Word Formation Processes

A. CONVERSION is a common process for the formation of new words. We butter bread,
take a look, calm somebody. In these everyday examples, words have changed from their
original world-class to a new world-class without any change in their form: Butter is a verb
derived from a noun (‘put butter on’), look is a noun derived from a verb, and calm is a verb
derived from an adjective. Poets sometimes introduce nonce-formations through conversion.
Hopkins converts the adjective comfortless into a noun in ‘grouping round my comfortless’ and
the abstract noncount noun comfort into a concrete count noun in ‘Here! creep, Wretch, under a
comfort’. e.e. cummings takes conversion to an extreme by converting the past form did and its
negative didn’t into nouns in ‘he sang his didn’t he danced his did’.
In some languages, a word belonging to one category can be converted to another category
without any changes to the form of the word. This is called functional shift. We request someone
to update (verb) a report and then call the revised report an update (noun). We ask a fellow
worker to e-mail or fax the report, both of which are verbs converted from shortened forms of
nouns (electronic mail, facsimile). Companies hire (verb) a group of employees and call them
new hires (where hires is a noun). To promote a product in the market we market it. Conversion
of this type commonly leads to noun/verb and noun/adjective pairs. Table 2–2 illustrates that
sometimes the same form can serve as noun, verb, and adjective. Once a form has been shifted to
a new lexical category,
it conforms to the inflectional morphology of that category: an update, two updates, she’s
updating the report now, and he updated it last month.
NOUN VERB ADJECTIVE
e-mail e-mail
bookmark bookmark
bust bust
outrage outrage
market market
delay delay
plot plot
play play
local local
inaugural inaugural
illegal illegal
average average average
model model model
blanket blanket blanket
brick brick brick
prime prime prime

B. COMPOUNDING
English speakers show a disposition for putting words together to create new words in a process
called compounding. Recent compounds include air kiss, moon shot, waterbed, upfront, color
code, computerlike, dust bunny, gut-buster, plastic wrap, speed dating, strip mall, and
radiopharmaceutical, as well as V-chip, e-mail, online, Web page, Web site, and download.
(Notice that these compounds have heavier stress or emphasis on the first element than on the
second element.) To gauge the popularity of compounding, consider
that one relatively short piece in an issue of the Los Angeles Times contained the following
examples.
Nouns Nouns Nouns Adjectives
petroleum engineer whistle-blower pay phone whistle-blowing
government documents troublemaker phone call baby-faced
government witness debt ceiling storerooms highranking
subcommittee hearing brain cancer cover-up overzealous
aircraft carrier reserve account kickbacks born-again
training course sea power breakup middle-aged
selfyeast

sea-girls; thought-fox

giftstrong

grandson

hotdog
blackboard
coldcream
shortstop
bull’s-eye
butterfly
punching bag
running shoe
laughing gas

jack-knife

runway

C. BACK-FORMATION
Another type of word formation is exemplified by pronunciate, which some college students can
be heard to say when searching for the verb corresponding to the noun pronunciation. From
pronunciation, they have “back-formed” a new verb. Other back formations include the verbs
typewrite, babysit, and edit, which are back-formed from the nouns typewriter, babysitter, and
editor.

D. BLENDS
These are words created by combining parts of words. Smog (from smoke and fog), glob (gob
and blob), and motel (motor and hotel) are older blends. Newer ones include fanzine ( fan and
magazine), punkumentary ( punk and documentary), an infomercial (information and
commercial), and biotech (biology and technology). Modem is well known, though its elements
are not (modulator and demodulator). Netizens and netiquette blend net (a shortened form of
Internet) with citizens and etiquette. Combining the existing blend smog with the tail end of
metropolis forms smogopolis. Blends like Spanglish, Franglais, Chinglish, and Yinglish suggest
how heavily certain languages have borrowed words from one another. Blends also serve as
trade names and as names of related products: Amtrak, Eurailpass, euro rail, euro trip, and Flexi
pass. Most blends appear to combine two nouns, but wannabes ‘persons who want to be
something other
than what they are’ and gimmes ‘things that aren’t earned’ combine other categories.
Try It Yourself: Identify the words combined into these blends: affluential, andropause,
automagically, beefalo, Bollywood, botel, brainiac, Chunnel, cremains, cybrarian, digicam,
emoticon, gasohol, gaydar, guesstimate, hactivist, himbo, murderabilia, prebuttal, sexpert.

E. CLIPPING
We have ‘mobs’ not ‘mobiles’, ‘fans’ more usually than ‘fanatics’, and modern life has the
‘telly’, the ‘phone’,
the ‘flu’, the ‘gym’, the ‘car’, the ‘bus’, the ‘pram’, the ‘fridge’ and many more, all clipped from
longer original words.

F. ACRONYMS
Shortenings in which the initial letters of an expression are joined and pronounced as a word are
acronyms:

UNESCO NATO radar (radio detecting and ranging)

WASP NASA yuppy (young urban professional _ -Y)
DOS (disk operating system) nimby (not in my backyard)
ASCII (American standard code for information interchange, pronounced “as-kee”)

Initialisms Some shortenings resemble acronyms but are pronounced as a sequence of letters. At
U-S-C (University of Southern California) and N-Y-U ( New York University), a student’s grade
point average may be called a G-P-A. PC carries two meanings— ‘politically correct’ and
‘personal computer.’ Given their pronunciation as a series of letters, these are called initialisms.
Many initialisms (AI, CD, DNA, DVD, fMRI, MTV, NHL, PDA) could not easily be pronounced
as ordinary words, while others could, but aren’t: CEO for chief executive officer, ADD for
attention deficit disorder, and SUV for sports utility vehicle. Perhaps the most popular initialism
in the world is OK.
Try It Yourself: Which are acronyms, which initialisms? EU, USA, FBI, CIA, WMD, GI,
SARS, BSE, NYPD, ER, DARPA, MBA, VIP, SEC, DJ, ATM, IT, IM, WAEC, IJMB, FUTA,
SOS, ETC, iPod.
 G. REDUPLICATION
This is the process by which a morpheme or part of a morpheme is repeated to create a new word
with a different meaning or different category.
Partial reduplication repeats only part of the morpheme, while full reduplication reduplicates the
entire morpheme.

H. BORROWING
English has been extraordinarily receptive to borrowed words, accepting words from nearly a
hundred languages in the last hundred years. As in most of its history, English borrowed more
from French during the twentieth century
than from any other language. Following French at some distance are Japanese and Spanish,
Italian and Latin and Greek, German, and Yiddish. In smaller numbers, English now hosts to
words borrowed from Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Portuguese, and Hindi, as well as from
numerous languages of Africa and some Native American languages.

Most borrowings into English have been nouns

paparazzi, karaoke, and resume

I. NEOLOGISMS
New coinages of words are formed from other existing words.
‘warp-drive’, ‘raygun’, ‘flying saucer’ and ‘cyborg’
‘kemmer’ (Ursula Le Guin’s invention of the reproductive period of an alien race), ‘grok’
(Robert Heinlein’s wide-ranging term for mutual empathy),
‘kipple’ (the bits and pieces of detritus that accumulate and multiply over time in drawers and
cupboards).