Word-formation:
some general issues (Origins chapter 11)
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§
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·
borrowing
·
most important in 16th
and 17th centuries (Nevalainen 351)
·
brought in new affixes
as well as new words
·
Most commonly, its own
resources: wordformation (and deformation)
·
deformation: clipping,
blending
·
formation: compounding,
affixing, and functional shift (e.g. using noun as verb)
·
now (and except during
that period in EModE) the most productive
·
particularly
characteristic of modern English: compounds from classical elements that were
never combined in classical times
·
Tyrannosaurus rex: Greek “tyrant” and “lizard”; Latin “king”
·
compounds are formed
from two free-standing words (“independent lexical items”): fleabite,
bookseller (C16th)
·
affixing involves adding
an affix to a free-standing word: non-toxic
·
prefixes tend to change
meaning (toxic!)
·
suffixes tend to change
word class (toxicity)
·
borderline:
neo-classical formations like astronaut
·
can’t stand alone: electro-,
-phile
·
but can form entire
words: hydrophobe
·
combining two
freestanding lexical units to form a new one: studmuffin, brewpub
·
common in OE
o
including loan-translations
(or calques): two elements of Latin patri-arch recognized and
rendered with two OE elements, heah-faeder
§
workbook 12.4 has some more modern ones
o
creative: hláf-weard
‘loaf-ward’, wif-mann ‘female human’
o
lord and woman
o
subsequent sound changes
sometimes impede analyzability
o
Algeo’s “amalgamated
compounds”
o
workbook 11.13
In EmodE, most compounds are
original
o
loan translations
include fairy tale 1750 on conte de fée
Most common compounds: N+N
o
different kinds of relationships
between the Ns
o
e.g. ‘copulative’: maidservant,
girlfriend; washerwoman (servant, friend, washer who is a …)
o
e.g. ‘rectional’
§
e.g. with a
‘object-subject’ relation: boatman (man has a boat)
§
e.g. N2 is for the N1: ashtray,
doghouse
o
workbook 11.12 has
more
o
lack of inflections can
obscure the relationship: teen killer (anecdote: coin laundry)
Stress patterns useful for
establishing
§
meaning: TEEN killer,
teen killer
§
lexicalization: white
house vs White House
If NN phrases do become
lexicalized, they can get clipped
§
(computer) programmer
§
cell(ular) (phone)
Foreign patterns
§
governor general, court
martial
§
not productive
Prefixes: usually change
meaning not class
§
un/happy
o
interesting form: inflammable
(does in- negate or intensify?)
Suffixes: usually change
class
·
happi/ness
§
not always: sonneteer,
rhymester
Affixing in EmodE:
Native affixes are most
high-frequency
§
blurry area between
vocabulary and grammar: verbal nouns in –ing
§
most common noun affixes
o
-er derivations (forms nouns from verbs): sinister
whisperers
o
-ness: makes abstract nouns from adjectives (goodness)
§
“prefers native bases
but isn’t limited to them”: disingenuousness
But some foreign ones became
very productive in this period
§
–ness and –ity are the main suffixes that derive
abstract nouns from adjectives
o
–ity mostly sticks to Latinate bases (oddity an
oddity)
o
but there is some
overlap with –ness, and it’s very productive
§
helps to look at bigger
context
·
“the capacity of a word
element ... to produce new words”
·
the amazing Brian-iz-er
·
unputdownable
·
in contrast to the
unproductive transparency or analyzability of –th
·
recognize it as having
formed abstract nouns like truth, warmth, growth, length, breadth, width
·
sloth isn’t analyzable/transparent because of subsequent
sound changes
·
but doesn’t make new
words: the few new formations are jocular: coolth, thickth
What might block new
formations?
