UNIT 10. LEXIS. CHARACTERISTICS OF WORD FORMATION IN ENGLISH.

PREFIXATION,
SUFFIXATION AND COMPOUNDING.
1. INTRODUCTION
2. WORD FORMATION IN ENGLISH
3. AFFIXATION
4. COMPOUNDING
5. OTHER WAYS OF WORD FORMATION
6. CONCLUSION
7. BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. INTRODUCTION
Lexis is defined as all of the words in a language; all word forms having meaning or grammatical function. The
study of English lexis is aimed to know more about the way vocabulary works.
This topic will deal with the different processes of word formation in English. The field of linguistics devoted to the
study of the form of the word is called morphology, derived from the Latin word ‘morph’, meaning ‘word’.
According to Bloomfield (1926), a minimum free form is a word. A word is thus a form which may be uttered alone
(with meaning) but cannot be analyzed into parts that may (all of them) be uttered alone (with meaning). On his part,
P.H. Matthew sees the word as a lexeme, as a form unit and as a functional and grammatical unit.
2. WORD FORMATION IN ENGLISH
Many word forms can be understood to be a result of processes which make them have complex structures. Before
continuing the study of the processes of word-formation some concepts related to the field of morphology must be
clear:

1. BASE: It is any form to which affixes of any kind can be added. Any root or stem can be termed a base, for
example: un -touchable

2. STEM: It is the part of the word form that remains when all inflectional affixes have been removed. It may be
complex, containing derivational affixes (government-s) or more than one root (wheelchair-s)
3. ROOT: it is the ultimately irreducible form. Some authors use the term stem to mean the same as root here.
According to Gimson, roots include even that part of a word remaining after an affix has been removed, even though
such a part cannot occur on its own, e.g. ephemer-al, tremend-ous, hospit-able.

4. LEXEME: the term refers to all possible shapes that the word can have. It is the fundamental unit of the lexicon
of the language. A lexeme is the smallest unit in the meaning system of a language that can be distinguished from
other similar units. It is an abstract unit. It can occur in many different forms in actual spoken or written sentences,
and is regarded as the same even when inflected. It belongs to the field of linguistic competence, as opposed to
performance, where it can be represented by more than one word (called morph in specialized terminology), e.g. the
lexeme /read/ is represented by ‘read’ and ‘reads’ at performance level.
5. MORPHEME: it is an abstract unit and at the same time is the minimal unit of grammatical description. Like
lexeme, it belongs to the field of competence and it can be realized by different morphs (e.g. the morpheme {plural}
is realized by [–s], [-es], [-en], etc). They can be lexical, derivational or inflectional.
6. MORPH: it is a segment of a word form which at performance level represents a morpheme or a lexeme. That is,
when the phonetic strings are segmentable, these segments are called morphs (e.g. un-touch-able-s). The alternative
representations of one morpheme are called allomorphs.

3. AFFIXATION
Affixation is a process which consists on adding prefixes or suffixes to a base.
3.1. Prefixation
It consists of adding a prefix in front of the base, sometimes with, but more usually without, a change of word class;
it only affects to semantics (e.g. husband > exhusband – noun > noun).
Examples:
• negative, like in- or un- (incomplete, unfair, unexpected)
• reversative, like dis- or un- (to disconnect, to undo)
• pejorative, like mal- under- (malformation, to underestimate)
• of degree, like super-, over- (superman, overconfident)
• attitude, like anti-, co- (anti-social, cooperate)
• locative, like sub-, inter- (subway, internation)
• of time and order, like post- or pre- (post-war, pre-war)
• of number, like bi-, di-, tri- (trimester, bilingual, dipole)
• of conversion, like en-, be-(to endanger, bewigged)
English language teachers should note and point out to their students alternative spellings of certain prefixes, like
when the negative in- becomes im- before bilabials (impossible), il- before /l/ (illiterate) and ir- before /r/
(irrelevant).
3.2. Suffixation
It consists of adding of adding a suffix to a base. They do more than altering the meaning, they alter the word class.
Suffixes often help us recognize the meaning of the word from the meaning of the base and knowing the effect of the
suffix itself.
The main types of suffixes are:

Suffix Type Suffix Added to To Create Meaning Example

Nouns - dom Concrete Noun Abstract Noun Domain Kingdom
Adverbs - ly Adjectives Adverbs In a… way Happily
-wise Nouns Crabwise / clock
wise
Adjectives - able Verb Adjectives ‘Able to be v-ed’ Wasable
- less Nouns Adjectives ‘Without’ Careless
Verbs - ify Nouns or adjs Verbs Causative Simply
- ise / -ize Nouns or adjs modernise

