WORD-FORMATION

IN THE PRESENT-DAY ENGLISH

LANGUAGE

WF_2024
1. Introduction
1.1. General
1.1.1. Aims of the course

The aim of the present course is to introduce students to

the basic conceptual and terminological apparatus
indispensable in a coherent and systematic description
of word-formation processes in the present-day English
language.
1.1.2. Organization

15 two-period sessions providing:

 introduction to basic terms and their theoretical
background
 exposition of central problems and

 suggestions for their solution through a number of

exercises and study questions.
Assessment will be based on 3 written tests
administered during the term (33 + 34 +33 points), or
a 60' minute test at the end of the course (and if
necessary a viva voce examination)

68-75 2
76-84 3
85-92 4
93-100 5
1.1.3. Overview

1. Introduction
1.1. General
1.2. Types of word-formation processes
2. Concatenative word-formation processes
2.1. Affixation
2.1.1. Prefixation
2.1.2. Suffixation
2.2. Compounding
2.2.1. Introductory notes
2.2.2. Noun compounds
2.2.3. Adjective compounds
3. Non-concatenative word-formation processes
3.1. Conversion/Zero derivation
3.2. Back-formation
3.3. Reduplication
3.4. Clipping
3.5. Blending
3.6. Abbreviation
4. Productivity in word-formation
4.1. Productivity and creativity
4.2. Constraints on productivity of word-formation
processes
1.1.4. Literature
Obligatory:

Bauer, Laurie, Rodney Huddleston (2002). Lexical word-

formation. The Cambridge Grammar of the English
Language, ed. by Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey K.
Pullum, 1621-1721. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech,
Jan Svartvik (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of
the English Language, Appendix I: Word-formation,
1515-1585. London: Longman.
1.1.4. Literature
Recommended reading:
Adams, Valerie (1973). An Introduction to Modern English Word
Formation. London: Longman.
Adams, Valerie (2001). Complex Words in English. Harlow: Pearson
Educational/Longman.
Aronoff, Mark (1976). Word Formation in Generative Grammar.
Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
Bauer, Lauri (1983). English Word-Formation. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Jespersen, Otto (1965). A Modern English Grammar on Historical
Principles. Part IV: Morphology. Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard.
Marchand, Hans (1965). The Categories and Types of Present-Day
English Word-Formation. A Synchronic-Diachronic Approach.
München: Beck.
Plag, Ingo (2003). Word Formation in English. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Schmid, Hand-Jörg (2011). English Morphology and Word-
Formation: An Introduction. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag.
Szymanek, Bogdan (1993). Introduction to Morphological Analysis.
Warszawa: Panstwowe Wydawnictvo Naukowe.
1.2. Types of word-formation processes

INFLECTION and DERIVATION

 the two major types of morphological processes, are
distinguished on the bases of morphemes that are
involved.
 If a bound grammatical morpheme is involved, the
process is called inflection (the morphemes in
question are sometimes also called inflectional),
 if two or more lexical morphemes are involved we
speak of derivation.
inflection:
produce → produced
word → words

derivation:
produce → producer
word → wordsmith
Free or bound morphemes?
hand-out
geo-logy
dis-respect
ROOT: the irreducible core of a word, with absolutely
nothing else attached to it, it is the part that is always
present, possibly with some modification, in the
various manifestations of a lexeme, e.g. walk in walk,
walks, walking, walked, etc.

STEM: the part of a word that is in existence before any

inflectional affixes have been added, e.g. cat in cats, or
catwalk in catwalks.
 BASE is any morphological unit whatsoever to which
affixes of any kind can be added or which can be
added to another base in compounding.
 it may:
 consist of a single morpheme (i.e. a root), or

 be itself a complex consisting of more than one

morpheme, existing as an independent word, or just
as a bound part of a word),

beauty, beautiful
beautify, beautificiation
What are the bases in the following words?

disprove
modifier
postpone
prefabrication
promotional
personality
 inflectional and derivational morphemes form words in
different ways.
 derivational ones form new words either by changing
the meaning of the base to which they are attached, or
by changing the word-class that a base belongs to.
Concatenative vs non-concatenative word-formation
processes

 this distinction is based on whether two or more

distinct and overt lexical elements are joined in the
course of a word-formation process in a more or less
straightforward way or not.
 the former are termed concatenative processes, the
latter non-concatenative ones.
 in the case of non-concatenative processes a single
lexical element may be modified internally (i.e. a covert
element may be added, or we witness subtraction—
systematic elimination of parts of a lexeme—, or a
combination of these).
 of course, new words can be output of the application
of both types of processes.
 generally speaking, concatenative processes happen
to be most important ones in English in terms of their
productivity.
 they belong therefore to major word formation
processes in English.
 most non-concatenative word formation processes
have a minor role in English, but the correlation
between the two classifications is not perfect (e.g.
conversion is a major word-formation processes but it
cannot be characterized as a straightforward
concatenative processes).
Major word formation processes in English

1. AFFIXATION: a process in which lexical affixes are

added to the base, also called derivation.
(1) [duck] + [-ling] → [duckling]

2. CONVERSION: a word-formation strategy in which

words are formed without modifying the form of the
input words that serve as the bases, also called zero-
derivation and subsumed under affixation.
(2) a. The head of the village school has arrived.
b. She will head the village school.
3. COMPOUNDING: a process in which at least two
bases, that are both words, or at any rate root
morphemes, are combined.

(3) [tea] + [pot] → [teapot]

[week] + [end] → [week-end]
Minor word formation processes

a. BACK-FORMATION: the formation of words by the

deletion of actual or supposed affixes in longer
words, often accompanied by a change of word-
class.
(4) actor → act
b. CLIPPING: the process of shortening a word without
changing its cognitive meaning or its part of speech,
though frequently with the effect of making it
stylistically less formal:
(5) vegetable vs veg

c. BLENDING: formation of new lexemes from parts of

two or more other lexemes by telescoping them i.e.
taking the extreme parts of the words involved, often
by splitting morphemes. Blends are also called
portmanteau words.
(6) stagnation + inflation → stagflation
d. REDUPLICATION: the formation of new items by
repeating the whole or some part of the base,
specifically, The term REDUPLICATIVE COMPOUND is
applied to English words like helter-skelter, shilly-
shally.

e. formation of ABBREVIATIONs, i.e. ACRONYMs and

ALPHABETISMs, from the initial letters of the words
in a name, title or phrase The former being
pronounced as if they were real words, the latter as
strings of letters.
(7) Teaching English as Foreign Language → TEFL
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