English Word formation

This paper discusses word formation in both English and Arabic. Processes of word formation are the bases upon which words are formed in a language. Firstly, the paper introduces word formation as to definition and processes, along with a few previous studies. Secondly, processes of word formation are discussed in English, and then in Arabic. Then, these processes are compared. Finally, certain conclusions, as well as some further areas of research, are proposed. There are different types of these processes. In English, there are eleven processes of word formation; they are acronymy,

This dissertation examines how borrowed derivational morphemes such as -age, -ity, -cion, and -ment became productive in the English language, particularly in the
fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. It endeavors to expand our current understanding of morphological productivity as a historical phenomenon--to account for not only aggregate quantitative measures of the products of morphological processes, but also some of the linguistic mechanisms that made those processes more productive for language users. Judgments about the productivity of different suffixes in the late ME period cannot be made on counts of frequency alone, since the vast majority of uses were not neologisms or newly coined hybrid forms but rather borrowings from Latin and French. It is not immediately clear to the historical linguist if Middle English speakers perceived a derivative such as enformacion as an undecomposable word or as a morphologically complex word. By examining usage patterns of these derivatives in guild records, the Wycliffite Bible, end-rhymed poetry, medical texts, and personal correspondence, this project argues that several mechanisms helped contribute to the increased transparency and perceived productivity of these affixes. These mechanisms include the following: the use of rhetorical sequences of derivatives with the same base or derivatives ending in the same suffix; the frequent use of derivatives as end rhymes in poetry; the lexical variety of derivatives ending in the same suffix; and the more frequent use of certain bases compared to their derivatives. All of these textual and linguistic features increased readers' and listeners' ability to analyze borrowed derivatives as suffixed words. Ultimately, the dissertation finds that several borrowed affixes were seen as potentially productive units of language in the late ME period, though some were seen as more productive than others in different discourses and contexts. It also emphasizes the value of register studies for understanding the specific motivations for the use of borrowed derivatives in different discourses, as well as the morphological consequences of salient usage patterns within different registers.

La parasíntesis ha sido analizada como un fenómeno derivativo consistente en la adjunción simultánea de un prefijo y un sufijo a una base nominal (en+cárcel+ar > encarcelar) o adjetiva (a+liger(o)+ar > aligerar). Este tipo de parasíntesis, que ofrece interesantes cuestiones dignas de estudio, no será objeto de atención en este trabajo y 1999. Nos ocuparemos de manera particular de la parasíntesis en composición, proceso relacionado con el mecanismo de synthetic compounding característico, entre otras, de las lenguas germánicas.

Scholars have stated the particularities of the language used in specialized discourse but little attention has been so far paid to the role derivational morphology may play in register variation. The present research makes a contribution to the study of word-formation in scientific registers by means of a corpus-based approach to the productivity of 14 suffixes in two scientific English registers, i.e., computer science and medicine. In order to empirically examine the productivity of the suffixes in each register, types, tokens and hapaxes ratio were used. Results obtained were then contrasted with the presence of the same suffixes in the written language wordlist of the British National Corpus (BNC). The study shows that suffixes are a productive word-formation resource in scientific registers and that their productivity differs in the registers under study. Findings ranked higher productivity of abstract noun-forming suffixes such as -ity, -ion and -ness in scientific registers than in the BNC. The suffix -ize reached values in the scientific corpora highly over the ranking drawn from the BNC. On the contrary, the BNC yielded an outstanding productivity rate of -free and -like, suffixes which proved to be fully unproductive in the scientific registers under study.

"Scholars have stated the particularities of the language used in specialized discourse but little attention has been so far paid to the role derivational morphology may play in register variation. The present research makes a contribution to the study of word-formation in scientific registers by means of a corpus-based approach to the productivity of 14 suffixes in two scientific English registers, i.e., computer science and medicine. In order to empirically examine the productivity of the suffixes in each register, types, tokens and hapaxes ratio were used. Results obtained were then contrasted with the presence of the same suffixes in the written language wordlist of the British National Corpus (BNC). The study shows that suffixes are a productive word-formation resource in scientific registers and that their productivity differs in the registers under study. Findings ranked higher productivity of abstract noun-forming suffixes such as -ity, -ion and -ness in scientific registers than in the BNC. The suffix –ize reached values in the scientific corpora highly over the ranking drawn from the BNC. On the contrary,
the BNC yielded an outstanding productivity rate of –free and -like, suffixes
which proved to be fully unproductive in the scientific registers under study"

Parasynthesis in Romance

1. Introduction
2. Some problems concerning the delimitation of parasynthesis
3. Parasynthetic verbs in Romance languages
4. Are there any other parasynthetic formations?
5. References

Abstract:

Parasynthesis is a word-formation process that Romance languages have inherited from Latin. It is characterised by the simultaneous and joint attachment of two affixes (a prefix and a suffix) to a lexical base. In order to define the concept of parasynthesis, several theoretical tenets (e.g. the transcategorisation power of prefixes, the binary branching hypothesis, etc.) must be taken into account. In Romance languages, verbs are the most representative cases of this morphological process; there are, however, other non-verbal formations that have been included in this category.

