Word Formation Ppt Free Download

[Ermengardi Atkisson]

Wordformation 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.

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:

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.

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 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.

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:

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:

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.

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.

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