Some Non-Productive Affixes
Lecture №4
How English words are made. Word-building.
Words are divided into smaller units which are called morphemes. Morphemes do not occur as free forms but only as constituents (составляющая) of words. All morphemes are subdivided into two large classes: roots (or radicals) and affixes. In their turn, affixes fall into prefixes which precede the root in the structure of the word (mis-pronounce, re-read, un-well) and suffixes which follow the root (teach-er, dict-ate, cur-able).
Words which consist of a root and an affix or several affixes are called derived words or derivatives (производное слово). They are produced by the process of word-building known as affixation or derivation (деривация, словопроизводство). Derived words are extremely numerous in the English vocabulary.
The so-called root word which has only a root morpheme in its structure is competing with derived words. This type is widely represented by a great number of words belonging to the original English stock or to earlier borrowings (house, room, book, work, port, street, table), and, in Modern English, has been enlarged by the type of word-building called conversion (to hand, v. formed from the noun hand; to can, v. from the noun can).
Another wide-spread word-structure is a compound word consisting of two or more stems (stem is a part of word consisting of root and affix; in English words stem and root often coincide) (dining-room, mother-in-law, bluebell). Words of this structural type are produced by the word-building process called composition (словосложение).
Words like flu, lab, pram (детская коляска) are called shortenings, contractions or curtailed words and are produced by the way of word-building called shortening (contraction - сокращение).
The four types (root words, derived words, compounds (сложное слово), shortenings) represent the main structural types of Modern English words, and conversion, derivation and composition the most productive ways of word-building.
Affixation
The process of affixation consists in creating a new word by adding an affix or several affixes to some root morpheme. The role of the affix in this procedure is very important and therefore it is necessary to consider certain facts about the main types of affixes.
From the etymological point of view affixes can be classified into the same two large groups as words: native and borrowed.
Some Native Suffixes
| Noun-forming | -er | Worker, miner, teacher, painter |
| -ness | Coldness, loveliness, loneliness | |
| -dom | Freedom, wisdom, kingdom | |
| -hood | Childhood, manhood, motherhood | |
| -ship | Friendship, mastership, companionship | |
| - th | Length, health, truth | |
| -ing | Feeling, meaning, singing, reading | |
| Adjective-forming | -ful | Careful, joyful, wonderful, skilful |
| -less | Careless, cloudless, senseless | |
| -y | Cozy, tidy, merry, snowy, showy | |
| -ish | English, Spanish, reddish, childish | |
| -ly | Lonely, lovely, ugly, likely | |
| -en | Wooden, woolen, silken, golden | |
| -some | Handsome, quarrelsome, tiresome | |
| Verb-forming | -en | Widen, redden, darken, sadden |
| Adverb-forming | -ly | Warmly, hardly, simply, carefully, coldly |
Affixes can be also classified into productive and non-productive types. Productive affixes are affixes which take part in deriving new words in this peculiar period of language development. The best way to identify productive affixes is to look for them among neologisms which are usually formed on the level of living speech and reflect the most productive and progressive patterns in word-building.
Some Productive Affixes
| Noun-forming suffixes | -er, - ing, -ness, -ism(materialism), -ist(impressionist), -ance |
| Adjective-forming suffixes | -y, - ish, - ed(learned), -able, -less |
| Adverb-forming suffix | -ly |
| Verb-forming suffixes | -ize/ise (realize), -ate |
| Prefixes | un- (unhappy), re- (reconstruct), dis- (disappoint) |
Some Non-Productive Affixes
| Noun-forming suffixes | -th, -hood |
| Adjective-forming suffixes | -ly, -some, -en, -ous |
| Verb-forming suffix | -en |
Semantics of Affixes
The morpheme, and therefore affix, which is a type of morpheme, is generally defined as the smallest indivisible component of the word possessing its own meaning. Meanings of affixes are specific and considerably differ from those of root morphemes. Affixes have widely generalized meanings and refer to the concept conveyed/carried by the whole word to a certain category, which is vast (обширный, громадный) and all-embracing (всеобъемлющий).
So, the noun-forming suffix -er could be defined as designating persons from the object of their occupation or labour (painter – the one who paints) or from their place of origin or abode (местожительство) (southerner – the one living in the South).
