14 Word Formation in English

Dr. Neeru Tandon

Learning Outcome: The existence of words is usually taken for granted by the speakers of a language. To speak and understand a language means – among many other things – knowing the words of that language. The average speaker knows thousands of words, and new words enter our minds and our language on a daily basis. This module is about words. More specifically, it deals with the internal structure of complex words, i.e. words that are composed of more than one meaningful element. Take, for example, the very word meaningful, which could be argued to consist of two elements, meaning and -ful, or even three, mean, -ing, and – ful. We will address the question of how such words are related to other words and how the language allows speakers to create new words. For example, meaningful seems to be clearly related to colorful, but perhaps less so to awful or plentiful. And, given that meaningful may be paraphrased as ‘having (a definite) meaning’, and colorful as ‘having (bright or many different) colors’, we could ask whether it is also possible to create the word coffeeful, meaning ‘having coffee’. Under the assumption that language is a rule-governed system, it should be possible to find meaningful answers to such questions

Introduction: It has been estimated that average speakers of a language know from 45,000 to 60,000 words. This means that we as speakers must have stored these words somewhere in our heads, our so-called mental lexicon. But what exactly is it that we have stored? What do we mean when we speak of ‘words’? In non-technical every-day talk, we speak about ‘words’ without ever thinking that this could be a problematic notion. In this section we will see that, perhaps contra our first intuitive feeling, the ‘word’ as a linguistic unit deserves some attention, because it is not as straightforward as one might expect. If you had to define what a word is, you might first think of the word as a unit in the writing system, the so-called orthographic word. You could say, for example, that a word is an uninterrupted string of letters which is preceded by a blank space and followed either by a blank space or a punctuation mark.

In traditional grammar, words are the basic units of analysis. Grammarians classify words according to their parts of speech and identify and list the forms that words can show up in. Words are the main units used for entries in dictionaries. In fact Words are potentially complex units, composed of even more basic units, called morphemes. A morpheme is the smallest part of a word that has grammatical function or meaning.

DEFINITION

‘In linguistics (particularly morphology and lexicology), word formation refers to the ways in which new words are made on the basis of other words or morphemes. Also called derivational morphology.

Word-formation can denote either a state or a process, and it can be viewed either diachronically (through different periods in history) or synchronically (at one particular period in time)

Most English vocabulary arises by making new lexemes out of old ones—either by adding an affix to previously existing forms, altering their word class, or combining them to produce compounds. These processes of construction are of interest to grammarians as well as lexicologists . . .. But the importance of word-formation to the development of the lexicon is second to none . . .. After all, almost any lexeme, whether Anglo-Saxon or foreign, can be given an affix, change its word class, or help make a compound. Alongside the Anglo-Saxon root in kingly, for example, we have the French root in royally and the Latin root in regally. There is no elitism here. The processes of affixation, conversion, and compounding are all great levellers.”(David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2003)

History of Word Formation: Following years of complete or partial neglect of issues concerning word formation (by which we mean primarily derivation, compounding, and conversion), the year 1960 marked a revival—some might even say a resurrection—of this important field of linguistic study. As a result, a large number of seminal works emerged over the next decades, making the scope of word- formation research broader and deeper, thus contributing to better understanding of this exciting area of human language.”

Birth and Death Rates of Words: “Just as a new species can be born into an environment, a word can emerge in a language. Evolutionary selection laws can apply pressure on the sustainability of new words since there are limited resources (topics, books, etc.) for the use of words. Along the same lines, old words can be driven to extinction when cultural and technological factors limit the use of a word, in analogy to the environmental factors that can change the survival capacity of a living species by altering its ability to survive and reproduce.” (Alexander M. Petersen, Joel Tenenbaum, Shlomo Havlin, and H. Eugene Stanley, “Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death.” Scientific Reports, March 15,

Processes of Word-Formation:

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. “Apart from the processes that attach something to a base (affixation) and processes that do not alter the base (conversion), there are processes involving the deletion of material . . .. English Christian names, for example, can be shortened by deleting parts of the base word. This type of word formation is called truncation, with the term clipping also being used. Sometimes truncation and affixation can occur together, as with formations expressing intimacy or smallness, so-called diminutives.

We also find so-called blends, which are amalgamations of parts of different words, such as smog (-smoke/fog) or modem (modulator/demodulator).

Bound Morpheme, Free Morpheme and Bound Roots: As we can see from the complex words 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. 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. Note that there are also bound roots, i.e. roots that only occur in combination with some other bound morpheme. Examples of bound roots are often of Latin origin, e.g. later- (as in combination with the adjectival suffix -al), circul- (as in circulate, circulation, circulatory, circular), approb- (as in approbate, approbation, approbatory, approbator), simul- (as in simulant, simulate, simulation), but occasional native bound roots can also be found (e.g. hap-, as in hapless).

