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TOPIC 10. LEXIS. CHARACTERISTICS OF WORD FORMATION IN ENGLISH. PREFIXATION…
TOPIC 10. LEXIS. CHARACTERISTICS OF WORD FORMATION IN ENGLISH. PREFIXATION. SUFFIXATION AND COMPOUNDING.
REFERENCES
- Bauer, L. (1983). English word-formation. Cambridge university press.
- Greenbaum, S. (1996). English grammar. Oxford University.
AFFIXATION = word formation process wherein an affix is attached to a root to form a new word. It is always attached to some free morpheme and can be either inflectional (modifies the form/grammatical category of a word) or derivational (modifies the parts of speech of the root, while leaving the grammatical category unchanged) since it can't occur by itself.
PREFIXATION morphological process in which words are formed by adding an affix to the front of a root (= prefix).
Prefixes do not alter the word-class of the base, they usually have a light stress on their first syllable and the main stress comes on the base. Some regularly involve a hyphen.
They can have the following interpretations:
- negative (indisciplined)
- reversative (undo)
- pejorative (overrated)
- degree or size (outnutmbered, oversize)
- attitude (antivaccines)
- locative (transatlantic)
- of time and order (prewar)
- number (multimedia, dimensional, bipolar,)
- conversion prefixes (asleep)
- other (automatic)
SUFFIXATION is a morphological process in which words are formed by adding an affix to the end of a root (= suffix).
Suffixes in English can represent either derivational or grammatical morphemes. They frequently alter the world-class of the base. We can group them by the class of word they form or by the class of base they're typically added to.
Suffixes have been divided as
- Noun suffixes (friendship, relationship, democracy, cheerful)
- Noun/adjective suffixes (absenteeism)
- verb suffixes (specify)
- other adjective suffixes (plausible)
- adverb suffixes (contrarywise, onwards)
LEXIS is defined as all the words in a language having meaning or grammatical function. There's word consciousness among speakers of any language.
Linguistic analysis provides arguments to treat the word as a separate unit:
-
semantic: it's a unit of meaning despite their form
-
Phonological: it's possible to detect/make pauses between words without making the utterance incomprehensible
-
Syntactic: segments of words cannot be moved freely or elements inserted between them making the utterance incomprehensible on the sentence level, what shows the external unity of the word.
-
COMPOUND is a lexeme consisting of (+)2 bases, found in all word classes. Some compounds are formed by succesively combining words into compounds.
Compounds have a structure similar to the basic phrase classes: the final element may be seen as the head that is modified or complemented (daydream)
Generally, compound nouns are spelling in various ways (side meat, side-line); compound verbs are usually written either as single words or hyphenated (to downshift or to double-space); and compound adjectives are usually hyphenated when they modify a noun and left as separate words when they are really compound noun adjuncts modifying another noun.
However, in certain forms the rules governing the use of hyphens are more regular:
- Particular prefixes regularly involve a hyphen (self-care)
- when a compound premodifies a noun head, a hyphen is normally inserted to indicate which words are compounded (well-known)
- hyphens are normally used in compounds in which the pre-head item is a single capital letter (X-Men)
- Hyphens are sometimes needed to disambiguate different words (reform = change radically or form again)
- In numerically modified adjectives, all modifying elements are hyphenated (a twenty-four-hour flight)
A semantic classification for those cases when the meaning is well outside the right or second part of the compound:
- Endocentric: compound that shows the qualities of grammatical head and the whole is the hyponym of its head (sunglasses)
- Exocentric: compound that is unexpressed 'head': scarecrow
- Appositional: a compound that can be divided into such elements that the whole can be viewed as a hyponym of either: maidservant
- Copulative: compound that names separate entities: Square-Enix
Phonetic aspects: primary stress is usually on the fist element and a full vowel is kept on the second element. Some compounds involve (near) identical or rhyming bases (reduplicative compounds, often very informal or used in affectionate talk with children as in lovely-dovey) because these are compounded by 2 rhyming words.
Stresses are distributed according to certain rules which have many exceptions. The primary stress in compounds is most commonly on the first element (glasshouse)
- Reduplication is a morphological process in which the root/stem of a word (or part of it) is repeated exactly or with a minor change. It's used to show plurality distribution, continuance, etc.
(bye-bye = exact reduplication) (super-duper = rhyming reduplication)
EXAMPLES
- Noun compounds: VERB+NOUN
- Adjective compounds: NOUN + -ing participle
- Verb compounds: NOUN+VERB (