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Word-formation in Modern English

Working Deflations of Principal Concepts

The word is not the smallest unit of the language. It consists of morphemes. The morpheme may be defined as the smallest meaningful unit which has a sound form and meaning and which occurs in speech only as a part of a word.

Word formation is the creation of new words from elements already existing in the language. Every language has its own structural pat-terns of word formation.

Morphemes are subdivided into root - morphemes and affixational morphemes.

The root morpheme is the lexical center of the word. It is the seman-tic nucleus of a word with which no grammatical properties of the word are connected, Affixational morphemes include inflections and derivational affixes.

Inflection is an affixal morpheme which carries only grammatical meaning thus relevant only for the formation of word-forms (books, opened, strong-er).

Derivational morpheme is an affixal morpheme which modifies the lexical meaning of the root and forms a new word. In many cases if adds the part-of-speech meaning to the root (manage-ment, en-courage, fruit-ful)

Morphemes which may occur in isolation and function as independ-ent words are called free morphemes (pay, sum, form).

Morphemes which are not found in isolation are called bound mor-phemes (-er, un-, -less)

Morphemic analysis

The segmentation of words is generally carried out according to the method of Immediate and Ultimate Constituents. This method is based upon the binary principle, i.e. each stage of procedure involves two components the word immediately breaks into. At each stage these two components are referred to as the Immediate Constituents (IC). Each IC at the next stage of analysis is in turn broken into smaller meaningful elements. The analysis is completed when we arrive at constituents incapable of further division, i.e. morphemes. These are referred to as Ultimate Constituents (UC). The analysis of word-structure on the morphemic level must naturally proceed to the stage of UC-s.

Allomorphes are the phonemic variants of the given morpheme e.g. il-, im-, ir-, are the allomorphes of the prefix in- (illiterate, important, irregular, inconstant).

Monomorphic are root-words consisting of only one root-morpheme i.e. simple words (dry, grow, boss, sell).

Polymorphic are words consisting of at least one root-morpheme and a number of derivational affixes, i.e. derivatives, compounds (customer, payee, body-building, shipping).

Derived words are those composed of one root-morpheme and one more derivational morphemes (consignment, outgoing, publicity).

Derived word are those composed of one root-morpheme and one or more. Compound words contain at least two root-morphemes (ware-house, camera-man),

Productivity is the ability to form new words after existing patterns which are readily understood by the speakers of a language. Syn-chronilly the most important and the most productive ways of word-formation are affixation, conversion, word-composition and abbreviation (contraction). In the course of time the productivity of this or that way of word-formation may change. Sound interchange or gradation (blood - to bleed, to abide -abode, to strike - stroke) was a productive way of word building in old English and is important for a diachronic study of the English language. It has lost its productivity in Modern English and no new word can be coined by means of sound gradation. Affixation on the contrary was productive in Old English and is still one of the most productive ways of word building in Modern English.

Affixation is the formation of new words with the help of derivational affixes. Suffixation is more productive than prefixation. In Modern English suffixation is characteristic of noun and adjective formation, while prefixation is typical of verb formation (incoming, trainee, principal, promotion).

Affixes are usually divided into living and dead affixes. Living affixes are easily separated from the stem (careful). Dead affixes have become fully merged with the stem and can be singled out by a diachronic analysis of the development of the word (admit - L.- ad + mittere). Living affixes are in their turn divided into productive and non-productive affixes. In many cases the choice of the affixes is a means of differentiating meaning:

uninterested - disinterested distrust - mistrust

Word-composition is another type of word-building which is highly productive. That is when new words are produced by combining two or more stems.

Stem is that part of a word which remains unchanged throughout its paradigm and to which grammatical inflexions and affixes are added. The bulk of compound words is motivated and the semantic relations between the two components are transparent.

Compound words proper are formed by joining together stems of words already available in the language. Compound proper is a word, the two Immediate Constituents of which are stems of notional words, e.g. ice-cold (N + A), ill-luck (A+N).

Derivational compound is a word formed by a simultaneous process of composition and derivation. Derivational compound is formed by composing a new stem that does not exist outside this pattern and to which suffix is added. Derivational compound is a word consisting of two Immediate Constituents, only one of which is a compound stem of notional words, the other being a derivational affix, e.g. blue - eyed - (A+N) + ed In coordinative compounds neither of the compo-nents dominates the other, both are structurally and semantically independent and constitute two structural and semantic centres, e.g. breath-taking, self-discipline, word-formation.

Exercise 1.

Analyse the following words morphologically and classify them ac-cording to what part of speech they belong to:

post-election, appoint, historic, mainland, classical, letterbox, out-come, displease, step, incapable, supersubtle, illegible, incurable, adjustment, ladyhood, elastic, perceptible, inaccessible, partial, own-ership, idealist, hero, long-term, corporate.

Exercise 2.

Analyse the structure of the following compounds and classify them into coordinative and subordinative, syntactic and asyntactic: book-binder, doorbell, key-note, knife-and-fork, hot-tempered, dry-clean, care-free, policy-maker, mad-brained, five-fold, two-faced, body-guard, do-it-yourself, boogie-woogie. оfficer-director, driver-collector, building-site.

Exercise 3.

Classify the compound words in the following sentences into com-pounds proper and derivational compounds: l)She is not a mind-reader. 2) He was wearing a brand-new o\ereoat and hat. 3) She never said she was homesick. 4) He took the hours-old dish away. 5) She was a frank-mannered, talkative young lady. 6) The five years of her husband's newspaper-ownership had familiarised her almost unconsciously with many of the mechanical aspects of a newspaper printing-shop. 7)The parlour, brick-floored, with bare table and shiny chairs and sofa stuffed with horsehair seemed never to have been used. 8) He was heart-sore over the sudden collapse of a promising career. 9)His heavy-lidded eyes and the disorder of his scanty hair made him look sleepy.

Exercise 4.

Study the following passage. What is understood by the term "productivity"?

Word-formation appears to occupy a rather special place in grammatical description. In many cases the application of apparently productive rules leads to the generation of compounds and derivatives that are, for one reason or another, felt to be unacceptable or at least very old by native speakers, and the grammarian must decide what status he is to give to such rules and their output in his grammar. The decision is by no means easy, and can lie anywhere between the setting up of maximally general rules of a generative type, with little concern for the fact that much of their output may in some sense be questionable, and the simple listing and classifying, in terms of syntactic function and internal structure, of attested forms... Processes of word-formation often seem to belong to a somewhat vague intermediary area between grammar and lexicon, and while this needs not prevent us from giving formal statements of these processes, it may often be necessary to state restrictions on their output in primarily semantic terms if we want to hold on to the criterion if native speaker acceptance as an essential measure of the adequacy of our description. Thus in the area of English nominal compounds it would seem that actually occurring compounds are not as a rule created like new sentences in order to refer to momentary conditions. Leaving aside the possible difficulties of stating such semantic considerations in a reasonably rigorous way in any given case, the problem is to deter-mine, for the various word-formative processes in which they appear to play a part how they can most reasonably be accommodated within an over-all framework, of grammatical and semantic description.

(Karl E. Zimmer, Affixal Negation in English and other languages).