Lecture 8

WORD-BUILDING
Plan
1. Word-formation. Morphemes. Structural types of words.
2. Productivity. Highly-productive types of word-formation.
3. Semi-productive types of word-formation.
4. Non-productive types of word-formation.

Literature
1. Антрушина Г. Б. Лексикология английского языка : учеб. пособие
для студентов / Г. Б. Антрушина, О. В. Афанасьева, Н. Н. Морозова. –
Москва : Дрофа, 2000. – 288 с.
2. Арнольд И.В. Лексикология современного английского языка :
Учеб. для ин-тов и фак. иностр. яз. / И.В. Арнольд. – [3-е изд., перераб. и
доп.]. – Москва : Высш. шк., 1986. – 295 с.
3. Бабич Г. Н. Лексикология английского языка / Г.Н. Бабич. –
Екатеринбург – Москва : Уральское издательство «Большая медведица»,
2005. – 176 с.
4. Верба Л. Г. Порівняльна лексикологія англійської та української
мов / Л. Г. Верба. – Вінниця : Нова книга, 2008. – 248 с.
5. Давлетбаева Д. Н. Курс лекций по лексикологии английского
языка : учебное пособие для студентов иностранных языков /
Д. Н. Давлетбаева. – Казань : ТГГПУ, 2010. – 92 с.
6. Марчишина А. А. English Lexicology: theory and practice : навч.-
метод. посіб. з лексикології англ. мови / А. А. Марчишина, Т. М. Петрова. –
Кам’янець-Подільський : Кам’янець-Поділ. нац. ун-т ім. І. Огієнка, 2008. –
63 с.

-1-
Word-formation (word-building) is the process of creating new words from
the elements already existing in the language. Every language has its own
structural patterns of word-formation. Together with borrowing, word-building
provides for enlarging and enriching the vocabulary of the language.
Structurally, words are divided into smaller units which are called
morphemes. Morphemes do not occur as free forms but only as constituents of
words. Yet they possess meanings of their own.
All morphemes are subdivided into two large classes: roots (or radicals) and
affixes. The latter, in their turn, fall into prefixes which precede the root in the
structure of the word (as in re-read, mis-pronounce, un-well) and suffixes which
follow the root (as in teach-er, cur-able, dict-ate).
From the structural point of view morphemes fall into 3 types:
1) free morphemes – can stand alone as words, e.g. friendly, friendship
(cf. a friend);
 2) bound morphemes – occur only as constituent parts of words, e.g.
freedom, greatly, poetic; depart, adrift, enlarge, dishonest, misprint; conceive,
deceive, receive; resist, subsist;
3) semi-bound morphemes – can function both as affixes and as free
morphemes (i.e. words), e.g. after, half, man, well, self and after-thought, half-
baked, chairman, well-known, himself.
In Modern English one can often meet morphemes of Greek and Latin origin
which have a definite lexical meaning though are not used as autonomous words,
e.g. tele- – ‘far’, -scope – ‘seeing’, -graph – ‘writing’, etc. Such morphemes are
usually called combining forms or bound root morphemes.
The main structural types of Modern English words are: 1) root (simple)
words; 2) derived words; 3) compounds; 4) shortenings.
The largest group in Modern English is the so-called root word which has
only a root morpheme in its structure. This type is widely represented by a great
number of words belonging to the original English stock or to earlier borrowings
(house, room, book, work, port, street, table, etc.)
Words which consist of a root and an affix (or several affixes) are called
derived words or derivatives and are produced by the process of word-building
known as affixation (or derivation). Derived words are extremely numerous in the
English vocabulary.
Another wide-spread word-structure is a compound word consisting of two
or more stems (stem is a part of the word consisting of root and affix), e. g. dining-
room, bluebell, mother-in-law, good-for-nothing. Words of this structural type are
produced by the word-building process called composition.
Words, which components are joined together by means of compounding
and affixation, are called derivational compounds: long-legged, black-eyed, oval-
shaped, bald-headed, strong-willed.
The somewhat odd-looking words like flu, pram, lab, M. P., V-day, H-bomb
are called shortenings, contractions or curtailed words and are produced by the
way of word-building called shortening (contraction).
-2-
Productivity is the ability to form new words after existing patterns which
are readily understood by the speakers of a language. Various types of word-
formation in Modern English possess different degrees of productivity. Some of
them are highly-productive (affixation, compounding, conversion, substantivation,
shortening, forming phrasal verbs); others are semi-productive (back-formation,
blending, reduplication, lexicalization of the plural of nouns); and non-productive
(sound interchange, sound-imitation).
Highly-productive types of word-formation
1. The process of affixation consists in coining a new word by adding an
affix or several affixes to some root morpheme.
1. From the etymological point of view affixes are classified into native
(noun-forming -er, -ness, -ing, e.g. worker, coldness, feeling) and borrowed
(Romanic, e.g. the suffixes -tion (revolution), -ate (create); Greek, e.g. -ism, -ist,
anti-).
 2. Affixes can also be classified into productive and non-productive types.
Productive affixes take part in deriving new words in this particular period of
language development: -er, -ness, -able, -y, -ize; un-, re-. Non-productive: -th,
-hood, -en, -ous.
Don’t confuse the productivity of affixes with their frequency of
occurrence!!! There are quite a number of high-frequency affixes which,
nevertheless, are no longer used in word-derivation. e. g. the adjective-forming
native suffixes -ful, -ly; the adjective-forming suffixes of Latin origin -ant, -ent, -al
which are quite frequent.
3. Suffixes derive a certain part of speech, hence one should distinguish:
noun-forming, adjective-forming, verb-forming and adverb-forming suffixes.
(Copy “Parts of Speech – Suffixes”)
4. Meanings of affixes are specific and considerably differ from those of
root morphemes. Affixes have widely generalized meanings and refer the concept
conveyed by the whole word to a certain category, which is vast and all-embracing.
(Copy “Common Affixes and Their Meaning”)

