§ 4. Productive Word-Formation

Productive word-formation is the most effective means of enriching the vocabulary. The most widely used means are affixation (prefixation mainly for verbs and adjectives, suffixation for nouns and adjectives), conversion (giving the greatest number of new words in verbs and nouns) and composition (most productive in nouns and adjectives).

'New’ words that appear as a result of productive word-formation are not entirely new as they are all made up of elements already available in the language. The newness of these words resides in the particular combination of the items previously familiar to the language speaker. As has already been mentioned productivity of derivative devices that give rise to novel vocabulary units is fundamentally relative and it follows that there are no patterns which can be called ‘fully’ productive.

For instance the existence and frequent use of the noun denoting an object presupposes the possibility of the verb denoting an action connected with it, e.g. the nouns stream, sardine, hi-fi, timetable, lead to the appearance of verbs to stream – ‘to divide students into separate classes according to level of intelligence’, to sardine – ‘to pack closely’; to hi-fi – ‘to listen to hi-fi recordings’; to timetable – ‘to set a timetable’. Similarly a verb denoting an action presupposes a noun denoting an act, result, or instance of this action as in the new words, e.g. a holdup, a breakdown, a layout, etc.

Productive word-formation has a specific distribution in relation to different spheres of communication, thematic and lexical stylistic groups of new words. New terminological vocabulary units appear mainly as a result of composition making extensive use of borrowed root-morphemes, and affixation with sets of affixes of peculiar stylistic reference, often of Latin-Greek origin which are scarcely ever used outside this group of words, for example suffixes -ite, -ine- -tron, etc. The suffixes -in, -gen, -ogen are productive in the field of chemistry and biochemistry, e.g. citrin, penicillin, carcinogen; -ics in the naming of sciences as in radionics, bionics; the prefixes non-, pan-, suffixes -ism, -ist are most productive in political vocabulary, e.g. Nixonomics, Nixonomist, etc.

In comparison with specialised vocabulary items, lexical units of standard-colloquial layer are more often created by affixes of neutral stylistic reference, by conversion and composition.

§ 5. Various Ways of Word-Creation

New words in different notional classes appear also as a result of various non-patterned ways of word creation. The two main types of non-patterned word-creation are: I. Various ways of transformation of a word-form into a word usually referred to as lexicalisation and II. Shortening which consists in substituting a part for a whole. Shortening comprises essentially different ways of word creation. It involves 1. transformation of a word-group into a word, and 2. a change of the word-structure resulting in a new lexical item, i.e. clipping.

I. Lexicalisation. Due to various semantic and syntactic reasons the grammatical flexion in some word-forms, most often the plural of nouns, as in, e.g. the nouns arms, customs, colours, loses its grammatical meaning and becomes isolated from the paradigm of the words arm, custom, look. As a result of the re-interpretation of the plural suffix the word-form arms, customs developed a different lexical meaning ‘weapons’ and ‘import duties’ respectively. This led to a complete break of semantic links with the semantic structure of the words arm, custom and thus to the appearance of new words with a different set of grammatical features.

Essentially the same phenomenon of lexicalisation is observed in the transition of participles into adjectives. The process is also known as adjectivisation. It may be illustrated by a number of adjectives such as tired, devoted, interesting, amusing, etc. which are now felt as homonymous to the participles of the verbs to tire, to marry, etc.

Lexicalisation is a long, gradual historical process which synchronically results in the appearance of new vocabulary units.

II. Shortening. Distinction should be made between shorten-” ing which results in new lexical items and a specific type of shortening proper only to written speech resulting in numerous graphical abbreviations which are only signs representing words and word-groups of high frequency of occurrence in various spheres of human activity as for instance, RD for Road and St for Street in addresses on envelopes and in letters; tu for tube, aer for aerial in Radio Engineering literature, etc. English graphical abbreviations include rather numerous shortened ‘ variants of Latin and French words and word-groups, e.g.: i.e. (L. id est) – ‘that is’; R.S.V.P. (Fr. – Repondez s'il vous plait) – ‘reply please’, etc.

Graphical abbreviations are restricted in use to written speech, occurring only in various kinds of texts, articles, books, advertisements, letters, etc. In reading, many of them are substituted by the words and phrases that they represent, e.g. Dr. = doctor, Mr. = mister, Oct. = October, etc.

1. Transformations of word-groups into words involve different types of lexical shortening: ellipsis or substantivisation, initial letter or syllable abbreviations (also referred to as acronyms), blendings, etc.

Substantivisation consists in dropping of the final nominal member of a frequently used attributive word-group. When such a member of the word-group is dropped as, for example, was the case with a documentary film the remaining adjective takes on the meaning and all the syntactic functions of the noun and thus develops into a new word changing its class membership and becoming homonymous to the existing adjective.

Acronyms and letter abbreviations are lexical abbreviations of a phrase. There are different types of such abbreviations and there is no unanimity of opinion among scholars whether all of them can be regarded as regular vocabulary units. The following may serve as examples of such abbreviations: CBW = chemical and biological warfare, DOD = Department of Defence (of the USA), ITV = Independent Television, Instructional Television, SST = supersonic transport, etc.

Acronyms are regular vocabulary units spoken as words. They are formed in various ways:

1) from the initial letters or syllables of a phrase, which may be pronounced differently a) as a succession of sounds denoted by the constituent letters forming a syllabic pattern, i.e. as regular words, e.g. UNO ['ju:nou] = United Nations Organisations; NATO ['neitou] = North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, UNESCO [ju:'neskou]; laser ['leisa] = light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation; radar ['reidэ] = radio detection and ranging.

2. Acronyms may be formed from the initial syllables of each word of the phrase, e.g. Interpol = inter/national pol/ice; tacsatcom = Tactical Satellite Communications: Capcom = Capsule Communicator (the person at a space flight centre who communicates with the astronauts during a space flight).

3. Acronyms may be formed by a combination of the abbreviation of the first or the first two members of the phrase with the last member undergoing no change at all, e.g. V-day = Victory Day; H-bomb = = hydrogen bomb; g-force = gravity force, etc.

Вlendings are the result of conscious creation of words by merging irregular fragments of several words which are aptly called “splinters.” Splinters assume different shapes — they may be severed from the source word at a morpheme boundary as in transceiver (=transmitter and receiver), transistor (= transfer and resistor) or at a syllable boundary like cute (from execute) in electrocute, medicare (from medical care), polutician (from pollute and politician) or boundaries of both kinds may be disregarded as in brunch (from breakfast and lunch), smog (from smoke and fog), ballute (from baloon and parachute).

2. Clipping refers to the creation of new words by shortening a word of two or more syllables (usually nouns and adjectives) without changing its class membership. Clipped words, though they often exist together with the longer original source word function as independent lexical units with a certain phonetic shape and lexical meaning of their own. The lexical meanings of the clipped word and its source do not as a rule coincide, for instance, doc refers only to ‘one who practices medicine’, whereas doctor denotes also ‘the higher degree given by a university and a person who has received it’, e.g. Doctor of Law, Doctor of Philosophy.

It must be stressed that acronyms and clipping are the main ways of word-creation most active in present-day English. The peculiarity of both types of words is that they are structurally simple, semantically non-motivated and give rise to new root-morphemes.