Word formation

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In linguistics, word formation is an ambiguous term [1] that can refer to either:

Contents

Morphological

A common method of word formation is the attachment of inflectional or derivational affixes.

Derivation

Examples include:

Inflection

Inflection is modifying a word for the purpose of fitting it into the grammatical structure of a sentence. [4] For example:

Nonmorphological

Abbreviation

Examples includes:

Acronyms & Initialisms

An acronym is a word formed from the first letters of other words. [6] For example:

Acronyms are usually written entirely in capital letters, though some words originating as acronyms, like radar , are now treated as common nouns. [7]

Initialisms are similar to acronyms, but where the letters are pronounced as a series of letters. For example:

Back-formation

In linguistics, back-formation is the process of forming a new word by removing actual affixes, or parts of the word that is re-analyzed as an affix, from other words to create a base. [5] Examples include:

The process is motivated by analogy: edit is to editor as act is to actor. This process leads to a lot of denominal verbs.

The productivity of back-formation is limited, with the most productive forms of back-formation being hypocoristics. [5]

Blending

A lexical blend is a complex word typically made of two word fragments. For example:

Although blending is listed under the Nonmorphological heading, there are debates as to how far blending is a matter of morphology. [1]

Compounding

Compounding is the processing of combining two bases, where each base may be a fully-fledged word. For example:

Compounding is a topic relevant to syntax, semantics, and morphology. [2]

Hashtagging as word formation

Linguists argue that hashtags are words and hashtagging is a morphological process. [8] [9] Social media users view the syntax of existing viral hashtags as guiding principles for creating new ones. A hashtag's popularity is therefore influenced more by the presence of popular hashtags with similar syntactic patterns than by its conciseness and clarity. [10]

Word formation vs. Semantic change

There are processes for forming new dictionary items which are not considered under the umbrella of word formation. [1] One specific example is semantic change, which is a change in a single word's meaning. The boundary between word formation and semantic change can be difficult to define as a new use of an old word can be seen as a new word derived from an old one and identical to it in form.

Related Research Articles

In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. The main two categories are derivational and inflectional affixes. Derivational affixes, such as un-, -ation, anti-, pre- etc., introduce a semantic change to the word they are attached to. Inflectional affixes introduce a syntactic change, such as singular into plural, or present simple tense into present continuous or past tense by adding -ing, -ed to an English word. All of them are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes.

A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge. In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word lexicon derives from Greek word λεξικόν, neuter of λεξικός meaning 'of or for words'.

A lexeme is a unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of words that are related through inflection. It is a basic abstract unit of meaning, a unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single root word. For example, in the English language, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, which can be represented as RUN.

A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this is the distinction, respectively, between free and bound morphemes. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.

In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language. Most approaches to morphology investigate the structure of words in terms of morphemes, which are the smallest units in a language with some independent meaning. Morphemes include roots that can exist as words by themselves, but also categories such as affixes that can only appear as part of a larger word. For example, in English the root catch and the suffix -ing are both morphemes; catch may appear as its own word, or it may be combined with -ing to form the new word catching. Morphology also analyzes how words behave as parts of speech, and how they may be inflected to express grammatical categories including number, tense, and aspect. Concepts such as productivity are concerned with how speakers create words in specific contexts, which evolves over the history of a language.

Morphological derivation, in linguistics, is the process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix, such as un- or -ness. For example, unhappy and happiness derive from the root word happy.

In linguistics, function words are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. They signal the structural relationships that words have to one another and are the glue that holds sentences together. Thus they form important elements in the structures of sentences.

Lexical semantics, as a subfield of linguistic semantics, is the study of word meanings. It includes the study of how words structure their meaning, how they act in grammar and compositionality, and the relationships between the distinct senses and uses of a word.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Agglutination</span> Process of word formation by combining morphemes of singular meaning

In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages. For example, in the agglutinative language of Turkish, the word evlerinizden consists of the morphemes ev-ler-i-n-iz-den. Agglutinative languages are often contrasted with isolating languages, in which words are monomorphemic, and fusional languages, in which words can be complex, but morphemes may correspond to multiple features.

A root is the core of a word that is irreducible into more meaningful elements. In morphology, a root is a morphologically simple unit which can be left bare or to which a prefix or a suffix can attach. The root word is the primary lexical unit of a word, and of a word family, which carries aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. Content words in nearly all languages contain, and may consist only of, root morphemes. However, sometimes the term "root" is also used to describe the word without its inflectional endings, but with its lexical endings in place. For example, chatters has the inflectional root or lemma chatter, but the lexical root chat. Inflectional roots are often called stems. A root, or a root morpheme, in the stricter sense, a mono-‑morphemic stem.

