Lingua inglese - Talking about new words formation

Talking about new word formation in English

In English, the combination or the alteration of morphemes generates new word formation. The word formation can happen in different ways. The major processes are: creation, derivation, compounding, and reduplication. Instead, the minors, which occur less frequently, are: acronym, blending, and clipping.

Understanding the term "word"

Before I talk about word formation, it is necessary to consider the term "word". The word is the largest unit of language and comes from the combination of morphemes; a morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of language. The linguistic distinguishes two types of morpheme: free and bound, that could be grammatical (function words and inflexional affixes) and lexical (content words and derivational affixes). The combination of morphemes that are rule-governed forms new words.

Derivation in word formation

Lots of words are generated through a system of derivation, or rather through the addition of a derivational affix to the root of a word. When we generically talk about affix, we indicate suffixes and prefixes that could be of different types.

Types of suffixes

Suffixes can be divided into: nominal suffixes, verbal suffixes, adjectival suffixes, and adverbial suffixes.

Nominal suffixes

The nominal suffixes are often employed to derive abstract nouns from verbs, adjectives, and nouns. Nominal suffixes are: -age, -al, -ance, -ant, -ce/-cy, -dom, -ee, -eer, -er, -or, -(e)ry, -ess, -ful, -hood, -(i)an, -(e)an, -ing, -ion, -ism, -ist, -ity, -ment, -ness, and -ship.

Some examples of words generated by the addition of nominal suffixes are: voltage, arrival, absorbance, dispersant, convergence, kingdom, employee, mountaineer, mixer, bakery, handful, childhood, Anglican, running, personification, racism, fantasist, formality, treatment, etc.

Verbal suffixes

After the addition of a verbal suffix as: -en, ify, and ize, we have new verbs from other categories, mostly adjectives and nouns. We can find some examples of verbs originated in this way in: quicken, humidify, hospitalize, etc.

Adjectival suffixes

The adjectives that come from the addition to the root of the adjectival suffixes can be subdivided into relational adjectives and qualitative adjectives. The adjectival suffixes are: -able, -al, -ary, -ed, -esque, -ful, -ic/ical, -ing, -ish, -ive, -less, -ly, -ous.

Adjectives formed by the addition of this type of suffixes are: readable, cultural, complementary, wooded, picturesque, beautiful, historical, hopeless, curious, etc.

Adverbial suffixes

There are two suffixes which derive adverbs from other categories, the adverbial suffixes –ly and wise, that generate adverbs as: hardly, shortly, crosswise, etc.

Derivational phenomena

When we talk of derivation, we must say that not always when a suffix is added to a root do we have a derivational phenomenon, but this also happens in other instances.