10. LEXIS.

CHARACTERISTICS OF WORD-FORMATION IN
ENGLISH. PREFIXES, SUFFIXES AND COMPOUND WORDS.
This topic is about word-formation in English and its characteristics so, in
order to explain clearly, I will divide my presentation into three different parts.
The first one will be about the main characteristics of the English language
regarding it lexis; the second one will deal with the main concepts that have to
be taken into account when dealing with word-formation in English. Finally, the
third section of my presentation will be about the processes of word-formation in
English, which are compounding, affixation (prefixation and suffixation), clipping,
conversion, backformation, blending, formation of acronyms, and eponymy.
Lets begin by looking at English lexis. It is often said that what most
immediately sets English apart from other languages is the RICHNESS of its
vocabulary. Websters Third New International Dictionary lists 450.000 words,
and the revised Oxford English Dictionary has 615.000, but that is only part of
the total. Technical and scientific terms would add millions more. Altogether,
about 200.000 English words are in common use, more than in German
(184.000) and far more than in French (a mere 100.000). The richness of the
English vocabulary and the wealth of available synonyms mean that English
speakers can often draw shades of distinction unavailable to non-English
speakers. Spanish, for example, does not differentiate a chairman from a
president. On the other hand, other languages have facilities English lacks
(Spanish, for instance, has the word rincn, and esquina whereas English has
only corner, and would have to use in the corner to mean en el rincn and
on the corner to mean en la esquina as well as, for instance, Eskimo has nine
words for snow).
A second commonly cited factor in setting English apart from other
languages is its FLEXIBILITY, which is especially noticeable in the fact that
many words function both as verbs and nouns, such as drink, sleep, look and
so on. English also tends to be very CONCISE, compared to other languages.
Fewer words may be necessary to express something in English. For instance,

Best Before____ in Spanish would be Consumir preferentemente antes

de ___.
But, perhaps, the most notable characteristic of English is its deceptive
COMPLEXITY. Nothing in English is ever quite what it seems. Take the simple
word what. We use it every day -indeed, every few sentences. However, it
takes the OED five pages and almost 15,000 words to explain its meanings.
Another example is the word fine: it has 14 definitions as an adjective, 6 as a
noun and 2 as a verb.
Yet, despite this richness of vocabulary, lexicographers suggest that the
average well-read person has a vocabulary of about 20,000-30,000 words, and
probably uses about 1500 to 2000 in normal weeks conversation.
Once I have dealt with the first section regarding the characteristics of
the English language as far as it lexis is concerned, I am going now to step to
the second section of my essay, which deals with the main concepts to be taken
into account when studying word-formation in English. I am going to speak a
little bit about what are words in English, what morphemes are, and finally, I will
speak about Morphology, just to go on to explain the ways in which words are
formed in English.
Firstly, providing a definition of what a word is might seem trivial -after all,
surely words are those things we write with space between them. But in fact it is
not always easy to define words in this way. First, many languages (such as
most in India) do not put spaces between words when they write. Second, there
are many languages that do not have a written form and speech does not have
gaps like written words do. Well, you only have to try listening to a language
you do not understand and you will not be able to decide where each word
ends. Even in languages like English, which do write words with spaces
between them, there can be difficulties: Is lawn-mower two words, or is it only
one word -lawnmower-? One of the reasons why it is difficult to define word is
that we use the term to mean several different things. Linguists distinguish
between these different uses. An ORTHOGRAPHIC WORD is the thing we
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write with a space at either end. A PHONOLOGICAL WORD is something

