Lecture 2 The Structure of English Words and Word-building in English.

1. Various ways of word-building in English.

2. Conversion. Historical conversion. Present-day conversion.

3. Affixation. The classification and productivity of suffixes and prefixes.

4. Different types of compounds in Modern English.

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Word-building is a process of making new words. But then, naturally, we shall have to distinguish morphological and syntactical word-building.

Morphological word-building (characterized by a change in morphological structure) will include:

1. Affixation or forming new words by means of adding suffixes and prefixes, e.g. wonderful, enjoy, boredom.

2. Word-composition or joining two or more stems to form a new word, e.g. hogshead, Turkoman, Russo-Japanese, speedometer.

3. Shortnening or making a new word by omitting a certain part of a longer word, e.g. amend – mend, fantasy – fancy, trigonometry – trig, military police – M.P., etc.

4. Sound-gradation (sometimes referred to as sound-interchange) or forming a new word by changing a root sound, either consonant (e.g. excuse – excuse, voiced in the verb and devoiced in the noun) or vowel (e.g. brood – breed) or both (e.g. breathe – breath, live – life).

5. Semantic stress, or stress-interchange when a new word is created through a change of stress, e.g. ‘present – pre’sent, ‘conduct – con’duct, etc.

6. Reduplication or forming a new word by means of complete or partial repetition of the same stem (e.g. goody-goody, chin-chin, mishmash, criss-cross, chow-chow, hurdy-gurdy, etc.)

7. Back formation or forming a word by dropping a suffix (to baby sit from baby-sitter, to beg from beggar, etc.).

8. Blending or forming a new word from the beginning of one word and the end of another (e.g. smog from smoke and fog, motel from motorist and hotel, etc.)

Syntactico-morphological word-building where both morphological and syntactical features of the word are changed will include:

1. Juxtapositional word-composition (e.g. snow-white, girl-friend).

2. Substantivization or incomplete transition from adjective to noun (e.g. the poor, the wounded, the rich).

3. Lexicalization of the plural in nouns ( lines –poetry, colours – banner, pains – trying hard, etc.)

4. Conversion – or forming a new word by shifting a noun into a verb (water – to water), an adjective into a noun (my native town – a native of the town), a verb into a noun (to swim – a swim) without any distinct ending.

Syntactical word-building where a combination of words is semantically and structurally isolated to form a word without any changes in the syntactico-semantic relations, e.g. white-thorn, maid-of-all-work, free-and-easy, free-thinker, man-at-arms, jack-in-the-box, etc.

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Conversion

Conversion is one of the most productive ways of making new words in Modern English. The process of creating a new word of a different part of speech and with a shift in function without adding any derivative element, so that the basic form of the original and the basic form of the derived words are homonymous, is called conversion. In the sentence "His voice silenced everyone else" - 'silence' is used as a verb. The difference between 'silence', n. And 'silence', v. Is morphological, syntactic and semantic: the original and the resulting words are grammatically different; a new paradigm is acquired and the syntactic functions are those of a verb.

The historical development of conversion

The causes that made conversion so widely spread should be viewed from the hysterical point of view. Nouns and verbs have become identical in form firstly as a result of the loss of endings. When endings had disappeared phonetical development resulted in the merging of sound-forms of both elements of these pairs.

OE ME

carian, v. care, n., v.

caru, n.

drincan,v. drink,n.,v.

drinca, n.

Conversion in present-day English

Conversion usually occurs in monosyllabic words of a simple morphological structure. Conversion from suffixed and prefixed words is less common. A common functional shift is from noun to verb. Technical language uses this device as a source of new expressions, e.g.: access, backstroke, polygraph. Changes from verb to noun occur less frequently, perhaps because nouns can easily be formed from verbs by adding suffixes. Noun use of adjectives is also common in words ending with -ic, such as acrylic, tricyclic, and a number of nouns connected with medical descriptions: astigmatic, etc.

When a noun is converted into a verb the name of the object becomes the name of the action (you ask questions = you question sm.) Things are different in the attributive use of nouns. When a noun is used attributively only characterize the object in a general manner. Thus, swamp water and a swamp bird, both characterize their objects in a general way: "water peculiar to swamps, putrid." Now putrid is a real adjective, it names the quality immediately. So the noun used attributively gives only a sort of implication, comparison, allusion.

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