2. Compounding (composition) is a type of word-building, in which new

words are produced by combining two or more stems which occur in the language
as free forms. It is one of the three most productive types in Modern English and
represents one of the most typical and specific features of English word-structure.
Compounds may be classified proceeding from different criteria:
1) the part of speech they belong;
2) the means of composition used to link their components together;
3) the structure of components;
4) their semantic characteristics.
1. According to the parts of speech compounds are subdivided into:
a) nouns: baby-moon, globe-trotter;
b) adjectives: free-for-all, power-happy;
c) verbs: to honey-moon, to baby-sit, to henpeck;
d) adverbs: downdeep, headfirst;
e) prepositions: into, within;
f) numerals: fifty-five.
Most compounds in Modern English belong to nouns and adjectives.
Compound verbs are less frequent. Compound adverbs, pronouns, conjunctions
and prepositions are rather rare.
2. According to the means of joining components together compounds are
divided into the following structural types:
a) juxtapositional (neutral), which are formed by joining together two stems
without any joining morpheme, e.g. classroom, timetable, heartache, grey-green,
deep-blue, H-bomb, ball-point, to windowshop;
b) morphological where components are joined by a linking element:
vowels ‘o’ or ‘i’ or the consonant ‘s’, e.g. astrospace, handicraft, sportsman;
 c) syntactical (integrated) which are the result of the process of semantic
isolation and structural integration of free word-groups, e.g. blackboard (<black
board), highway (<high way), here-and-now, free-for-all, do-or-die.
3. According to their structure compounds are subdivided into:
a) compounds consisting of simple stems: railway, key-board, snow-white,
bookshelf, scarecrow, browbeat;
b) compounds where at least one of the components is a derived stem:
chain-smoker, shoe-maker, pen-holder, snow-covered, moon-lit, price-reduction;
c) compounds where at least one of the components is a clipped stem:
photo-intelligence, bacco-box, maths-mistress, T-shirt, TV-set, X-mas;
d) compounds where at least one of the components is a compound stem:
wastepaper-basket, newspaper-ownership;
e) derivational compounds in which the second component does not occur
as a free form: honey-mooner, slim-wasted.
4. There are 2 semantic types of compound words:
a) non-idiomatic compounds – the meaning is easily understood from the
meaning of the components: dining-room, blood-pressure, skiing-suit, raincoat,
bookshelf;
b) idiomatic compounds – the meanings of the unit cannot be understood
from the meaning of the components: buttercup, lady-killer, wall-flower,
fiddlesticks, bull’s-eye, jelly-fish, forget-me-not, merry-go-round.