บทคัดย่อ

บทความนี้เป็นส่วนหนึ่งในงานวิจัยที่ศึกษาเปรียบเทียบข้อผิดในกระบวนการสร้างคำประสมภาษาอังกฤษที่เป็นคำยืมแปล กลุ่มตัวอย่างในจำนวน 60 คน คัดเลือดมาจากระดับคะแนนประสบการณ์ภาษาอังกฤษของนักเรียนไทยระดับปริญญาตรีชั้นปีที่ 1 จำนวน 330 คน โดยจำแนกนักเรียนไทยที่มีประสบการณ์ภาษาอังกฤษสูง และกลุ่มที่ประสบการณ์ภาษาอังกฤษต่ำ ข้อมูลที่ใช้ในงานวิจัยมาจากแบบทดสอบการสร้างคำประสมภาษาอังกฤษจากคำภาษาไทยที่เป็นคำยืมแปลจำนวน 80 คำ โดยไม่จัดกัดอัตราความเร็วในการนึกรู้คำ (Reaction time) ผลการวิจัยสรุปได้ว่า กระบวนการสร้างคำประสมภาษาอังกฤษที่มีความหมายเทียบเท่ากับคำประสมในภาษาไทยทีเป็นคำยืมแปลมีลักษณะของการสร้างคำที่มีความแตกต่างเป็นแนวต่อเนื่อง (Continuum) จากการ (Problem Avoidance Strategy) ซึ่งกลวิธีและข้อผิดในการสร้างคำประสมภาษาอังกฤษของกลุ่มตัวอย่างทั้ง 2 กลุ่มมีความแตกต่างกัน นอกจากนี้กระบวนการการสร้างคำภาษาอังกฤษของนักเรียนกลุ่มต่ำแสดงให้เห็นถึงความจำกัดของคลังคำซึ่งนักเรียนไทยมีไม่เพียงพอจะใช้เพื่อนึกรู้คำ และเป็นกลุ่มที่ข้อผิดเกิดจากการถ่ายโอนภาษาแม่มากที่สุดผ่านทั้งทางรูปเขียนและมโนทัศน์ อย่างไรก็ตาม ผลการทดลองเสนอแนวคิดที่ว่า ผู้เรียนทวิภาษาที่มีประสบการณ์ภาษาอังกฤษสูงมีกลวิธีการสร้างคำประสมภาษา มีความหมายใกล้เคียงกับคำในภาษาอังกฤษมากกว่าและมีรูปแบบที่หลากหลายกว่า โดยใช้โครงข่ายทางความหมาย และมีระดับความถูกต้องตามไวยากรณ์ของรูปคำภาษาอังกฤษมากกว่า ครั้งนี้ไม่พบกลยุทธ์การเลี่ยงปัญหา ดังเช่นในกลุ่มที่มีประสบการณ์ภาษาอังกฤษต่ำ

Abstract

This article reports an experimental study that aimed at investigating compound of Thai students with different English language experiences in the formation of English compound words equivalent to Thai compounds. The data were collected from 60 students, selected from 330 first-year university students by their English language experience levels determined by the scores acquired from a language exposure questionnaire. There were 30 students in each group that had the highest and lowest English language experiences. The sample groups were required to construct 80 English compound words equivalent to Thai compounds which are borrowed loans. Reaction time was not investigated. The test results from the 2 sample groups demonstrated that the proficiency of L2 lexical access was related to learners L2 experiences. They also exhibited a continuum of English word formation strategies. The result from the low L2 group revealed that they had limited English lexical items in their lexicon. In addition, an avoidance strategy was used frequently in the low group. It was also found that L1 transfer was salient in the English formation patterns of the low L2 group, both in the conceptual and orthographical aspect. However, in bilinguals with high L2 experience, there was a large diversity of L2 compound word formation strategies with a high level of grammatical accuracy. The high group also used a semantic network, and no avoidance strategy was used, in contrast to the low L2 learners.

This article takes a function-to-form approach to word-formation in present-day English and argues that the ecosystem metaphor can help morphologists see competition in word-formation and its resolution in a new light. The analysis first draws correspondences between four lexical functions (transcategorial, transconceptual, evaluative, and compacting) and ten formal operations (prefixation, suffixation, compounding, blending, morphostasis, stress shift, clipping, desuffixation, initialization, and replication) and concludes that there is no across-the-board interoperation competition to encode each function, but rather a fairly complementary distribution of the operations between the four functional subsystems. Each functional subsystem is then reviewed in turn and it is shown that, again, there is no full-scale competition at this level, but rather some fairly pronounced tendencies towards complementariness, and, in one case, also towards combination. The broad division of labor within each subsystem can, remarkably, be accounted for in different terms: the conditioning is primarily semantic (with formal subconsiderations) in the transcategorial and transconceptual subsystems while it is formal in the evaluative and compacting subsystems.

