Affixation or derivation

II. Morphological word-building

I. Ways and Types of English Word-Building

The term „word-building” is of polysemantic nature. It is used to denote the branch of the science of language which studies the patterns on which a language forms lexical units. It is also used to denote the process of creating new words from the material available in the word-stock according to certain structural and semantic patterns specific for the given language.

We have to distinguish morphological, syntactico-morphological and syntactical word-building in Modern English.

Morphological word-building which is characterized by a change in morphological structure includes the following types:

1) affixation (e.g. lucky – unlucky; happy – unhappy);

2) morphological compounding (e.g. speedometer, hogshead – большая бочка);

3) shortening (e.g. fantasy – fancy, vacation – vac, MP, NIS);

4) sound-interchange (e.g. live– life, blood – bleed, sing – song);

5) stress-interchange (e.g.´ present – pre´sent, ´conduct – con´duct);

6) back-formation (e.g. baby-sitter > baby-sit);

7) reduplication (e.g. murmur, bye-bye, blah-blah);

8) blending (e.g. blue + green > bleen, crazy + drunk > crunk).

Syntactico-morphological word-building is the one where both morphological and syntactical features of the word are changed. It includes the following types:

1) juxtapositional compounding (e.g. girl-friend, snow-white);

2) substantivation of adjec tives (e.g. the poor, the rich);

3) lexicalization of the plural of nouns (e.g. lines = poetry, colours = banner);

4) conversion (water – to water; garden – to garden, wine – to wine).

Syntactical word-building is the one where a combination of words semantically and structurally isolated is used to form a word without any changes in the syntactico- semantic relations. It, in fact, includes syntactic compounding, e.g. bread-and-butter, hook-and-ladder, Jack-of-all-trades, forget-me-not, melt-in-the-mouth (cookies), etc.

Various types of word-building in Mоdern English possess different degrees of productivity. Some of them are highly-productive (affixation, compounding, shortening, conversion, substantivation), others are semi-productive (back-formation, reduplication, blending, lexicalization of the plural of nouns, sound-imitation) and non-productive (sound-interchange, stress-interchange).

Categories and types of word-building in each language present a separate system with its own patterns of vocabulary items, its specific types and its own way of distinguishing them.

Affixation is commonly defined as the formation of words by adding derivational affixes to stems. Affixation includes prefixation, i.e. forming new words with the help of prefixes, and suffixation, i.e. forming new words with the help of suffixes. Affixation, or derivation, has been productive at every period of development of the English language and it has retained its productivity to this day.

However, this does not mean that the affixes remain unchanged all the time. In the course of language development some affixes were replaced by others, some changed their meanings. Thus, e.g. mis- and un- replaced wan- (wantrust – mistrust, wantruth – untruth).

Once affixes were independent words. What is now a suffix was at some period of time a separate word, for example the modern suffix -dom was in Old English a separate word meaning „state, condition, sphere of action”, -hood was also a word meaning „state, condition”, -ship meant „to create, to shape”, etc.

Modern English possesses a large stock of affixes which make a material for coining new words. Affixes are derivational morphemes added directly to roots or to stems. The role of the affix in the process of affixation is very important and therefore it’s necessary to consider certain facts about the main types of affixes.

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