Before moving on to a closer examination of the multiple word formation processes, let us briefly consider the field of study called lexicology and the definition of ‘word’. Lexicology, the study of lexis, is closely linked to other fields of study such as phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, etymology, and lexicography.
For instance the word unsafe consists of the vocabulary item safe as well as the prefix un, containing the meaning ‘not safe’, just as the word mended consists of the word mend and the grammatical function ´past´, ie -ed.
The basic meaning of a word is carried by the stem which, if formed by a single morpheme is called a root or base, and to which affixes are added. Morphemes possess a relatively stable meaning or function present in not just a few but thousands of words. Re- means ´to do again the action denoted by the verb´ and as such attaches to a various number of verbs whilst maintaining the same meaning (rerun, rewrite, rebuild).
In the vocabulary of English, verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs belong to open classes, that is to say, they are open because they can be extended indefinitely by the addition of new items. But these new words, save exceptions, are not created from nowhere, but are either borrowed or formed by combining words or parts of words which already exist in the language. If learners know how new terms are formed and which patterns of word formation are prevalent today, they will be able to learn foreign language easily.
A word may be newly coined (made up) and not yet have other forms. For example, the word selfie is widely used as a noun, but no verb, adjective or adverb forms exist. English speakers already have over a million words. Despite of this English language is growing. English speakers are adding new ones at the rate of around 1,000 a year. Recent dictionary debutants include blog, crowdfunding, hackathon, airball, e-marketing, sudoku, twerk and Brexit. But these represent just a sliver of the tip of the iceberg.
According to Global Language Monitor, around 5,400 new words are created every year; it’s only the 1,000 or so deemed to be in sufficiently widespread use that make it into print.
Secondly, the word can be perceived as the total of the sounds which
comprise it. Third, the word, viewed structurally, possesses several characteristics.
a) The modern approach to the word as a double-facet unit is based on
distinguishing between the external and the internal structures of the word. By the external structure of the word we mean its morphological structure. For example, in the word post-impressionists the following morphemes can be distinguished: the prefixes post-, im-, the root –press-, the noun-forming suffixes -ion, -ist, and the grammatical suffix of plurality -s. All these morphemes constitute the external structure of the word post-impressionists.
The internal structure of the word, or its meaning, is nowadays commonly
referred to as the word's semantic structure. This is the word's main aspect.
Words can serve the purposes of human communication solely due to their
meanings.
b) Another structural aspect of the word is its unity. The same example may be used to illustrate what we mean by semantic unity. In the word-group a black bird each of the meaningful words conveys a separate
concept: bird – a kind of living creature; black – a color. The word blackbird
conveys only one concept: the type of bird. This is one of the main features of any
word: it always conveys one concept, no matter how many component morphemes it may have in its external structure.
c) A further structural feature of the word is its susceptibility to grammatical employment. In speech most words can be used in different grammatical forms in which their interrelations are realized.
So, the formal/structural properties of the word are
1) isolatability (words can function in isolation, can make a sentence of their own under certain circumstances);
2) inseparability/unity (words are characterized by some
integrity, e.g. a light – alight (with admiration);
3) a certain freedom of distribution (exposition in the sentence can be different);
4) susceptibility to grammatical employment;
5) a word as one of the fundamental units of the language is a double facet unit of form (its external structure) and meaning (its
internal/semantic structure).
1.2. Studying word-formation
In this section, we will study five major morphological processes that affect roots and stems and which lead to the production of new words. Those processes are affixation, compounding, symbolism, reduplication and suppletion.
A. Affixation. Affixation consists in adding derivational affixes (i.e., prefixes, infixes and suffixes) to roots and stems to form new words. For example, if the suffix -able is added to the word pass, the word passable is created. Likewise, if to the word passable the prefix in- (or rather its allomorph im-) is attached, another word is formed, namely impassable. Affixation is a very common and productive morphological process in synthetic languages. In English, derivation is the form of affixation that yields new words.
B. Compounding. Compounding consists in the combination of two or more (usually free) roots to form a new word. For example, the word blackboard, heartfelt, brother-in-law are compound words; they are made up of the roots (at the same time words themselves) black and board, heart and felt, brother, in and law, respectively.
Compounding is a very common process in most languages of the world (especially
among synthetic languages). In English, for instance, compound words have the following characteristics:
1. Compounds words behave grammatically and semantically as single words.
2. Since compound words behave as units, between their component elements no affixes (whether inflections or derivations) can usually occur; inflectional suffixes can appear only after compound words. For example, bathrooms, school, buses, water resistant. Exceptions: passersby, brothers-in-law, courts-martial.
3. Compound words can be written in three different ways:
a. Open, i.e., with a space between the parts of the compound; e.g., toy store, diving board, flower pot.
b. Hyphenated, i.e., with a hyphen (-) separating the elements of the compound; e.g., flower-pot, air-brake, she-pony.
c. Solid, e.g., without a space or hyphen between the component elements of the
compound; e.g., flowerpot, washrooms, pickpocket.