3. Conversion consists in making a new word from some existing word by

changing the category of a part of speech, the morphemic shape of the original
word remaining unchanged: hand > to hand, face > to face, to go> a go, to make
> a make. Conversion is a highly productive and a particularly English way of
word-building.
As a matter of fact, all parts of speech can be drawn into the word-building
process of conversion to a certain extent. Its derivational patterns are varied, the
most widespread among them being N→V, V→N, A→V.
The two categories of parts of speech especially affected by conversion are
nouns and verbs.
Verbs made from nouns are the most numerous amongst the words
produced by conversion: e. g. to hand, to back, to face, to eye, to mouth, to nose, to
dog, to wolf, to monkey, to can, to coal, to stage, to screen, to room, to floor, to
blackmail, to blacklist, to honeymoon.
Nouns are frequently made from verbs: do – event, incident; go – energy;
make, run, find, catch, cut, walk, worry, show, move.
Verbs can also be made from adjectives: to pale, to yellow, to cool, to grey,
to rough.
It’s necessary to remember that a word made by conversion has a different
meaning from that of the word from which it was made though the two meanings
can be associated.
In the group of verbs made from nouns there are such the most obvious
cases of regular semantic associations:
 1) The noun is the name of a tool or implement, the verb denotes an action
performed by the tool: to hammer, to nail, to pin, to brush, to comb, to pencil.
2) The noun is the name of an animal, the verb denotes an action or aspect of
behaviour considered typical of this animal: to dog, to wolf, to monkey, to ape, to
fox, to rat.
Yet, to fish does not mean "to behave like a fish" but "to try to catch fish".
The same meaning of hunting activities is conveyed by the verb to whale and
one of the meanings of to rat.
3) The name of a part of the human body – an action performed by it: to
hand, to leg, to eye, to elbow, to shoulder, to nose, to mouth.
However, to face does not imply doing something by or even with one's face
but turning it in a certain direction. To back means either "to move backwards" or,
in the figurative sense, "to support somebody or something".
4) The name of a profession or occupation – an activity typical of it: to
nurse, to cook, to maid, to groom.
5) The name of a place – the process of occupying the place or of putting
smth/smb in it: to room, to house, to place, to table, to cage.
6) The name of a container – the act of putting smth within the container: to
can, to bottle, to pocket.
7) The name of a meal – the process of taking it: to lunch, to supper.
The suggested groups do not include all the great variety of verbs made from
nouns by conversion. They just represent the most obvious cases and illustrate,
convincingly enough, the great variety of semantic interrelations within so-called
converted pairs and the complex nature of the logical associations which specify
them.