4. COMPOUNDING
A compound is a lexical unit consisting of more than one base and functioning both grammatically and semantically
as a single word (e.g. flowerpot). ompounding can take place within any of the word classes, but we shall in effect
be dealing only with the productivity of compounds resulting, above all, in new nouns and adjectives.
We also find pseudo-compounds, compound-like words where at least one of the constituents is not a free morpheme
in isolation (e.g. cranberry) or words which contain two morphemes but these do not function as separate
morphemes in the compound (e.g. carpet).
Compound nouns are made up from a combination of free morphemes, e.g. snowflake, blackbird, driftwood.
Although there is no clear borderline between compounds and noun phrases with premodifying nouns, we can
recognize some criteria for the identification of compounds
a) Orthography: if two words are written with no space between them, possibly with an intervening hyphen,
they form a compound (a solid compound or a hyphenated compound, respectively): snowflake, hat-stand.
b) Stress pattern: if the two words are pronounced with only one primary stress which falls on the first word,
they form a compound: a |blackbird as opposed to a |black |bird (which is a sequence of a premodifier plus a head
noun).
c) Semantics: if the combined meaning of the two words is indeterminate out of context, they make up a
premodifier + head combination (regardless of stress pattern): the umbrella man (cf. umbrella stand, umbrella term,
which are not indeterminate out of context).
The relationships involved in compounding are frequently resemblance, function, or some of the salient or
defining characteristics. For example, ‘darkroom’ is a lexicalisation of something we might paraphrase as “a room
for [=purpose] photographic processing”. The item dark is used in the lexicalisation not because such rooms such
rooms happen to be dark, but because the facility to make such rooms dark is a salient characteristic.

Compounds are grouped into three main categories according to the word they form:

Compound 1st Element 2nd Element Example

Noun Compound Noun Noun Boyfriend
Verb Noun Hangman
Adjective Coumpound Verb Verb Pass-Fail
Verb Adjective Lead-Free
Verb Compound Noun Verbs Handwritting
Baby sit

From the semantic point of view, compounds can be divided into:

 • Endocentric – compound which can be divided into elements, one of which shows the qualities of
grammatical head and the whole compound is the hyponym (subordinate in meaning) of its head.
• Exocentric – a compound which cannot be said to be the hyponym of any of its elements, but of another
unexpressed ‘head’: redskin is a hyponym of ‘person’, and not of ‘red’ or ‘skin’.
• Appositional – a compound which can be divided into such elements that the whole compound can be
viewed as a hyponym of either: maidservant.
• Copulative – a compound which is not the hyponym of any other word form , nor of its elements, which
name separate entities (Rolls-Royce).
5. OTHER WAYS OF WORD FORMATION
Conversion: Conversion is the derivational process whereby an item changes its word-class without the addition of
an affix but with a change of stress. Thus, when the noun 'sign' shifts to the verb 'sign(ed)' without any change in the
word form we can say this is a case of conversion. Conversion is particularly common in English because the basic
form of nouns and verbs is identical in many cases.
Reduplication: Reduplication is when a word, an element of a word, or a phrase is repeated. This can often result in
change of meaning or tone. You can like someone, and then you can LIKE-like someone. These two things, though
they both involve liking, have different meanings. The first one could mean that you like a person as a friend or you
have a crush on that person, depending on the context. However, the second type of l ike—the LIKE-like—
unambiguously implies that you have a crush. There’s rhyming reduplication (razzle-dazzle, hoity-toity), exact
reduplication (bye-bye, din-din), ablaut reduplication (ding-dong, zig-zag), and shm-reduplication (baby-shmaby,
fancy-schmancy).
Clipping: It involves the shortening of a longer word, often reducing it to one syllable. Many examples are very
informal or slang. Maths, which is a clipped form of mathematics, is an example of this. Informal examples include
'bro' from brother and 'dis' from disrespect. In the classroom: Discussion of clipping can help learners understand
how words are formed in English, and will help learners understand authentic speech. One possible exercise to do
this is for learners to identify the original words that have been clipped. Learners can also invent new clipped words.
Blending: It refers to joining the beginning of one word and the end of another to make a new word with a new
meanings. Smog, from smoke and fog, and brunch, from breakfast and lunch, are examples of blends. In the
classroom: Discussion of blends can help learners understand how words are formed in English, e.g. Asking learners
to identify root words. Learners can also invent new blend words.

Acronyms: An acronym is a word formed by taking initial letters of a word/words and pronouncing them as a single
unit. Common examples of acronyms include NASA (an acronym for National Aeronautics and Space
Administration) and FOMO (a slang acronym for fear of missing out).

Alphabetism: taking initial letters from a phrase and pronouncing them as letters of the alphabet. OK, USA.

Borrowing: which consists in using foreign words with minimal changes of spelling and with adapted pronunciation
in English, for example jihad, ayatollah, taco shell, kosher, cosmonaut, the Duma, tikka masala, tzatziki, tandoori.
6. CONCLUSIONS
At a time of a rapid expansion of English lexis into other languages, it is interesting to see how it manages to keep its
own vocabulary updated and adjusted to the needs of its users. Knowledge of some of the word formation rules is
also very useful for students of English as it often helps to guess the meaning of unknown words. Word formation
can also turn into a communication strategy if one is short of adequate words. The main difficulty here consists in
the possible changes of pronunciation or spelling.
One of the ways of simplifying the process of teaching vocabulary is giving students some simple rules related to the
principles of word-formation. In doing so, the learners will be able to increase their core vocabulary without having
to study long lists of items. In the same way, their communicative competence will be improved, since they will
develop their ability to derive meaning from many unknown words.
7. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bauer, Laurie. (2003). Introducing Linguistic Morphology. Washington D.C. George Town University Press

Crystal, David. (1995). The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of English Language.Cambridge: CUP

Quirk, R. & Greenbaum, S. 1973. A University Grammar of English. Longman. 430449.

Bauer, L. (1983). English Word Formation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Translation Journal: http://accurapid.com/journal.htm