4. The global meaning of the compound word can often be guessed from the individual meaning of each element of the compound. For example, a boathouse is ‘a shed in which boats are stored’; a bookstore is ‘a store which sells books’; and so on. But there are a few compound words whose global meanings have to be learned as if they were single words because such meanings cannot be guessed from the individual meanings of the component elements of the compounds. For instance, a Redcoat is ‘a British soldier’, not ‘a coat that is red’. Similarly, a flatfoot is ‘a detective or policeman’, a turncoat is ‘a traitor’, a hot dog is
‘a kind of fast food’, etc.
5. Compound words usually have the primary stress on the first element of the compound; e.g., "air-crafts, "chewing-gum. This fact differentiates compounds from phrases that have the same elements and order as compounds.
6. The second element (or head word) of the compound usually determines the grammatical category to which the whole compound belongs. Following are a few possible combinations:
n + n = n; e.g., sunrise, dancing girl, hand-shake, air-conditioning, cigar smoker, windmill.
v + n = n; e.g., rattlesnake, call-girl, dance-hall.
adj. + n = n, e.g., darkroom, highbrow.
n + adj. = adj.; e.g., airsick, bottle-green.
pron. + n = n; e.g., she-pony, he-goat.
prep. + v = v; e.g., overtake, undergo.
prep. + n = n; e.g., onlooker, off-day.
adj. + adj. = adj.; e.g., gray-green, Swedish-American.
However, there are some cases in which the headword does not determine the grammatical class of the compound; for example:
n + v = adj.; e.g., man-eating, ocean-going, heartfelt.
adj./adv. + v = adj.; e.g., hard-working, good-looking, dry-cleaned.
n + prep. = n; e.g., passer-by, hanger-on.
v + (adv.) prep. = n; e.g., show-off, holdup.
v + adv. = n; e.g., have-not, get-together
It is important to point out that some compound words are made up of a bound root (or ‘special’ combining form, e.g., socio-, psycho-, and a free root; e.g., socioeconomic, psychoanalysis, biotechnology. The compound may also consist of two bound roots; e.g., Laundromat, nephrolithotomy.
7. Compounding is a recursive process; i.e., one compound itself may become a constituent of a larger compound; e.g., lighthouse keeper, living-room furniture.
C. Symbolism. Symbolism (or morpheme internal change) consists in altering the internal phonemic structure of a morpheme to indicate grammatical functions. For example, in order to form the plurals of goose \gu:s\ and tooth \tu:θ\ in English, the phoneme \u…\ is replaced by the phoneme \i\, thus yielding the plural forms geese \gi:s\ and teeth \tiθ\, respectively.
Other words that form their plurals in a similar way are man /mæn\ → men /men/,
woman \ wumæn\ → women \wimәn\, mouse \maUs\ → mice \mais\, louse \laus\ → lice \lais\, etc. Similarly, a few verbs indicate their past tense and past participle forms just by undergoing internal changes, as in the following cases:
sing [siŋ] sang [sæŋ] sung [sʌŋ]
swim [swim] swam [swem] swum [swʌm]
sink [siŋk] sank [sæŋk], sunk [sʌŋk] sunk [sʌŋk]
bring [briŋ] brought [brɔ:t] brought [brɔ:t]
teach [ti:tʃ] taught [tɔ:t] taught [tɔ:t]
Some of these verbs, in addition, take the inflectional morpheme –en \- n\ to indicate the past participle, as in:
break [breik] broke [brouk] broken ['brouk(e)n]
at [i:t] ate [et] eaten ['i:tn]
write [rait] wrote [rout] written ['ritn]
ride [raid] rode [roud] ridden ['ridn]
It is important to point out that the new words created by the process of symbolism are usually considered irregular forms and have come to be as a result of historical changes in the development of the language.
D. Reduplication. Reduplication consists in the repetition of all or of part of a root or stem to form new words. If the entire root or stem is repeated, the process is called complete (or total) reduplication, and the new word is considered as a repetitive compound. Total reduplication is
fairly frequent in Indonesian, Hausa (Sudan), and Hawaiian. For example, in Indonesian, total reduplication is used to form the plural of nouns, as in
[rumah] ‘house’, [rumahrumah] ‘houses’; [ibu] ‘mother’ [ibuibu] ‘mothers’; [lalat]
‘fly’, [lalatlalat] ‘flies’. In Hawaiian, holo means 'run', holoholo 'go for a walk or ride'; lau means 'leaf', laulau 'leaf food package'.
If only a part of the root or stem is repeated, the process is called partial reduplication, and the repeated portion is called a reduplicative. Such reduplicatives may occur preposed, interposed, and postposed to the root or stem; however, reduplicatives are more common word-initially and word-medially.
E. Suppletion. Suppletion consists in a complete change in the form of a root (i.e., a word) or in the replacement of root by another morphologically unrelated root with the same component of meaning in different grammatical contents. For example, good and well change to better and best in the comparative and superlative. Another example is go which changes to went in the past. As can be seen, this process yields completely irregular forms. Suppletive forms help to fill gaps in grammatical paradigms of the language.
