A Project on
Word Formation Techniques
Submitted by: Mohammad Fahad
Submitted to: Dr. Raghul V. Rajan
Submitted on: 10.05.2020
Faculty Roll No: 19BALLB-232
Class: BALLB[Hons.] Ist Year
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TABLE OF CONTENT
Topic Page No
Introduction 3
Clipping 3
Acronym 3
Blending 4
Back-Formation 4
Derivation 6
Borrowing 6
Coinage 7
Compounding 7
Conclusion 9
Refrences 10
1. Introduction
Nowadays, the terms ‘word formation’ does not have a clear cut, universally accepted usage. It is
sometimes referred to all processes connected with changing the form of the word by, for
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example, affixation, which is a matter of morphology. In its wider sense word formation denotes
the processes of creation of new lexical units. Although it seems that the difference between
morphological change of a word and creation of a new term is quite easy to perceive, there is
sometimes a dispute as to whether blending is still a morphological change or making a new
word. There are, of course, numerous word formation processes that do not arouse any
controversies and are very similar in the majority of languages.
2. Clipping
Clipping is the word formation process which consists in the reduction of a word to one of its
parts (Marchand: 1969). Clippings are, also, known as "shortenings."Clipping mainly consists of
the following types:
1. Back clipping
2. Fore-clipping
3. Middle clipping
4. Complex clipping
3. Acronym
Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations, such as NATO, laser, and IBM, that are formed
using the initial letters of words or word parts in a phrase or name. Acronyms and initialisms are
usually pronounced in a way that is distinct from that of the full forms for which they stand: as
the names of the individual letters (as in IBM), as a word (as in NATO), or as a combination (as
in IUPAC). Another term, alphabetism, is sometimes used to describe abbreviations pronounced
as the names of letters.
Examples :
o FNMA: (Fannie Mae) Federal National Mortgage Association
o laser: light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation
o NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
o scuba: self-contained underwater breathing apparatus
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4. Blending
A blend is a word formed from parts of two other words. These parts are sometimes, but not
always, morphemes.
A blend is different from a portmanteau word in that a portmanteau refers strictly to a blending
of two function words, similar to a contraction.
4.1. Formation of blendings
Most blends are formed by one of the following methods:
1. The beginning of one word is added to the end of the other. For example, brunch is a blend
of breakfast and lunch. This is the most common method of blending.
2. The beginnings of two words are combined. For example, cyborg is a blend
of cybernetic and organism.
3. One complete word is combined with part of another word. For example, guesstimate is a
blend of guess and estimate.
When two words are combined in their entirety, the result is considered a compound word rather
than a blend. For example, bagpipe is a compound, not a blend,
5. Back-formation
Back-formation refers to the process of creating a new lexeme by removing actual or
supposed affixes. The resulting neologism is called a back-formation. Back-formations are
shortened words created from longer words, thus back-formations may be viewed as a sub-type
of clipping.
For example, the noun resurrection was borrowed from Latin, and the verb resurrect was then
backformed hundreds of years later from it by removing the -ion suffix. This segmentation
of resurrection into resurrect + ion was possible because English had many examples of Latinate
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words that had verb and verb+-ion pairs — in these pairs the -ion suffix is added to verb forms in
order to create nouns (such as, insert/insertion, project/projection, etc.).
Back formation may be similar to the reanalyses of folk etymologies when it rests on an
erroneous understanding of the morphology of the longer word. For example, the singular
noun asset is a back-formation from the plural assets. However, assets is originally not a plural;
it is a loan-word from Anglo-Norman asetz (modern French assez). The -s was reanalyzed as a
plural suffix.
5.1. Back-formation in the English language
Many words came into English by this route: Pease was once a mass noun but was reinterpreted
as a plural, leading to the back-formation pea. The noun statistic was likewise a back-formation
from the field of study statistics. In Britain the verb burgle came into use in the 19th century as a
back-formation from burglar (which can be compared to the North
America verb burglarize formed by suffixation).
Even though many English words are formed this way, new coinages may sound strange, and are
often used for humorous effect. For
example, gruntled or pervious (from disgruntled and impervious) would be considered mistakes
today, and used only in humorous contexts. The comedian George Gobel regularly used original
back-formations in his humorous monologues. Bill Bryson mused that the English language
would be richer if we could call a tidy-haired person shevelled - as an opposite to dishevelled.