·
phonological
characteristics of the base form
·
we don’t usually make
adverbs out of adjectives in –ly (friendlily tends to be avoided)
·
existing synonyms
“preemption by synonymy”) (McMahon 195): domestic blocks housely
or housey; vernal blocks springly (Gorlach 172)
·
existing verbs in ify
or ize might block new ones in ate: no edificate, deificate,
pulverizate
·
weren’t necessarily such
norms in EModE before dictionaries: verbs attested glad, gladden,
englad, engladden and beglad (Gorlach 172)
-principle: languages tend
not to have forms that are identical in form, meaning, register, region, etc.:
something has to differ
-verbs in –ate often
competed with their infinitive form
-variants later eliminated or
redistributed
-expire,
expirate: disappears
-prove,
probate: semantic differentiation
-orient,
orientate: regional differentiation
·
first, borrowed words
appear that are complex, i.e. that contain affixes
·
e.g. charioteer
and engineer
·
then the affixes become
analyzable: “person concerned with or engaged in, often in a military context”
·
then the affixes might
start to be productive
·
cannoneer, volunteer: often military
·
pulpiteer,
pamphleteer: extended (with ironic
hyperbole) to non-physical combat
·
waistcoateer ‘prostitute’, profiteer: or just derogatory
without denoting combat
·
mountaineer, auctioneer: though not always derogatory
·
mostly attached to
Romance bases
Some affixes have the ‘same’
form but different origins
§
see workbook 11.7:
amoral and aside
-English forms new words by
adding affixes: sleep, sleepy, sleeper
-occasionally the reverse
happens: a simple form is wrongly analyzed as a complex form, and a supposed
‘suffix’ is removed
-see workbook 11.16
for examples
-because
–s is the productive plural inflection, it’s sometimes removed from
singular loanwords
§
French cerise
-> cherry
§
Greek heros ->
hero
§
Dutch schaats
-> skate
-agent noun suffix –er added to verbs to make nouns
-so Latin editor -> edit, sculptor -> sculpt
(though see OED)
-also cobble, tipple from cobbler and tippler
-adjective
ending –y very productive: pattern of sleep and sleepy
spawned new nouns and verbs
-new nouns greed (1609) and haze (1706)
-later: nouns sleaze and funk from sleazy and funky
-verb laze formed from lazy (16th century)
-enough
nouns in –ation corresponded to verbs in –ate that new verbs were
formed from existing nouns in -ation
-legislate (c18th) from legislation, negate (17th
century) from negation
-orate
and donate: borrowings from Latin? or back-formations from oration
and donation?
-some
modern verbal nouns in –ing seem to have appeared before the
corresponding verbs: multitasking, dumpster-diving
-same
with other verb/noun pairs
-revise/revision model for television -> televise
-liaison -> liase
-tend to be semantically
derivative (televise ‘to put on television’, rather than television
as conceived as an act of televising)
o
Latin and Greek words
were being adapted in the European vernaculars as scientific and technological
terms, e.g. virus, vacuum, etc.
o
so were elements of
Latin and Greek, often newly combined
o
hybrids combine Greek
and Latin:
anti- (Greek,
‘opposite’) toxin (Latin, ‘poison’)
tele (Greek,
‘far’) + vision (Lat, ‘seeing’)
o
note: spelling of Greek
often depends on where we got it from
-e.g. Greek /k/
-<k> if directly from Greek, e.g.kinetic
-<c> if from Latin or French, e.g. calligraphy
-<c> /s/ if sound change within French, e.g.
cinema
o
elements like bio-
and –ology like dis- and –ness in that they can’t stand
alone
o
but they can combine
with each other (*dis-ness)
biocide,
ecophile, astrology
Etymological status of
classical compounds
o
Would you say television
is Greek, Latin, or English?
o
not necessarily coined
in an English-speaking country
o
present in most
languages, e.g. antitoxin is recognizable in English, French, Italian,
Swedish, Russian (calqued in German: Gegen-gift ‘against poison’)
o
ways around it:
“International Scientific Vocabulary”, just cite elements (OED) …
-auto “self-“ ->
“pertaining to cars” in Autoshare
-but still has meaning of ‘self’ in, e.g. autoimmune
disease
-tele “far” ->
“pertaining to televisions” in telegenic
-very common: using one part
of speech as another (foreground ‘to put in the foreground’)
-because English now has so
few grammatical endings
-OE lufu, lufian -> PDE love
-many noun -> verb: input,
foreground, trash, impact, snowboard, mountain
bike
-some the other way: double-click was a verb before
it was a noun
-most share stress patterns:
is this one way of telling whether a verb has come from a noun or not?
