Social:Word formation

Short description: Creation of a new word

In linguistics, word formation is the creation of a new word. Word formation is sometimes contrasted with semantic change, which is a change in a single word's meaning. The boundary between word formation and semantic change can be difficult to define as a new use of an old word can be seen as a new word derived from an old one and identical to it in form. See 'conversion'.

Root

There are a number of methods of word formation.

Blending

A lexical blend is a complex word typically made of two word fragments. Some examples are smog, which comes from smoke and fog, and brunch, from breakfast and lunch.

Acronym

An acronym is a word formed from the first letters of other words. They are usually written entirely in capital letters, though some words originating as acronyms, like radar, are now treated as common nouns. Strictly speaking, an acronym is pronounced as if it was a word (like NASA for National Aeronautics and Space Administration), whereas a word pronounced as a sequence of letters (like ATM for Automatic Teller Machine") is called an initialism.

Calque

A calque is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation. For example, the English phrase to lose face is a calque from the Chinese "丟臉/丢脸".

A subcategory of calques is the semantic loan, that is, the extension of the meaning of a word to include new, foreign meanings.

Neologism

A neologism is a process of forming a new word by coining such as quark.

Subcategories of neologisms include:

• The eponym, a proper noun that becomes commonly used for an idea it is associated with, usually by changing its part of speech, like Xerox, Orwellian, and Stentorian
• The loanword, a word borrowed from another language, as cliché is from French or loot from Hindi
• An onomatopoeic word, a word which imitates natural sounds, like the bird name cuckoo
• Formation using phono-semantic matching, that is, matching a foreign word with a phonetically and semantically similar, pre-existing native word or root

Back-formation

In linguistics, back formation is the process of forming a new word by removing actual or supposed affixes from other words.

Ex:Television—Televise

Donation:Donate.etc.

References

• Hadumod Bussmann (1996), Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, London: Routledge.
• Ein internationales Handbuch zur Natur und Struktur von Wörtern und Wortschätzen, [Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft 21], Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, vol. 1, pp. 1142-1178.
• Ghil'ad Zuckermann (2003). Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. (Palgrave Studies in Language History and Language Change). ISBN:978-1-4039-3869-5.