As the term ‘word-formation’ suggests, we are dealing with the formation of words, but what does that mean? Let us look at a number of words that fall into the domain of word-formation and a number of words that do not:
(1) a. employee b. apartment building c. chair
inventor greenhouse neighbor
inability team manager matter
meaningless truck driver brow
suddenness blackboard great
unhappy son-in-law promise
decolonialization pickpocket discuss
In columns (1a) and (1b) we find words that are obviously composed by putting together smaller elements to form larger words with more complex meanings. We can say that we are dealing with morphologically complex words. For example, employee can be analyzed as being composed of the verb employ and the ending -ee, the adjective unhappy can be analyzed as being derived from the adjective happy by the attachment of the element un-, and decolonialization can be segmented into the smallest parts de-, colony, -al, -ize, and -ation. We can thus decompose complex words into their smallest meaningful units. These units are called morphemes.
In contrast to those in (1a) and (1b), the words in (1c) cannot be decomposed into smaller meaningful units, they consist of only one morpheme, they are monomorphemic. Neighbor, for example, is not composed of neighb- and -or, although the word looks rather similar to a word such as inventor. Inventor (‘someone who invents (something)’) is decomposable into two morphemes, because both invent- and -or are meaningful elements, wheras neither neighb- nor -or carry any meaning in neighbor (a neighbor is not someone who neighbs, whatever that may be...). As we can see from the complex words in (1a) and (1b), some morphemes can occur only if attached to some other morpheme(s). Such morphemes are called bound morphemes, in contrast to free morphemes, which do occur on their own.
In writing, individual morphemes are usually represented by their graphic form, or spelling; e.g., -es, -er, un-, re-; or by their graphic form between bracers, { }; e.g., {-es}, {-er}, {un-}, {re-}. The branch of linguistics in charge of studying the smallest meaningful units of language (i.e., morphemes), their different forms, the internal structure of words, and the processes and rules by which words
are formed is called morphology.
Types of Morphemes.
Depending on the way morphemes occur in an utterance, they are grouped into two large groups: free morphemes and bound morphemes.
1. Free or independent morphemes are those morphemes which can occur alone as words and have a meaning or fulfill a grammatical function; e.g., man, run, and. There are two types of free morphemes.
a. Lexical (content or referential) morphemes are free morphemes that have semantic content (or meaning) and usually refer to a thing, quality, state or action. For instance, in a language, these morphemes generally take the forms of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs; e.g., dog, Peter, house, build, stay, happy, intelligent, quickly, always. Actually, lexical morphemes constitute the larger class of morphemes. They form the open class of words (or content words) in a language, i.e., a class of words likely to grow due to the incorporation of new members into it.
b. Function(al) or grammatical morphemes are free morphemes which have little or no meaning on their own, but which show grammatical relationships in and between sentences. For instance, in a language, these morphemes are represented by prepositions, conjunctions, articles, demonstratives, auxiliary verbs, pronouns; e.g., with, but, the, this, can, who, me. It should be said that function words are almost always used in their unstressed form.
2. Bound (or dependent) morphemes are those morphemes which never occur alone as words but as parts of words; they must be attached to another morpheme (usually a free morpheme) in order to have a distinct meaning; e.g., -er in worker, -er in taller, -s in walks, -ed in passed, re- as in reappear, un- in unhappy, undo, -ness in readiness, -able in adjustable; -ceive in conceive, receive, -tain in contain, obtain, etc. There are two types of bound morphemes: bound roots and affixes.
a. Bound roots are those bound morphemes which have lexical meaning when they are attached to other bound morphemes to form content words; e.g., -ceive in receive, conceive; -tain in retain, contain; plac- in implacable, placate; cran- in cranberry, etc. Bound roots can be prefixed or suffixed to other affixes.
b. Affixes are bound morphemes which are usually marginally attached to words
and which change the meaning or function of those words; e.g., -ment in development, en- in enlarge; ’s in John’s; -s in claps, -ing in studying, etc.
Some bound morphemes, for example un-, must always be attached before the central meaningful element of the word, the so-called root, stem or base, whereas other bound morphemes, such as -ity, -ness, or -less, must follow the root. Using Latin-influenced terminology, un- is called a prefix, -ity a suffix, with affix being the cover term for all bound morphemes that attach to roots.
To avoid terminological confusion, we will avoid the use of the term ‘stem’ altogether and speak of ‘roots’ and ‘bases’ only. The term root is used when we want to explicitly refer to the indivisible central part of a complex word. In all other cases, where the status of a form as indivisible or not is not at issue, we can just speak of bases or base-words. The derived word is often referred to as a derivative. The base of the suffix -al in the derivative colonial is colony, the base of the suffix -ize in the derivative colonialize is colonial, the base of -ation in the derivative colonialization is colonialize. In the case of colonial the base is a root, in the other cases it is not.
In sum, there is a host of possibilities speakers of a language have at their disposal (or had so in the past, when the words were first coined) to create new words on the basis of existing ones, including the addition and subtraction of phonetic (or orthographic) material. The study of word-formation can thus be defined as the study of the ways in which new complex words are built on the basis of other words or morphemes. Some consequences of such a definition will be discussed in the next section.