ACRONYMS: ’Blends based on orthography are called acronyms, which are coined by combining the initial letters of compounds or phrases into a pronounceable new word (NATO, UNESCO, etc.). Simple abbreviations like UK or USA are also quite common.”

COMPLEX WORDS: Sometimes new complex words are derived without an existing word formation rule, but formed on the basis of a single (or very few) model words. For example, ear -witness ‘someone who has heard a crime being committed’ was coined on the basis of eyewitness, cheeseburger on the basis of hamburger, and air-sick on the basis of sea-sick. The process by which these words came into being is called analogy, which can be modeled as proportional relation between words.

employee VS. neighbour

In columns 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. We can thus decompose complex words into their smallest meaningful units. These units are called morphemes. On the other hand the words like neighbour 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, whereas neither neighb- nor -or carry any meaning in neighbor (a neighbor is not someone who neighbs, whatever that may be.

Productive and unproductive Affixes

Some affixes are often used to create new words, whereas others are less often used, or not used at all for this purpose. The property of an affix to be used to coin new complex words is referred to as the productivity of that affix. Not all affixes possess this property to the same degree, some affixes do not possess it at all. For example, we KNOW that nominal -th (as in length) can only attach to a small number of specified words, but cannot attach to any other words beyond that set. This suffix can therefore be considered unproductive. Even among affixes that can in principle be used to coin new words, there seem to be some that are more productive than others.For example, the suffix -ness (as cuteness) gives rise to many more new words than, for example, the suffix -ish (as in apish). The obvious question now is which mechanisms.

Productivity and formation of words: possible, or potential word

Intuitively, the notion of productivity must make reference to the speaker’s ability to form new words and to the conditions the language system imposes on new words. This brings us to a central distinction in morphology, the one between ‘possible’ (or ‘potential’) and ‘actual’ words. A possible, or potential, word can be defined as a word whose semantic, morphological or phonological structure is in accordance with the rules and regularities of the language. It is obvious that before one can assign the status of ‘possible word’ to a given form, these rules and regularities need to be stated as clearly as possible. It is equally clear that very often, the status of a word as possible is uncontroversial. For example, it seems that all transitive verbs can be turned into adjectives by the attachment of -able. Thus, affordable, readable, manageable are all possible words. Notably, these forms are also semantically transparent, i.e. their meaning is predictable on the basis of the word-formation rule according to which they have been formed. Predictability of meaning is therefore another property of potential words. In the case of the potential words affordable, readable, manageable, these words are also actual words, because they have already been coined and used by speakers. But not all possible words are existing words, because, to use again the example of -able, the speakers of English have not coined – able derivatives on the basis of each and every transitive verb of English. For instance, take the word CANNIBALIZABLE that is not an existing word, in the sense that it is used by the speakers of English. However, it is a possible word of English because it is in accordance with the rules of English word-formation, and if speakers had a practical application for it they could happily use it.

Having clarified the notion of possible word, we can turn to the question of what an actual (or existing) word is. A loose definition would simply say that actual words are those words that are in use. However, when can we consider a word as being ‘in use’? Does it mean that some speaker has observed it being used somewhere or that the majority of the speech community is familiar with it? Or that it is listed in dictionaries?

Active and Passive Words: ALL speakers know the same words is not a possibility, i.e. the mental lexicon of one speaker is never completely identical to any other speaker’s mental lexicon. Furthermore, it is even not completely clear when we can say that a given word is ‘known’ by a speaker, or ‘listed’ in her mental lexicon.

For example, we know that the more frequent a word is the more easily we can memorize it and retrieve it later from our lexicon. This entails, however, that-

‘knowledge of a word’ is a gradual notion, and that we know some words better than others. Note that this is also the underlying assumption in foreign language learning where there is often a distinction made between the so-called ‘active’ and ‘passive’ vocabulary. The active vocabulary obviously consists of words that we know ‘better’ than those that constitute our passive vocabulary. The same distinction holds for native speakers, who also actively use only a subset of the words that they are familiar with. Another instance of graded knowledge of words is the fact that, even as native speakers, we often only know that we have heard or read a certain word before, but do not know what it means.

