Intro to Language and Linguistics - Chapter four

Backformation

A new word is formed by removing an affix (or what looks like an affix) from a word to form a word that never existed before.

Eggcorn

A term for phonetic reinterpretations of words that create new meaningful forms made up of familiar words (e.g. intensive purposes for intents and purposes) arguably more familiar to the maker of eggcorns than ones in the in the original.

Clipping

A word is 'clipped' when it loses an element, often as its primary morphemic boundary, next to the root or base.

Blends

Are created by joining two or more words, at least one of which must be clipped. Blending is a hybrid process of blending and combining. Ex. Internet derived from inter (connected) and net (work)

Derivational morphemes

Are in the form of prefixes, suffixes, and inflectional endings., represent relatively consistent meanings, they change the syntactic classification of a word. examples pre, anti, and sub. Change drive to driver goes from verb to noun.

Innovative clippings

Don't always observe the original morphemic boundaries (Shipper is an excellent example of a word formed to fill a lexical gap)

Shortening

Existing English words can be shortened to form new words in four common ways: alphabetism, clipping, and backformation.

Suffix

Follows the root word: for example, -age in breakage, -ness in kindness, -y in cheesy.

Affix

Is an element of a word in some fashion to a base or root word. English allows three types of affix: the prefix, the suffix, and the infix.

Infix

Is placed, given phonological and morphological constraints within the root word.

Closed morphological classes

Lexical category in which new items rarely develop, such as conjunction, determiner, and preposition.

Open morphological classes

Lexical category to which new items can be added, such as adjective, noun, and verb.

Bound morphemes

Morphemes that cannot stand alone as words

Compounding compounds

Or combination of free morphemes, are frequent in Germanic languages, of which English is one.

Matrix

Or root word (e.g. absolutely or guarantee), the infix must directly precede the stressed syllable.

Prefix

Precedes the root word: for example a- in amoral, -dis in disappear, -un in uncool.

Nonce word

That is, a word created only once, for a specific purpose in a specific context.

Combining

The most productive way to make new words in English, can involve combinations of all free morphemes, free and bound morphemes, and occasionally all bound morphemes.

Reduplication

We form new English words by repeating a morpheme Ex. Knock-knock, no-no

Shifting

When a word form employed in one lexical category moves into another category. It undergoes a functional shift. Ex. Email began as a noun ("I love email because you can communicate with family and friends more quickly than in letters") but soon shifted into a verb ("email me tomorrow!")

Alphabetism

When a word is formed from the initials of a phrase and the word is pronounced as the resulting sequence of letters, it is called an alphabetism or initialism.

Morphonemes

Zelig Harris (1942): "Every sequence of phonemes which has meaning, and which is not composed of smaller sequences having meaning, is a morpheme."

Folk etymology

a commonly accepted but (strictly) historically incorrect account of a word's origin.

Inflectional morphemes

is a suffix that's added to a word (a noun, verb, adjective or an adverb) to assign a particular grammatical property to that word, such as its tense, number, possession, or comparison.

Acronymy

the process of abbreviating that uses the first letter of a group of words but, unlike an initialism, an acronym is pronounced as a single word (Ex. RAM being 'Random Acess Memory)

Morphology

the study of word structure

Free morphemes

the word form consists of exactly one morpheme, and that morpheme functions independently as an English word