The meaning of a derived word is always a sum of the meanings of its morphemes: un/eat/able = “not fit to eat” where not stands for un- and fit for -able. There are numerous derived words whose meanings can be easily deduced from the meanings of their constituent parts. But the constituent morphemes within derivatives do not always preserve their current meanings and are open to complicated semantic shifts.
Conversion
Conversion is one of the most productive ways of modern English word-building. Conversion consists in making a new word from some existing word by changing the category of a part of speech, the morphemic shape of the original word remaining unchanged. Normally, a word changes its syntactic function without any shift in lexical meaning. It has also paradigm peculiar to its new category as a part of speech.
| nurse, n. | to nurse, v. |
| Substantive paradigm -s, pl. -‘s, poss. c., sg. -s’, poss. c., pl. | Verbal paradigm -s, 3rd p.sg. -ed, past indef., past part. -ing, pres. part., gerund |
The new word automatically acquires all the properties of the new category, so that if it has entered the verb category, it is now regularly used in all the forms of tense and it also develops the forms of the participle and the gerund.
The two categories of parts of speech especially affected by conversion are nouns and verbs. Verbs made from nouns are the most numerous among the words produced by the conversion: to back, to face, to eye, to room, to stage.
Nouns are frequently made from verbs: do – event, incident; go – energy. Verbs can also be made from adjectives: to yellow, to pale, to cool.
A word made by conversion has a different meaning from that of the word from which it was made though the two meanings can be associated. There are certain regularities in these classifications which can be classified. For example, in the group of verbs made from nouns some of the regular semantic associations are the following:
I. The noun is the name of a tool or implement (инструмент), the verb denotes an action performed by the tool: to hammer, to brush, to comb, to pencil.
II. The noun is the name of an animal, the verb denotes an action or aspect of behaviour considered typical of this animal: to dog, to wolf, to monkey, to fox, to rat.
III. The name of a part of the human body – an action performed by it: to hand, to leg, to eye, to nose, to shoulder.
IV. The name of a profession or occupation – an activity typical of it: to nurse, to cook, to maid.
V. The name of a place – the process of occupying the place or of putting smb./smth. In it: to room, to house, to place, to table.
VI. The name of a container – the act of putting smth. within the container: to can, to bottle, to pocket.
VII. The name of a meal – the process of taking it: to lunch, to supper.
These groups do not include all the great variety of words made from nouns by conversion. They just represent the most obvious cases.
Composition
This type of word-building, in which new words are produced by combining two or more stems, is one of the three most productive types in Modern English; the other two are conversion and affixation. There are three types of compounds: neutral, morphological and syntactic.
In neutral compounds the process of compounding is realized without any linking elements, by a mere juxtaposition (наложение, соприкосновение) of two stems: bedroom, sunflower, blackbird.
Morphological compounds are few in number. This type is non-productive. It is represented by words in which two compounding (соединять) stems are combined by a linking vowel or consonant: Anglo-Saxon, spokesman, statesman.
Syntactic compounds are formed from segments of speech, preserving in their structure numerous traces of syntagmatic relations typical of speech: articles, prepositions, adverbs: Jack-of-all-trades, mother-in-law, good-for-nothing (бездельник).
Shortening (Contraction)
This type of word-building is very productive. Shortenings are produced in different ways. The first is to make a new word from a syllable of the original word: phone made from telephone, fence from defence, flu from influenza, fridge from refrigerator, props from properties.
The second way of shortening is to make a new word from the initial letters of a word group: U.N.O from the United Nations Organization, M.P. from Member of Parliament. This type is called initial shortenings (аббревиация).
Sound-Imitation
Words created by this type are made by imitating different kinds of sounds that may be produced by animals, birds, insects, human beings and inanimate (неодушевленный) objects.
English dogs bark (R. лаять). The English cock cries cock-a-doodle-do (R. ку-ка-ре-ку). In England ducks quack [kwaek] and frogs croak (R. крякать, квакать). English cats mew (R. мяукать).
Some names of animals and especially of birds and insects are also produced by sound-imitation: crow (ворона), cuckoo (кукушка), humming-bird (колибри), whip-poor-will [wipewil] (козодой жалобный), cricket (сверчок).
Back-formation (Reversion –обратное словообразование)
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. In all these cases the verb was made from the noun by subtracting (вычитать) what was mistakenly associated with the English suffix -er. Examples: to baby-sit from baby-sitter, to force-land (совершать вынужденную посадку) from forced land, to blood-transfuse (переливать кровь) from blood-transfusion.
Seminar №5