-Marchand
suggested that when there is a difference in stress, the noun has come from the
verb
-noun |address comes from the
verb ad |dress
-but we also find difference
in stress when the verb has come from the noun: escort (noun 1579, verb
1708), progress (noun 1432, verb 1590)
Some the result of several
processes in sequence
-private
‘lowest rank in army’ became a noun from an adjective as a result of the
clipping of private soldier
More “modern” processes:
Eponyms (derivation from common nouns)
-sandwich, stetson
-kind of metonymy (the thing
|| the inventor)
-usually commercial
-can be short-lived, if the thing disappears: Hansom, Anderson
Root creation
o
hard to document earlier
o
lots of onomatopoeic
words: clank, splash
o
words like fop, fib
have no known antecedents
o
easier with commercial
or scientific trail! Sound symbolism important
o
Blurb, Kodak, quark,
nylon
§
-on or –lon now has a
life of its own
§
Teflon: Tef sounds like ‘tough’, -lon
something smooth and high-tech
·
Exploits association
with neo-Greek –on (electron, proton, etc.)
Often not utterly made up
-Algeo: even when companies
do it with random computer generation, humans choose from the results
-e.g. CVCVC + suffix like –el, -ex, -on
Aim
-unique, novelty (both
science and commerce)
-accessibility (AAAA
locksmiths)
-memorable sound
-no unfortunate semantic
suggestions, e.g. Nova a bad name for a car in Spanish
Blends
-different processes, but
basically terminal loss in first item and initial loss in second item, where
there are usually overlapping parts in the fusion
-some from earlier: twirl
‘twist’ + ‘whirl’? 1598, blotch from blot and botch?
-Carroll’s chortle
(chuckle + snort), galumph (gallop + triumph) almost established
-many quite deliberate
-commercial: motor + hotel
(botels in Florida), selectric, infomercial
-science, news (Watergate,
Gatesgate, Spraypec) … shows short-lived nature of some
Clipping: app ‘application’, fax ‘facsimile’
-informal language: slow to
appear in writing
-but C16th examples: chap, gent, coz from chapman,
gentleman, cousin
-cute from acute 1731 (foreclipping)
-miss from mistress 1666 (backclipping)
-sometimes part of adaptation
process
-spinet, special, spy from French espinet, especial, espy
-but unstressed first syllable also lost from native words:
a/lone, a/live in C16th
-can change stress:
examination to exam
-can change meaning of what’s
left: soap, cell, chauvinist, auto, bus
-chauvinist ‘blind patriotism”
-bus: just part of a Latin grammar ending in word omnibus
(vehicle for all)
-often cuts off the end of a
word or phrase
-but
not always: bus, fridge, flu
-and
not at the original morphological boundary
-strep throat (strepto-coccus)
-condo (con-dominium)
-can lose etymological
spelling: fax from facsimile
-acro ‘tip’ + nym
‘name’
-term coined by analogy with
‘homonym’
-extreme kind of clipping
-relatively recent: need
literacy for it
-we know that people pronounced a.m, p.m., M.A.
-functions?
-efficient, authoritative
-catchy: MADD
-euphemistic (phonetic distortion):
general use: BO ‘body odour’
medicine: TB/AIDS, HIV
war: HRP (“human remains pouch”)
-often lose the origins
-e.g. laser – I’ve given up trying to
reconstruct it
Algeo distinguishes
-alphabetism (initialism):
UN, CBC, etc.