Complex words in the lexicon

Idiosyncratic complex words must be stored in the mental lexicon, because they cannot be derived on the basis of rules. But what about complex words that are completely regular, i.e. words that are in complete accordance with the word- formation rule on the basis of which they are formed? There are different models of the mental lexicon conceivable. In some approaches to morphology the lexicon is seen “like a prison – it contains only the lawless” (Di Sciullo and Williams 1987:3). In this view the lexicon would contain only information which is not predictable, which means that in this type of lexicon only simplex words, roots, and affixes would have a place, but no regular complex words. This is also the principle that is applied to regular dictionaries, which, for example, do not list regular past tense forms of verbs, because these can be generated by rule and need not be listed. The question is, however, whether our brain really follows the organizational principles established by dictionary makers. There is growing psycholinguistic evidence that it does not and that both simplex and complex words, regular and idiosyncratic, can be listed in the lexicon (in addition to the word formation rules and redundancy rules that relate words to one another).

THEORETICAL ISSUES: MODELING WORD-FORMATION

Why theory? Haven’t we so far rather successfully dealt?The answer is clearly ‘no’. Whenever we had to solve an empirical problem, i.e. to explain an observation with regard to complex words, we had to make recourse to theoretical notions such as ‘word’, ‘affix’, ‘rule’, ‘alternation’, ‘prosody’, ‘head’ etc. In other words, during our journey through the realm of complex words, we tacitly developed a theory of word- formation without ever addressing explicitly the question of how our theoretical bits and pieces may fit together to form an overall theory of word-formation. But what is a theory? In a more restricted sense a certain theory is a “hypothetical entity or structure explaining or relating an observed set of facts” (Webster’s Third, s. v. theory). Thus, a morphological theory would help us not only to understand observed (and yet unobserved) facts concerning complex words, but would also help us to develop hypotheses in order to arrive at general principles of word-formation. In very general terms a theory can help us to understand the world (better). This is also the idea behind the saying that there is nothing as practical as a good theory.

The first of these problems is the interaction of phonology and morphology, the second the form and nature of word-formation rules. Let us examine the theory of ‘lexical phonology’, which tries to explain the relationship between phonology and morphology in a principled fashion.

Alternative theories: We have frequently seen that any given affix or morphological process comes with its particular phonological, morphological, semantic and syntactic properties. Plag (1996, 1999) shows that these diverse properties together are responsible for the possible and impossible combinations of a given affix both with roots and with other affixes. What has been analyzed as would-be stratal behavior automatically falls out from the phonological, morphological and semantic properties of the affix. Since these properties must be stated anyway to account for the particular behavior of a given affix, no further stratal apparatus is necessary. Plag (1996, 1999) also incorporates the idea of base-driven suffixation to explain apparent idiosyncrasies in suffix combinations. The idea of base-driven restrictions in suffixation is that it is not only a given suffix that requires, or ‘selects’, a certain kind of base, but that bases, in particular bases that contain certain suffixes, may select a certain kind of affix. For illustration of this idea, consider the deverbal suffixes in (4), which, according to Fabb (1988), do not to attach to any suffixed word (this would be an affix-driven restriction): (4) deverbal nominal suffixes not attaching to an already suffixed word -age (as in steerage) -al (as in betrayal) -ance (as in annoyance) -ment (as in containment) -y (as in assembly) Why should these suffixes behave in this way? And is this a property that has to be stated in the lexical entry of each of the nominal suffixes? In an approach that only looks at the question of which kinds of base a given affix selects this would be essential. Let us call such an approach ‘affix-driven’. It is, however, possible to look at the problem from a different angle, i.e. from the perspective of the base

Theory of Word-based morphology: The theory of word-based morphology in generative grammar originated in Aronoff (1976). In this theory, affixes do not have an independent existence and do not have entries in the lexicon, only words do. And what is analyzed as a constituent morpheme in morpheme-based morphology is conceptualized as a particular phonological and semantic similarity between sets of words in word-based morphology. Thus, word-based morphology expresses the relationship between morphologically related words not by splitting up words into their components but by formalizing the common features of sets of words.

Summary: We can summarize this module in the words of Alexander Onysko and Sascha Michel – “[R]ecent voices stressing the importance of investigating word formation in the light of cognitive processes can be interpreted from two general perspectives. First of all, they indicate that a structural approach to the architecture of words and a cognitive view are not incompatible. On the contrary, both perspectives try to work out regularities in language. What sets them apart is the basic vision of how language is encapsulated in the mind and the ensuing choice of terminology in the description of the processes. . . . [C]ognitive linguistics concedes closely to the self-organizing nature of humans and their language, whereas generative-structuralist perspectives represent external boundaries as given in the institutionalized order of human interaction.”

Reference

• Bauer, Laurie. 1983. English Word-formation. London, UK: Cambridge University Press. 1988.
• Booij, Geert. 2005. The Grammar of Words. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
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