Lemmatization in linguistics is the process of grouping together the inflected forms of a word so they can be analysed as a single item, identified by the word's lemma, or dictionary form.

In linguistics, a word stem is a part of a word responsible for its lexical meaning. Typically, a stem remains unmodified during inflection with few exceptions due to apophony

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Word</span> Basic element of language

A word is a basic element of language that carries meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguists on its definition and numerous attempts to find specific criteria of the concept remain controversial. Different standards have been proposed, depending on the theoretical background and descriptive context; these do not converge on a single definition. Some specific definitions of the term "word" are employed to convey its different meanings at different levels of description, for example based on phonological, grammatical or orthographic basis. Others suggest that the concept is simply a convention used in everyday situations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wiyot language</span> Extinct Algic language of California

Wiyot or Soulatluk is an Algic language spoken by the Wiyot people of Humboldt Bay, California. The language's last native speaker, Della Prince, died in 1962.

In linguistics, the term nominal refers to a category used to group together nouns and adjectives based on shared properties. The motivation for nominal grouping is that in many languages nouns and adjectives share a number of morphological and syntactic properties. The systems used in such languages to show agreement can be classified broadly as gender systems, noun class systems or case marking, classifier systems, and mixed systems. Typically an affix related to the noun appears attached to the other parts of speech within a sentence to create agreement. Such morphological agreement usually occurs in parts within the noun phrase, such as determiners and adjectives. Languages with overt nominal agreement vary in how and to what extent agreement is required.

In linguistics and literature, periphrasis is the use of a larger number of words, with an implicit comparison to the possibility of using fewer. The comparison may be within a language or between languages. For example, "more happy" is periphrastic in comparison to "happier", and English "I will eat" is periphrastic in comparison to Spanish comeré.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English language</span> West Germanic language

English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, whose speakers, called Anglophones, originated in early medieval England on the island of Great Britain. The namesake of the language is the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples that migrated to Britain after its Roman occupiers left. English is the most spoken language in the world, primarily due to the global influences of the former British Empire and the United States. English is the third-most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish; it is also the most widely learned second language in the world, with more second-language speakers than native speakers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Inflection</span> Process of word formation

In linguistic morphology, inflection is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, while the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc. can be called declension.

In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes. They are very highly inflected languages. Polysynthetic languages typically have long "sentence-words" such as the Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq.

Francis X. Katamba is a Ugandan-born British linguist. He is currently an emeritus professor at the Department of Linguistics and English Language of Lancaster University, United Kingdom. His research focuses on Luganda phonology and morphology, English phonology and morphology, morphological theory, phonological theory, and African linguistics.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Bauer, L. (1 January 2006). "Word Formation". Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (Second Edition). Elsevier: 632–633. doi:10.1016/b0-08-044854-2/04235-8. ISBN   9780080448541 . Retrieved 17 December 2021.
  2. 1 2 Baker, Anne; Hengeveld, Kees (2012). Linguistics. Malden, MA.: John Wiley & Sons. p. 23. ISBN   978-0631230366.
  3. Katamba, F. (1 January 2006). "Back-Formation". Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (Second Edition): 642–645. doi:10.1016/B0-08-044854-2/00108-5. ISBN   9780080448541.
  4. Linguistics : the basics. Anne, July 8- Baker, Kees Hengeveld. Malden, MA.: John Wiley & Sons. 2012. p. 217. ISBN   978-0-631-23035-9. OCLC   748812931.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 Katamba, F. (1 January 2006). "Back-Formation". Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (Second Edition): 642–645. doi:10.1016/B0-08-044854-2/00108-5. ISBN   9780080448541.
  6. 1 2 Aronoff, Mark (1983). "A Decade of Morphology and Word Formation". Annual Review of Anthropology . 12: 360. doi:10.1146/annurev.an.12.100183.002035.
  7. Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew (2018). An Introduction to English Morphology: Words and Their Structure (2nd ed.). Edinburgh University Press. p. 71. ISBN   978-1-4744-2896-5.
  8. Caleffi, Paola-Maria (2015). "The 'hashtag': A new word or a new rule?" (PDF). Skase Journal of Theoretical Linguistics. 12 (2). ISSN   1336-782X.
  9. Calude, Andreea S.; Long, Maebh; Burnette, Jessie (2024-06-07). "#AreHashtagsWords? Structure, position, and syntactic integration of hashtags in (English) tweets". Linguistics Vanguard . 10 (1): 105–114. doi:10.1515/lingvan-2023-0044. ISSN   2199-174X.
  10. Wan, Ming Feng (2024-03-12). "The role of syntax in hashtag popularity". Linguistics Vanguard . 10 (1): 693–698. doi:10.1515/lingvan-2023-0051. ISSN   2199-174X.

See also