-acronym: pronounced as
single word NATO, UNESCO, RAM
-can use first few letters in order to make them more
pronounceable
-so
trendy that there are ‘reverse acronyms’: start with the result you want, like
MADD
-“a sort of political offshoot of normal acronymic
coinage”
Suffix –eer an
Anglicization of French –ier (itself from Latin –iarius > -ary)
·
forms nouns from other
nouns
·
sense “person concerned
with or engaged in”
o
except for a few words
like gazetteer and muffineer “device for putting sugar on
muffins”
First found in loanwords from
French in the C16th
·
interchangeable with –ier:
muletier/muleteer (and tons of other forms: -er, -our...)
·
though charioteer
and engineer come in earlier (ME engineour) and get assimilated
to –ier, -eer
In C17th, -eer and –ier
become distinct: brigadier, grenadier, gondolier
And –eer starts to be
productive within English
·
privateer “armed vessel (and its commander) owned and officered
by private individuals holding a government commission and authorized for war
service”
·
though mostly with
Romance forms?
Many early examples have
military connotations: cannoneer, volunteer
Extends to non-physical forms
of combat: pulpiteer, pamphleteer
o
in derogatory contexts
o
ironic hyperbole?
And can be derogatory without
denoting combat : waistcoateer ‘prostitute’, profiteer
But some words are neither
derogatory nor agonistic: auctioneer, mountaineer
Consider contexts
·
mostly Romance bases
(cf. –ster: rhymester, fraudster, etc.)
Tends to occur with –ing
(and occasionally to be backformed from these forms)
·
engineering, pamphleteering
·
parliamenteering, revolutioneering (OED has no entry for revolutioneer)
Appendix: verbal -ate
·
initially “an
anglicizing termination with Latin participles”: creare ‘to create’, creatus
‘created’
·
-ate first appeared in Middle English in participial forms
adapted from the second participle of the Latin first conjugation (creare
“to create”, creatus “was created”; there were also related nouns like creatio,
creationem, anglicized as –ation)
·
ex: “Man was create”
·
ex: “The opponents were
separate”
·
cf. adjectives like inveterate,
immediate
·
One theory for early
lack of ed: reinforced by other paradigms with infinitives identical in
form to participles or adjectives:
·
Romance words like clear:
CLEAR the table so that it is CLEAR
·
Native verbs like cut:
CUT the fabric so that it is CUT
·
Native verbs like dry:
DRY the dishes so that they are DRY.
·
“after about 1400,
appeared with other verb forms”, e.g. infinitives with causative meaning
·
ex: “He saw St Peter consecrate
him king” (1387, supposed to be earliest instance of a full verb in ate)
·
the past participle consecrate
is first attested around the same time
·
ex: “God will create
man”
·
ex: “They will separate
the opponents”
·
once there were enough
pairs
·
you didn’t need to have
the participle come in first
·
the present/infinitive
form of the loanword can come first
·
the suffix –ate become morphologically transparent: base and
a separate meaningful affix
·
you can make up new
words within the language
·
usually then combines
with borrowed bases
·
“from the sixteenth
century onwards, used to form verbs from
·
Latin nominal stems:
Latin pagina -> paginate; facility -> facilitate
·
and Romance bases:
adjective vaccine (“vaccine disease, cow pox”) -> vaccinate
·
or from French vacciner
(French –er || -ate)?
·
it’s usually impossible
to tell whether new forms are in fact back-derivations from nouns in –ation,
which are often older than the verb
·
e.g. is American orate
back-formed from oration or directly taken from Latin orare
·
appears intermittently
in OED since 1600 (earlier occasions more likely from Latin)
·
“I denounce the
allegations and I denounce the allegators”
·
Why is this funny?
(Back-forming allegate from allegation and then deriving allegator
from it)
·
now many verbs that
never existed in Latin
·
some not scientific:
·
hyphenate, orchestrate
·
very productive in
scientific English
·
chlorinate, dehydrate
·
(likes to combine with de-):
defibrilate
·
or in pseudo-scientific
or slangy English
·
garburator (would have to back-form the verb)
·
absquatulate, discombobulate