Frequently back-formations begin in colloquial use and only gradually become accepted. For
example, enthuse (from enthusiasm) is gaining popularity, though it is still considered
substandard by some today.
The immense celebrations in Britain at the news of the relief of the Siege of Mafeking briefly
created the verb to maffick, meaning to celebrate both extravagantly and publicly. "Maffick" was
a back-formation from Mafeking, a place-name that was treated humorously as
a gerund or participle.
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6. Derivation
Derivation is used to form new words, as with happi-ness and un-happy from happy,
or determination from determine. A contrast is intended with the process of inflection, which
uses another kind of affix in order to form variants of the same word, as
with determine/determine-s/determin-ing/determin-ed.
A derivational suffix usually applies to words of one syntactic category and changes them into
words of another syntactic category. For example, the English derivational suffix -
ly changes adjectives into adverbs (slow → slowly).
Some examples of English derivational suffixes:
adjective-to-noun: -ness (slow → slowness)
adjective-to-verb: -ize (modern → modernize)
noun-to-adjective: -al (recreation → recreational)
noun-to-verb: -fy (glory → glorify)
verb-to-adjective: -able (drink → drinkable)
verb-to-noun: -ance (deliver → deliverance)
Derivation may occur without any change of form, for example telephone (noun) and to
telephone. This is known as conversion. Some linguists consider that when a word's syntactic
category is changed without any change of form, a null morpheme is being affixed.
7. Borrowing
Borrowing is just taking a word from another language. The borrowed words are called loan
words. A loanword (or loan word) is a word directly taken into one language from another with
little or no translation. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept whereby it is
the meaning or idiom that is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is
itself a calque of the German Lehnwort. Loanwords can also be called "borrowings".
Examples:
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Biology, boxer ,ozone from German
Jacket,yoghurt,kiosh from Turkish
Pistl,robot from Czech
8. Coinage
Coinage is the invention of totally new words. The typical process of coinage usually involves
the extension of a product name from a specific reference to a more general one. For example,
think of Kleenex, Xerox, and Kodak. These started as names of specific products, but now they
are used as the generic names for different brands of these types of products.
9. Compounding
A compound is a lexeme (a word) that consists of more than one other lexeme.
An endocentric compound consists of a head, i.e. the categorical part that contains the basic
meaning of the whole compound, and modifiers, which restrict this meaning. For example, the
English compound doghouse, where house is the head and dog is the modifier, is understood as a
house intended for a dog. Endocentric compounds tend to be of the same part of speech (word
class) as their head, as in the case of doghouse. (Such compounds were called karmadharaya in
the Sanskrit tradition.)
Exocentric compounds do not have a head, and their meaning often cannot be transparently
guessed from its constituent parts. For example, the English compound white-collar is neither a
kind of collar nor a white thing. In an exocentric compound, the word class is determined
lexically, disregarding the class of the constituents. For example, a must-have is not a verb but a
noun. English language allows several types of combinations of different word classes:
N + N lipstick , teapot
A + N fast food , soft drink
V + N breakfast , sky-dive
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N + V sunshine , babysit
N + A capital-intensive , waterproof
A + A deaf-mute , bitter-sweet
Like derivational rules, compounding rules may differ in productivity. In English, the N + N
rule/pattern is extremely productive, so that novel compounds are created all he time and are
hardy noticed. By contrast, the V + N rule/pattern is unproductive and limited to a few lexically
listed items. Apart from endocentric and exocentric compounds there is another type of
compound which requires an interpretation different from the ones introduced so far. Consider
the hyphenated words in the examples below:
a. singer-songwriter
scientist-explorer
poet-translator
hero-martyr
b. the doctor-patient gap
the nature-nurture debate
a modifier-head structure
the mind-body problem
10. Conclusion
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The above mentioned word formation processes are the most frequent or important in the English
language, but it is rarely the case that only one process occurs in one word. Words can be loaned
and then back formed, later on gaining an affix. There are practically no boundaries to those
processes other that human ingenuity.
11. References
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George Yule.The Study Of Language.Cambridge University Press(2005).
Plag, I. (2003). Word-Formation in English. UK: Cambridge University Press.
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