Lecture 6 WORD-BUILDING PART 2 KEY-WORDS Coordination

Lecture 6 WORD-BUILDING. PART 2

KEY-WORDS Coordination Subordination Back-formation Fusion Contraction, elision Reduplication acronym

WORD-COMPOSITION Compounding, or word-composition, is one of the productive methods of word-formation in Modern English. It involves bringing together at least two stems already existing in the language as free forms (motor+car= motor-car). Graphically most compounds have two types of spelling they are spelt either solidly or with a hyphen. Both types of spelling when accompanied by structural and phonetic peculiarities serve as a sufficient indication of inseparability of compound words in contradistinction to phrases.

COMPOUNDING The result is not mere a sum of components, but a new lexical unit posessing: - semantic -phonemic - graphic - morphological - syntactic integrity.

COMPOUNDING Unlike a phrase, a compound word is characterized by impenetrability – no word or morpheme can stand between its elements. Compounding is one of the most ancient ways of word-building. Suffixation and prefixation are believed to have developed from it. Compounding has always been productive in forming adjectives and nouns.

COMPOUNDING But many of those compound words have lost their original morphological character due to various factors (for example, woman was a compound noun in Old English – wifman).

COMPOUNDING Two features of English compounds make them different from those in other Indo-European and Germanic languages: 1) unlike Russian, they are made up of free forms coinciding with words (in Russian they are bound forms); 2) unlike German, English compunds are usually binary (they are made up of two compounds only, with rare exceptions).

COMPOUNDING There at least three aspects of composition that present special interest. The first is the structural aspect. Compounds are not homogeneous in structure. Traditionally three types are distinguished: neutral, morphological and syntactic. In neutral compounds the process of compounding is realised without any linking elements, by a mere juxtaposition of two stems, as in blackbird, sunflower, bedroom, etc.

COMPOUNDING There are three subtypes of neutral compounds depending on the structure of the constituent stems. Compounds which have affixes in their structure are called derived or derivational compounds. E. g. absent-mindedness, blueeyed, golden-haired, broad-shouldered, ladykiller, film-goer, music-lover.

COMPOUNDING Words of this type shouldn’t be confused with a compound word having a derived stem as its second element (schoolteacher) or a word derived from a compound (schoolmasterish). Derivational compound may also be formed by conversion from a verbal phrase with a postposition adverb: to hold up, a holdup, week-end – to week-end.

COMPOUNDING The productivity of this type is confirmed by a considerable number of comparatively recent formations, such as teenager, babysitter, fourseater ("car or boat with four seats"), doubledecker. Numerous nonce-words are coined on this pattern which is another proof of its high productivity: e. g. luncher-out ("a person who habitually takes his lunch in restaurants and not at home"), goose-flesher ("murder story").

COMPOUNDING Attention getter : "Dad, " I began. . . "I'm going to lose my job. " That should be an attention getter, I figured. (From A Five-Colour Buick by P. Anderson Wood)

COMPOUNDING Contracted compounds. These words have a shortened (contracted) stem in their structure: TV-set (-program, -show, -canal, etc. ), V-day (Victory day), G-man (Government man "FBI agent"), H-bag (handbag), T-shirt, etc.

COMPOUNDING Morphological compounds are few in number. This type is non-productive. It is represented by words in which two compounding stems are combined by a linking vowel or consonant, e. g. Anglo-Saxon, Franko. Prussian, handiwork, handicraft, craftsmanship, spokesman, statesman.

COMPOUNDING In a number of compound words originating from phrases, the linking elements are former prepositions or conjunctions: Mother-in-law Man-of-war Bread-and-butter

COMPOUNDING There are two types of relations between the components in an English compound word – coordination and subordination. Coordinative compounds consist of components equal in their importance, so that neither of them dominates the other. The meaning of such compounds is the meaning of the sum of their components: Actor-manager, secretary-stenographer

COMPOUNDING A subordinative compound is based on the domination of one component, usually the second which is the structural and semantical centre of the word (taxi-driver, text-book). The order and arrangement of components are rigidly fixed in English and can’t be changed at will. The choice of stems and the rules of their arrangements are known as distributional formulas or structural patterns of compound words.