4. Shortening.
There exist 2 main ways of shortening: contraction (clipping) and
abbreviation (initial shortening).
Contraction – 4 types:
1) final clipping (apocope) – omission of the final part of the word:
doc<doctor, lab<laboratory, mag<magazine, vegs<vegetables, Al<Albert,
Nick<Nickolas, Phil<Philip;
2) initial clipping (apheresis) – omission of the fore part of the word:
phone<telephone, plane<aeroplane, story<history, van<caravan,
drome<airdrome, Dora<Theodora, Fred<Alfred;
3) medial clipping (syncope) – omission of the middle part of the word:
maths<mathematics, fancy<fantasy, specs<spectacles, binocs<binoculars,
through<thorough;
4) mixed clipping – the fore and the final parts of the word are clipped:
tec<detective, flu<influenza, fridge<refrigerator, stach<moustache,
Liz<Elisabeth.
Abbreviations (initial shortenings) are words produced by shortening the
component of phrasal terms up to their initial letters.
Abbreviations are subdivided into 5 groups:
 1) Acronyms which are read in accordance with the rules of orthoepy as
though they were ordinary words: UNO /'ju:nou/ (< United Nations Organization),
UNESCO /'ju:'neskou/ (< United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural
Organization/, NATO /'neitou/ (< North Atlantic Treaty Organization), SALT
/so:lt/ (< Strategic Arms Limitation Talks), STEM /stem/ (< scanning transmission
electrone microscope), radar /reida/ (< radio detecting and ranging), etc.
2) Alphabetic abbreviations in which letters get their full alphabetic
pronunciation and a full stress: USA /'ju:es'ei/ (< the United States of America),
B.B.C. /'bi:'bi:'si:/ (< the British Broadcasting Corporation), M.P. / 'em'pi:/
(<Member of Parliament), FBI / 'ef'bi: 'ai/ (< Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Alphabetic abbreviations are sometimes used for famous persons' names:
F.D.R. (< Franklin Delano Roosevelt), G.B.S. (< George Bernard Shaw), B.B.
(<Brigitte Bardot).
3) Compound abbreviations in which the first component is a letter (letters)
and the second a complete word: A-bomb (< atomic bomb), V-day (< Victory
day), L-driver (learner-driver), ACD solution (< acid citrate dextrose solution).
One or both components of compound abbreviations may be clipped: mid-
August, Interpol (< International police), hi-fi (< high fidelity), sci-fic (< science
fiction).
4) Graphic abbreviations which are used in texts for economy of space.
They are pronounced as the corresponding unabbreviated words: Mr. (< Mister),
m. (< mile), ft. (< foot/feet), v. (< verb), ltd. (< limited), govt. (< government), usu.
(< usually), pp. (< pages), Co (< Company), Capt. (< Captain), X-mas
(<Christmas).
5) Latin abbreviations which sometimes are not read as Latin words but as
separate letters or are substituted by their English equivalents: /ai 'i:/ - that is;
a.m. /ei 'em/ - before midday, in the morning, e.g. - for example. Id. – in the same
place.

5. Substantivation is the process in which adjectives (or participles) acquire

the paradigm and syntactic functions of nouns.
2 main types of substantivation: complete and partial.
Completely substantivized adjectives have the full paradigm of a noun, i.e.
singular and plural case forms. They may be associated with various determiners
(definite, indefinite and zero articles, demonstrative and possessive pronouns, etc.),
e.g. an official, the official, officials, the officials, official's, officials', this official,
our officials. Complete substantivation is often regarded as a pattern of conversion
(A —> N), though it may be argued, since, as a rule, it is the result of ellipsis in an
attributive phrase: a conservative politician —> a conservative, a convertible car—
> a convertible.
In the case of partial substantivation adjectives do not acquire the full
paradigm of a noun. They fall into several structural-semantic groups:
 partially substantivized adjectives (PSA) or participles which are
singular in form though plural in meaning. They are used with the definite article
and denote a group or a class of people: the rich, the accused, the English, the
blind, the living;
 PSA used mostly in the plural and denoting a group or a class of
people: reds, greens, buffs, blues;
 PSA used mostly in the plural and denoting inanimate things: sweets,
ancients, eatables;
 PSA presenting properties as substantive abstract notions: the good,
the evil, the beautiful, the singular;
 PSA denoting languages: English, German, Ukrainian, Italian.
6. Phrasal verbs are combinations of a verb and adverb or a verb and
preposition (or verb with both adverb and preposition).
Phrasal verbs may be either non-idiomatic or idiomatic.
Non-idiomatic phrasal verbs retain their primary local meaning: come in,
come out, come out of, take off, put down. They may also have a kind of perfective
colouring: add up, eat up, drink up, swallow up, rise up.
In idiomatic compounds meanings cannot be derived from their
components: bring up – виховувати, bear out – підтверджувати, give in –
піддаватися, fall out – сваритися, take in – обманювати.

