for the original word. Clipping is different from abbreviation as it is the shortened form of written words. Here are some examples:

Some linguists believe that clippings originated as slang or jargon among students and teachers in schools, officers and soldiers in the army, or doctors and nurses in the medical profession. Here are some examples:

This word-formation process happens when a word (usually a noun) is reduced to another part of speech (normally a verb). This word-formation process originated in Latin nouns ending with '-ion' that entered the English language. Take a look at some examples:

Back-formation is different from clipping. Back-formation may change the word's class or meaning, whereas clipping makes shortened words from longer words, but does not change the class or meaning of the word.

Coinage is a type of word-formation process in which a new word is created, either by inventing a completely new word or by adapting an existing word in a new way. This can happen because of advances in technology, movies, literature, music, and popular culture. For instance:

Words that are formed by coinage are usually written in lowercase letters when they are used in context, but when we want to refer to the source of the word, it becomes a proper noun and has to be written in uppercase letters.

This is a type of coinage where the word is derived from the names of people or places. Eponyms are usually written in lowercase letters, but when they are used as proper nouns, they must be written in uppercase letters. Like:

Infixes are affixes inserted into the word stems. There are a few infixes in English and they are normally used in informal speech or technical texts. Here are some examples:

Analogy happens when a new word is created based on an existing word that has a similar form or meaning. This process involves extending the meaning or form of an existing word to create a new word that is similar in structure or meaning. Take a look at this example for a better understanding:

Sometimes, we can use two or more of these processes at the same time to make a word. For instance, partial calque or semi-calque is the combination of calque and loan words together. Take a look at some examples:

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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:

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.

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.

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:

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.

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