pronounced as a single unit, identified by phonological criteria. There is not
necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between a meaning and a single
word. Meanings can be represented by multiple words (e.g. to give up the ghost
= die). On the other hand, LEXICAL TERMS or LEXEMES are those items
which are listed in dictionaries as separate words, and (more importantly for
linguists) are stored mentally as individual items. Thus, mow, mows, mowing
and mowed would all be considered the same lexical item: MOW. An idiom such
as kick the bucket would also be considered a single lexical item, because it
must be listed separately along with its unpredictable meaning: die.
In the same way as sentences are made up of combination of words, so
words are made up of combinations of smaller units known as morphemes. A
morpheme is defined as the smallest meaningful unit of grammatical analysis in
which a lexeme is segmented. The word unlikely, for example, is made up of
three morphemes, the prefix un-, the stem or root like, and the suffix -ly.
Each of these morphemes also occurs in other English words (like unzip,
dislike or quickly). Thus, I can say that MORPHEMES are the smallest
elements of a language that have a distinct meaning.
Words may consist of just a single morpheme (such as map or like), in
which case they are known as MONOMORPHEMIC. Words which are made up
of more than one morpheme (such as dislike, or un-help-ful-ness) are known
as POLYMORPHEMIC. Linguists often classify morphemes according to
whether they are FREE (able to occur as words in their own right, such as like),
or BOUND (not able to occur unless attached to another morpheme, such as
un- or -ly).
Morphemes are sometimes also classified according to whether they
have a grammatical function (like -ness, which turns an adjective into a noun),
or a lexical function (they carry word meaning, like man or help).
A single morpheme may be pronounced differently in different words,
such as the past tense morpheme in slept (/t/), minded (/id/), and smiled (/d/). In
some cases it can be very difficult to decide how to split a word into
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morphemes. For example, cats contains two morphemes: the stem cat and
the plural morpheme -s. Likewise, the word feet must also contain two
morphemes: the stem foot and the plural morpheme, but these do not appear
as separate parts of the word.
Finally, to end with the second section of my presentation, as far as
morphology is concerned, I should say that it is the branch of linguistics that
studies questions such as this about the internal structure of words. There are
two main branches: DERIVATIONAL MORPHOLOGY and INFLECTIONAL
MORPHOLOGY. Derivational morphology deals with processes that change a
word with one part of speech or meaning into a word with a different part of
speech or meaning. For example, there is a regular derivational process in
English which creates a noun from a verb by adding -er (so walk becomes
walker). Another example is the process which adds un- to an adjective to
derive another adjective of opposite meaning (so like becomes unlike).
Inflectional morphology, on the other hand, deals with processes that
alter the form of a word without changing either its part of speech or its
meaning. An example is the regular -s inflection in English which creates plural
forms of nouns (so rat becomes rats).
It turns out that derivational processes always apply before inflectional
processes. Compounding -the process which joins two words together to form a
new word- is like a derivational process in that it must always occur before any
inflectional processes. We cannot add the plural inflection -s to rat before we
compound it with, for instance, infest, so we cannot get rats-infested*. Mice,
however, is an irregular plural which is not formed by an inflectional process (it
is just a separate word that we have to learn as the plural of mouse). We can
thus form either mouse-infested or mice-infested.
Once I have dealt with the most outstanding characteristics about the
English language in my first section, and with the main concepts about wordformation in the second section of my presentation, it is time for me to go on
with the third part of my presentation: the way words are formed in English
4

.
According to Bauer (1983), it can be said that there are different ways of
word-formation in English. These are the following: compounding, affixation
(prefixation and suffixation), clipping, conversion, backformation, blending,
formation of acronyms, and eponymy. Lets see them separately.
Firstly, as far as COMPOUNDING is concerned, I should say that it is the
way in which two or more existing words are stuck together, as it happens in
girlfriend, takeover, bittersweet or couchpotato. Compounds may be written as
two independent words (washing machine), as two words joined by a hyphen
(tax-free), or as one word (toothache). Often the three forms of the same
compound exist side by side. The meaning of a compound cannot always be
deduced from the separate meaning of the individual elements (hot dog).
Secondly, as far as AFFIXATION (also known as DERIVATION) is
concerned, I should say that it involves the addition of morphemes that do not
have word status, that is to say, it involves the addition of prefixes, suffixes and
infixes. Prefixes precede the root morpheme (un-happy), and suffixes attach to
the end of the root (happi-ness). On the other hand, infixes are inserted within
the word, but in English they do not really exist. The inclusion of prefixes and
suffixes, as said before, change the word in the sense that they can even give
the opposite meaning or transform it into a different word type, so giving a list of
prefixes and suffixes would be a never-ending task since there are hundreds of
them. It must be pointed that affixation is the most productive way of creating
new words in English. Good examples can be seen in the following table:

Affix
Prefix

Class(es) of word to Nature of change in

which affix applies meaning

Examples
Noun: non-starter

Noun, adjective

Negation/opposite

Adjective

Changes to noun

Prefix

Verb

Reverses action

tie/untie,

'un-'

Adjective

opposite quality

fasten/unfasten

'non-'
Suffix 'ity'

Adj.: non-partisan
electric/electricity
obese/obesity

clear/unclear,
safe/unsafe
Suffix 'ous'
Prefix
're-'
Suffix 'able'

Noun

Changes to adjective

Verb

Repeat action
Changes to adjective;

Verb

means 'can undergo

action of verb'

fame/famous,
glamor/glamorous
tie/retie, write/rewrite
print/printable,
drink/drinkable

Thirdly, as far as CLIPPING (or ABBREVIATION) is concerned, I should

say that it is the process through which a word is shortened in English, as in bro
from brother, pro from professional, fax from facsimile, flu from influenza or
veg from vegetate (as in stay all day in front of TV).
Fourthly, as far as CONVERSION is concerned, I should say that it is the
process through which a word transfers from one word class to another, as in
the verb to refill to the noun a refill. It is also called ZERO DERIVATION,
because it changes the word class without the addition of any suffixes. Other
examples of conversion are the transformation from a hammer to the verb to
hammer, or the adjective dirty to the verb to dirty.
As far as BACKFORMATION is concerned, it is the process through
which new words are made by removing affixes from old ones. For instance,
editor was adapted to form the verb to edit, and surrealist led to surreal.
However, there is sometimes a false assumption that it brings about new words.
For instance, beef-burger and later chicken-burger or vege-burger were
back-formed from hamburger, which was not a burger made of ham, but a
dish named after the city of Hamburg.
As far as BLENDING is concerned, I should say that it is the process
through which two or more existing words are merged into one, as in
ginormous (giant+enormous), brunch (breakfast+lunch) smog (smoke+fog) or

motel (motor+hotel), Telethon (television+marathon), or even the language our

future students tend to speak: Spanglish (Spanish+English).
As far as the formation of ACRONYMS is concerned, it is the process
through which a word (an acronym) is formed from the initial letters of other
words as in nimby (not in my back yard), NASA (National Aeronautics and
Space Administration). And even nowadays, with the wide spread of written
communication via internet in forums and chats, more acronyms have been
created such as iawtc (I agree with the commenter) and so on, that help speed
communication.
And finally, as far as EPONYMY is concerned, it is the process through
which a new word is created from a persons name (often the person who
popularised or invented it). A very remarkable example of eponymy can be
found in the word leotard from the acrobat Jules Leotard. However, most of the
words created by eponymy do not tend to last in the language; they are usually
NONCES (temporary words that never properly enter the language). They are
often created to solve an immediate communication problem or to play on
current affairs. It is extremely difficult to predict which new words will be seized
upon and soon enter the dictionaries, and which will never be heard again. For
example, the eponym coined in the early 90s: TO BOBBITT was coined from
the ber-famous case of Lorena Bobbitt and her husband, and the newspapers
came up with the verb to Bobbitt meaning something like to vengefully remove
ones husbands penis. A the time, no one could have known if this word was to
be a nonce that would disappear as fast as it had been coined or whether it
would stay with us and enter the dictionaries. As it turns out, the word is still
alive. It is used literally and figuratively (meaning something like to remove
status from), and looks like a strong candidate for dictionary inclusion.

As a final word I would like to mention that word formation plays an

important role in the teaching of English. We should try to make our learners
aware of the processes of word formation so that they can expand their
vocabulary. By analysing the ways in which new words are created, they may
become aware that there is what is known as the grammar of vocabulary, that
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is, that certain patterns related to word formation are repeated again and again.
By becoming aware of these processes, the acquisition of vocabulary may
become easier, and our learners may venture to try to guess how certain words
would be in English by applying processes of word formation to words they
already know.
However, vocabulary acquisition is an incremental process, and we as
teachers must concentrate not only on introducing new words, but also on
enhancing learners knowledge of previously presented words.