COMPOUNDING There are two types of English compounds according to their structural arrangement – syntactic and asyntactic. In syntactic compounds the order of their components is parallel to the order of words in a phrase (tell-tale is the same in tell tales). In an asyntactic compound the order of components is different than in a phrase (oilrich and rich in oil).

COMPOUNDING Syntactical relations and grammatical patterns current in present-day English can be clearly traced in the structures of such compound nouns as: pick-me-up, know-all, know-nothing, go-between, get-together, whodunit. The last word (meaning "a detective story") was obviously coined from the ungrammatical variant of the word-group who (has) done it.

COMPOUNDING In this group of compounds, once more, we find a great number of neologisms, and whodunit is one of them. Consider, also, the two following fragments which make rich use of modern city traffic terms. Randy managed to weave through a maze of onewaystreets, no-left-turns, and no-stopping-zones. . . (From A Five-Colour Buick by P. Anderson Wood) ". . . you go down to the Department of Motor Vehicles tomorrow and take your behind-the-wheel test. "

COMPOUNDING The structure of most compounds is transparent, as it were, and clearly betrays the origin of these words from word-combinations. The fragments below illustrate admirably the very process of coining nonce-words after the productive patterns of composition. "Is all this really true? " he asked. "Or are you pulling my leg? ". . . Charlie looked slowly around at each of the four old faces. . . They were quite serious. There was no sign of joking or leg-pulling on any of them. (From Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by R. Dahl)

COMPOUNDING This example presents the nonce-word legpulling coined on the pattern of neutral derivational compounds.

COMPOUNDING Another focus of interest is the semantic aspect of compound words, that is, the question of correlations of the separate meanings of the constituent parts and the actual meaning of the compound. Or, to put it in easier terms: can the meaning of a compound word be regarded as the sum of its constituent meanings?

COMPOUNDING To try and answer this question, let us consider the following groups of examples. (1) Classroom, bedroom, working-man, eveninggown, dining-room, sleeping-car, reading-room, dancing-hall. This group seems to represent compounds whose meanings can really be described as the sum of their constituent meanings. Yet, in the last four words we can distinctly detect a slight shift of meaning.

COMPOUNDING The first component in these words, if taken as a free form, denotes an action or state of whatever or whoever is characterised by the word. Yet, a sleeping-car is not a car that sleeps (cf. a sleeping child), nor is a dancinghall actually dancing (cf. dancing pairs).

COMPOUNDING The shift of meaning becomes much more pronounced in the second group of examples. (2) Blackboard, blackbird, football, lady-killer, pick pocket, good-for-nothing, lazybones, chatterbox. In these compounds one of the components (or both) has changed its meaning: a blackboard is neither a board nor necessarily black, football is not a ball but a game, a chatterbox not a box but a person, and a lady-killer kills no one but is merely a man who fascinates women.

COMPOUNDING It is clear that in all these compounds the meaning of the whole word cannot be defined as the sum of the constituent meanings. The process of change of meaning in some such words has gone so far that the meaning of one or both constituents is no longer in the least associated with the current meaning of the corresponding free form.

COMPOUNDING In the third group of compounds the process of deducing the meaning of the whole from those of the constituents is impossible. The key to meaning seems to have been irretrievably lost: ladybird is not a bird, but an insect, tallboy not a boy but a piece of furniture (высокий комод), bluestocking, on the contrary, is a person.

COMPOUNDING Another important classification of Modern English compounds is according to their motivation (the way the morphological structure of a compound is related to its meaning). The compounds are accordingly divided into: 1) motivated or non-idiomatic 2) idiomatic or non-motivated

COMPOUNDING With motivated compounds, the meaning can be easily deduced from the meaning of their components: Land-owner is undoubted fully one who owns land. In idiomatic compounds there is no direct connection between the structure and the meaning, metaphorically speaking they are “not transparent”.

JOKE ABOUT IDIOMATIC COMPOUNDS The following joke rather vividly shows what happens if an idiomatic compound is misunderstood as nonidiomatic. Patient: They tell me, doctor, you are a perfect lady-killer. Doctor: Oh, no! I assure you, my dear madam, I make no distinction between the sexes. In this joke, while the woman patient means to compliment the doctor on his being a handsome and irresistible man, he takes or pretends to take the word lady-killer literally, as a sum of the direct meanings of its constituents.

