Theme 3: Word-building in Modern English

1. Comment on the terms:

word-building, word-building pattern, productive, non-productive, dead affixes, motivation, degrees of motivation, affixation, origin of affixes, theories of conversion, origin of conversion, composition (structural, semantic, theoretical aspect), shortening (lexical, clipping), blending, back-formation, sound-and-stress interchange, sound imitation, reduplication.

2. Deduce the meanings of the following derivatives from the meanings of their constituents:

reddish, overwrite, irregular, retype, old-womanish, disrespectable, disorganize, eatable, snobbish, handful, sandy, breakable, underfed.

3. Make up the names of people according to the following word-building meanings:

connection with action (V+er), place, residence (N+er), object (N+ist), instrument (N+ist), nationality (-ese, -an, -ish).

4.Specify the levels of lexical meaning in:

-er, -ish, -ist, -ian, -like, -ly, -ful.

5.Prove that the following affixes are highly productive:

un-, re-, dis-, -ing, -able, -ize, -er, -less, -ish, -ness, -ed.

6. Define the meanings of the nonce-words:

breakfaster, word-breaker, notatallness, mother-in-lawed, seasider, a take-my-word-for-itist, a collarless appearance, a lungful of smoke.

7. Say whether the following lexical units are word-groups or compounds:

railway platform, snowman, light dress, traffic light, landing field, film star, white man, hungry dog, medical man, landing plane, distant star, small house, evening dress, bluecoat, roughhouse, booby trap, black skirt, medical student, black shirt, hot dog.

8. Translate the words into English. Comment on the type of compounding:

cтарик, рыбак, колокольчик, свекровь, тесть, зять, невеста, белить, железная дорога, космический корабль, незабудка, черноволосый, зеленоглазый, вечнозеленый, самоанализ.

9.Form compounds:

to paint pictures, to break stones, to own land, to love art, something that kills pain, a brush for hair, the end of the week, the sill of a window, a chair with arms, filled with smoke, driven with wind, having dark eyes, the process of drilling holes.

10.Translate the word-combinations and sentences into Russian:

1. to head an army, to eye a foe, to chain a prisoner, to fish for accomplishments, to dress a wound, to hand a plate, to book a ticket;

2. 1. They will holiday in Italy. 2. It was a good buy. 3. She never notices the obvious. 4. Pocket your pride. 5. Why shoulder the burden alone? 6. His eyes narrowed. 7. The beer wasn’t iced. 8. Don’t baby him. 9. Women pilot planes and man ships. 10. The drop-out in colleges has a lot of reasons.

11.Write in full the shortened words. Define the type of shortening:

pub, ad, fancy, UNO,V-day, mike, mob, lab, jeep, fridge, V.I.P.

12.Give the words denoting sounds produced by the animals:

The cat… the hen….

The dog… the sparrow…

The cow… the pig…

The cock… the bee…

The frog… the duck…

The sheep… the snake…

13.Comment on the type of word-building. Translate into Russian:

walkie-talkie, ping-pong, dilly-dally, wishy-washy, flip-flop, helter-skelter, hanky-panky, hurly-burly, Humpy-Dumpy.

14.Form nouns from the verbs and adjectives according to the models:

a)to breathe – breath:

to live, to grieve, to advise, to use, to excuse, to bathe, to believe, to prove, to practice, to relieve;

b)strong – strength:

wide, deep, long, broad.

15.Form verbs from nouns and adjectives:

Food, brood, blood, full, gold.

16.Explain the formation of the following words:

1. to pettifog, to burgle, to typewrite, to sight-read, to beg, to meditate, to inflate;

2. flush, glaze, good-bye, smog, cablegram, electrochute, swellegant, motel.

Productive way of word building

a) Word composition.

b) Conversion.

c) Abbreviation.

d) Affixation or derivation.

All morphemes are subdivided into 2 large classes: root and affixes. Words which consist of a root and a affix are called derived words or derivatives and are produced by the process of word-building known as affixation. Affixes can also be classified into productive and non-productive. By productive affixes we mean the ones, which take part in deriving new words in this particular period of language development. Derived words are extremely numerous in the English vocabulary. This type is widely represented by a great number of words belonging to the original English stock or to earlier borrowings (house, book, room, work, port, street, etc.).

In Modern English, has been greatly enlarged by the type of word-building called conversion (e.g. to hand, v; formed from the noun hand; to can, v. from the noun can; to pail, v. from pail, adj.) Conversion consists in making a new word from some existing word by changing the category of a part of speech, the morphemic shape of the original word remaining unchanged.

Another wide-spread word-structure is a compound word consisting of two or more stems (e.g. dining-room, bluebell, mother-in-law, good-for-nothing). Words of this structural type are produced by the word-building process called composition. Compounds are not homogeneous in structure. Traditionally 3 types are distinguished: neutral, morphological, syntactic.

The somewhat odd-looking words like flu, pram, lab, V-day, H-bomb are called shortenings, constructions or curtailed words and are produced by the way of word-building called shortening (construction). Shortening are produced in 2 different ways. 1^st is to make a new word from a syllable (rarer, 2) of the original word. Second may lose its beginning (as phone, fence), its ending (as vac. from vacation, ad –from advertisement) or both the beginning and ending (as flu from influenza).

The four types (root words, derived words, compounds, shortenings) represent the main structural types of Modern English words, and conversion, derivation, composition the most productive ways of word-building.

In reduplication new words are made by doubling a stem, either without any phonetic changes as in bye-bye or with a variation of the root-vowel or consonant as in ping-pong, chit-chat.