-3-
Semi-productive types of word-formation
1. Back-formation (reversion) is the formation of a new word by subtracting
a real or supposed suffix from the existing words.
Back-formation is different from clipping – back-formation may change the
part of speech or the word's meaning, whereas clipping creates shortened words
from longer words, but does not change the part of speech or the meaning of the
word.
The earliest examples of this type of word-building are the verb to beg that
was made from the French borrowing beggar, to burgle from burglar, to cobble
from cobbler. In all these cases the verb was made from the noun by subtracting
what was mistakenly associated with the English suffix -er. In the case of the verb
to beg and to burgle the process was reversed: instead of a noun made from a verb
by affixation (as in painter from to paint), a verb was produced from a noun by
subtraction.
Later examples of back-formation are to butle from butler, to baby-sit from
baby-sitter, to force-land from forced landing, to blood-transfuse from blood-
transfusion, to fingerprint from finger printings, to straphang from straphanger.

2. Blending is the process of combining parts of two words to form one

word. Blends (blended words, blendings, fusions) are formations, that combine 2
words, and include and include the letters or sounds, they have in common as a
connecting element, e.g. smog (=smoke + fog); transceiver (=transmitter +
receiver), transistor (= transfer + resistor), medicare (from medical care),
polutician (from pollute and politician), brunch (from breakfast and lunch),
ballute (from baloon and parachute).
2 types of blending:
a)      additive type: smog – sm(oke) and (f)og;
b)     restrictive type: telecast – television broadcast.
Blends are coined not infrequently in scientific and technical language as a
means of naming new things, as trade names in advertisements. Since blends break
the rules of morphology they result in original combinations which catch quickly.
Most of the blends have a colloquial flavour.

3. In reduplication new words are made by doubling a stem.

Reduplicative compounds fall into 3 main subgroups:
1) reduplicative compounds proper – compounds are identical in their
form (without any phonetic changes): murmur, bye-bye, blah-blah, pooh-pooh;
2) ablaunt (gradational) compounds – with a variation of the root-vowel
or consonant: ping-pong, chit-chat, chit-chat, riff-raff, dilly-dally, singsongs;
3) rhyme compounds – compounds are joined to rhyme: willy-nilly,
helter-skelter, hoity-toity, namby-pamby, walkie-talkie.
This type of word-building is greatly facilitated in Modern English by the
vast number of monosyllables. Stylistically speaking, most words made by
reduplication represent informal groups: colloquialisms and slang.

4. Lexicalization of the plural of nouns – the grammatical form of the

plural of nouns becomes isolated from the paradigm and acquires a new lexical
meaning. This leads to the appearance of new lexical units: look – looks, arms,
attentions, belongings, colours, customs, lines, manners, glasses.

-4-
Non-productive types of word-formation
1. Sound-interchange (gradation) – the formation of a new word belonging
to different part of speech due to an alteration in the phonemic composition of its
roots:
a)      vowel-interchanging (ablaut): food (n) – to feed (v), song (n) – to sing
(v), gold (n) – to gild (v), strong (adj) – strength (n);
b)     consonant-interchanging: advice (n) – to advise (v).

2. Sound imitation (onomatopoeia) – imitating different kinds of sounds

that may be produced by animals, birds, insects, human beings and inanimate
objects.
a)      words denoting sounds produced by human beings in the process of
communication or expressing their feelings: chatter, babble;
b)     words denoting sounds produced by the animals, birds, insects: moo,
croak, buzz;
c)      words denoting sounds produced by water, the noise of metallic things,
a forceful motion, movements: splash, clink, whip, swing.
 It is of some interest that sounds produced by the same kind of animal are
frequently represented by quite different sound groups in different languages. For
instance, English dogs bark (укр. – гавкати) or howl (укр. вити). The English
cock cries cock-a-doodle-doo (укр. – кукурікати). In England ducks quack and
frogs croak (укр. – крякати; квакати). It is only English and Ukrainian cats who
seem capable of mutual understanding when they meet, for English cats mew or
miaow (meow). The same can be said about cows: they moo (but also low).
Some names of animals and especially of birds and insects are also produced
by sound-imitation: crow, cuckoo, humming-bird, whip-poor-will, cricket.