CRITERIA OF COMPOUNDING Eugene Nida suggested a combination of phonological, morphological and syntactic criteria in order to distinguish the compound words and free words. The numerous borderline cases between compounds and word-groups have given rise to one of the most controversial problem in English word-composition, known as “stone wall problem”.

SHORTENING OR CLIPPING OF WORDS This comparatively new way of word-building has achieved a high degree of productivity nowadays, especially in American English. Shortenings (or contracted/curtailed words) are produced in two different ways. The first is to make a new word from a syllable (rarer, two) of the original word. The latter may lose its beginning (as in phone made from telephone, fence from defence), its ending (as in hols from holidays, vac from vacation, props from properties, ad from advertisement) or both the beginning and ending (as in flu from influenza, fridge from refrigerator).

SHORTENING OR CLIPPING OF WORDS The second way of shortening is to make a new word from the initial letters of a word group: U. N. O. ['ju: neu] from the United Nations Organisation, B. B. C. from the British Broadcasting Corporation, M. P. from Member of Parliament. This type is called initial shortenings. They are found not only among formal words, such as the ones above, but also among colloquialisms and slang. So, g. f. is a shortened word made from the compound girl-friend.

SHORTENING OR CLIPPING OF WORDS Both types of shortenings are characteristic of informal speech in general and of uncultivated speech particularly. The history of the American okay seems to be rather typical. Originally this initial shortening was spelt O. K. and was supposed to stand for all correct. The purely oral manner in which sounds were recorded for letters resulted in O. K. whereas it should have been AC. or aysee.

SHORTENING OR CLIPPING OF WORDS Unlike conversion, clipping produces new words in the same part of speech – mostly nouns. There are 3 types: 1) final-clipped words (lab from laboratory) 2) initial clippings (story from history) 30 medial clippings (specs from spectacles).

SHORTENING OR CLIPPING OF WORDS Here are some more examples of informal shortenings. Movie (from moving-picture), gent (from gentleman), , circs (from circumstances, e. g. under the circs), I. O. Y. (a written acknowledgement of debt, made from I owe you), lib (from liberty, as in May I take the lib of saying something to you? ), cert (from certainty, as in This enterprise is a cert if you have a bit of capital), metrop (from metropoly, e. g. Paris is a gay metrop), exhibish (from exhibition), posish (from position).

REDUPLICATION In reduplication new words are made by doubling a stem, either without any phonetic changes as in bye-bye (coll, for good-bye) or with a variation of the root-vowel or consonant as in ping-pong, chitchat (this second type is called gradational reduplication). They often imply irony, a negative evaluation or are sound-imitations (e. x. ding-dong).

REDUPLICATION Stylistically speaking, most words made by reduplication represent informal groups: colloquialisms and slang. E. g. walkie-talkie ("a portable radio"), riff-raff ("the worthless or disreputable element of society"; "the dregs of society"), chi-chi (sl. for chic as in a chi-chi girl).

REDUPLICATION Reduplication compounds are a very mixed group, some of them phonetically motivated (onomatopoeic) words, others made up of pseudo-morphemes. Onomatopoeia was introduced by Jespersen (echoism).

ONOMATOPOEIA For instance, English dogs bark (cf. the R. лаять) or howl (cf. the R. выть). The English cock cries cock-a-doodle-doo (cf. the R. ку-каре-ку). In England ducks quack and frogs croak.

BACK –FORMATION (REVERSION) 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 verbs to beg, to burgle, to cobble 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. That is why this type of word-building received the name of back-formation or reversion.

BLENDINGS Blendings, also known as fusions or “telescoping formations” are made up of parts of two or more words so that the parts they have in common serve as a connecting element. Blendings are a very productive class of words in Modern English.

BLENDINGS Two subclasses are distinguished: - additive blendings -restrictive blendings The first class runs together both parts of the sound forms of two words and their meaning (smog – smoke+fog). The restrictive type runs together an attributive phrase, where the first element serves as the modifier of the second (medicare= medical care).

ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS Abbreviated words are those formed from the initial letters of a phrasal term: GPO – General post Office GMT – Greenwich Mean Time The words thus formed are called acronyms if the written form resembles an English word (NATO).

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