Lingua Inglese 1

Word Formation Processes

Mistakes can be found in shop signs or hypercorrection, people put it where it is not needed.

Stress placement

In a minority of cases, derivation is effected by changing stress placement. Nouns can be derived from verbs and verbs from nouns by changing the stress in a word.

Reduplication

Reduplication is a process similar to derivation, in which the initial syllable or the entire word is doubled, exactly or with a slight phonological change. Reduplication is not a common or regular process of word formation in English, though it may be in other languages. In English, it is often used in children's language (e.g. boo-boo, putt-putt, choo-choo) or for humorous or ironic effect (e.g., goody-goody, rah-rah, pooh-pooh).

Three different kinds of reduplication can be identified:

1. exact or full reduplication, i.e. the repetition of the entire word: papa, mama, goody-goody, so-so, hush-hush, never-never, tutu, fifty-fifty, bang-bang, bye-bye, night-night (or nighty-night), go-go;
2. ablaut reduplicationin which the vowel alternates while the consonants are identical: crisscross, zigzag, flip-flop, mish-mash, wishy-washy, clip-clop, riff-raff, achy-breaky, shilly-shally, pitter-patter; 3.partial or rhyme reduplicationin which the consonants change while the vowel remains thesame: hodge-podge, fuddy-duddy, razzle-dazzle, boogie-woogie, nitty-gritty, roly-poly, hob-nob, hocus-pocus, airy-fairy, hoity-toity, willy-nilly. Reduplications can be formed with two meaningful parts,forexample, flower-power, brain drain, culture vulture, boy toy, or heart smart. Reduplication has many different functions: it can express disparagement (namby-pamby), intensification (super-duper), diminution (teeny-weeny), onomatopoeia (tick-tock), or alternation (ping-pong), among other uses. Shm-reduplication: A peculiar type of reduplication that has attracted considerable interest among linguists since it’s quite productive (Nevins/Vaux2003). It came into English from Yiddish as a result of language contact. In Yiddish, many words.

   Beginning with s(c)hm-have negative connotation. The pejorative use of shm-was extended to English from Jewish speakers in the north-east of the United States, spreading to other dialects. Shm-reduplication derives its name from the fact that shm-is used as the onset of the first syllable of the reduplicated word. The meaning of the reduplicated word tends to have uncomplimentary connotations. E.g.: You call yourself a captain? Captain shmaptain, what leadership did you show? Posting charges are easy and precise. No fancy shmancy billing modules that only confuse you and help you make mistakes.

   Compounding Compounding, the combination of nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs or prepositions to form complex words, has always been a highly productive process. A compound is the combination of two or more free roots (plus associated affixes). Both the semantics and the syntax of compound are complex. Often the semantics of compounds are not simply a sum of the meaning of the parts; that is, if we know the meaning of

   The tworoots,we cannot necessarily predict the meaning of thecompound,as in firearm,highball,makeup,or handout.Note the various ways in which the meanings of the roots of thesecompounds interact with home:homeland ‘land which is one’s home’homemade ‘something which is made at home’homebody ‘someone who stays at home’homestead ‘a place which is a home’homework ‘work which is done at home’homerun ‘a run to home’homemaker ‘a person who makes(cares for)the home.Solo letturaNormally,compounds are classified on the basis of the word class of theirconstituents and the class of the entire resulting word.Compounds always have ahead word,which assigns the syntacticproperties to the entire word,typically following the right-hand headrule(i.e.,the idea that the head is normally the right-hand-mostelement).The right-hand head rule is subverted in two major ways:1.In cases of conversion->Ex.:up market(as in an up

   1. Market club is an adjective and not a noun, though the last word of the compound is a noun.
   2. Phrasal verbs (e.g. look for, look up to, look into) are a very large class of compound words with a head on the left.

   Compounds are either written without a space between them (e.g. sunset) or they are hyphenated (e.g. double-sided). But very many compounds are written as separate, unhyphenated words (e.g. life insurance, Prime Minister, etc.). Inflection in compounds appears at its right edge. For example, the plural of mousetrap is mousetraps (not micetrap), the plural of bean feast is bean feasts (not beans feast), etc.

   Coinage is the word manufacture without recycling existing words and morphemes. It is rare and mostly found in names of corporations and their commercial products. For example, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, nylon is an invented word. It was coined in 1938 by the Du Pont Pharmaceutical company by combining the fabricated stem nyl- with the pseudo-suffix -on found in other names of textile.

   fibres (e.g. rayon, cotton). Solo lettura

   Eponym

   Eponyms are new words created by widening the meaning of a personal name to refer to a place, concept or product associated with that person. Ex.: Kafkaesque (from Franz Kafka); lynching (from Charles Lynch); mesmerize (from Franz Mesmer); pasteurization (from Louis Pasteur); Seattle (from Chief Seattle), Victoria (in Australia, British Columbia, etc., from Queen Victoria).

   In Business Discourse, eponymy is a highly productive word-formation process as new companies and products come into existence all the time. Thus, Boeing, the aircraft manufacturer, is named after its founder, William E. Boeing; Michael Dell made sure that his computer company, and its products, were called Dell, and soon. Solo lettura.

   Backformation

   In backformation, speakers derive a morphologically simple word from a form which they analyze, on the basis of derivational and inflectional patterns existing in English, as a morphologically complex word. Ex.: By analogy with the very common derivational pattern in English

   In which the agentive suffix -er is added to a verb to produce a noun (sing+-er>singer; work+-er>worker; buy+-er>buyer), verbs have been formed from the following nouns by the removal of an agentive suffix, as in sightseer–-er>sightsee, babysitter–-er>baby-sit, or typewriter–-er>typewrite. Since the nouns predate the verbs in these cases, we say that the verbs are ‘back-formed’.