The paper presents the results of an empirical study of the conceptual structure and degree of lexicalization of N+N compounds. Informants were asked to list attributes for compounds and their constituent concepts. Based on the frequency with which attributes were named, rank-ordered lists were compiled for each compound and for its two constituents, and these lists were compared to assess conceptual overlap. The comparison suggests a division of N+N compounds into three types, which are taken to represent three stages of lexicalization: 1. With purely specifying compounds (e.g. apple juice, kitchen chair), there is a substantial overlap between the attributes listed for the second constituents and those listed for the compound, pointing to an initial stage of lexicalization. 2. Enriched compounds (e.g. wall paper, wheelchair) draw on the constituents' attributes to a lesser extent; instead their conceptual structure includes a considerable number of additional 'free' attributes, thus indicating that lexicalization is more advanced. 3. The final stage of this process is reached with fully lexicalized compounds like newspaper and (motor) car, which are no longer dependent on the constituent concepts. The data also provides evidence for the idea that with partonymic compounds like chairleg and coat collar, it is the first constituent (and not the second as suggested by the traditional modifier-head-analysis) that seems to dominate the conceptual structure of the compound.

English relies heavily on suffixation in deriving new words. The suffix-ism is used to form nouns in both general and specialised languages. In linguistics terminology,-ism is used to denote a range of technical concepts. The technical use of-ism and differences in term formation between Arabic and English have some implications for the translation of linguistic terms into Arabic. The aim of this study is to identify the technical senses of-ism in linguistics terminology in English and the translation techniques used by Arab lexicographers in rendering those senses into Arabic. The study findings show that (a)-ism has ten technical senses in linguistics terminology, (b) Arabic has the potential for translating the ten senses either lexically or morphologically, (c) different Arab lexicographers use different translation techniques, most of which produce denotatively acceptable equivalents, but only some techniques produce morphologically concise equivalents, and (d) formal consistency between Arabic equivalents is rarely maintained.

Blending is a word-formation process where a new word is made by combining two or more words. The newly created word is called a blend or a portmanteau word. There are many patterns by which blends are formed. When coining the new word, at least one of the source words has to be shortened. Blends are therefore formed by using fragments of source words. These fragments are called splinters. Besides shortening, blends can also be formed by retaining both source words if they share common sounds or letters.
While many blends become a part of everyday language, some blends quickly disappear after the initial popularity.
The graduation thesis is divided into two parts – theoretical and empirical. The first part is mainly concerned with the theoretical background of the blending process and word-formation in general. It also describes The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) in more detail. The empirical part is based on a corpus analysis, where we research the usage of blends in contemporary English by analysing a selected list of blends from The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).

The paper presents the design and operation of a FREE OPEN-ACCESS ONLINE platform for WORD FORMATION PRACTICE (check out the link that accompanies this paper). The system is based on a pre-defined list of pairs of base and derived forms and usage examples drawn automatically from the British National Corpus. A procedure for the extraction of example sentences is outlined. Results of 372 users' interacting with the system for over 4.5 months are reviewed. The question about what factors influence users' evaluation of specific exercises as more difficult is addressed. The results may be relevant in the area of language testing, preparation of examination materials, student-teacher online interaction and teaching English word formation.

Online exercises: http://wa.amu.edu.pl/~krynicki/wf/
Full content of Table 2 p. 6: http://wa.amu.edu.pl/~krynicki/wf/table2.htm
Prezi presentation: http://prezi.com/cgpsilarvlzm/corpus-based-online-word-formation-exercises-for-advanced-learners-of-english/

The aim of this paper is to explore the forms and meanings of armageddon as the right-hand source word in newly coined English lexical blends, such as stormageddon, carmageddon or cybergeddon. This source word has generated hundreds of analogical creations but has so far remained unresearched. A list of 102 blends, extracted from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (Davies 2013) available online, is subjected to morphological analysis in order to (1) determine the allomorphs of this splinter and (2) establish the structural preferences as regards the form of the left-hand source word. This is followed by an investigation of the semantic aspects of armageddon splinters, in order to give an overview of the development of its senses.

The aim of the present paper is to investigate the use of the adjectival suffix-cund in Old English and its development in Middle English. Since-cund is not attested in Present-Day English the study of the two discussed periods will focus on all the valid aspects of the suffix and its derivatives potentially indicative of the further decline of-cund. They include the semantics, the type of derivational bases, the number of types and tokens, textual and temporal distribution as well as semantic competition.

This contribution examines the conspicuous presence of lexical blends in the long-running US television show The Simpsons and consists of two parts. The first part involves the formal analysis of 237 nonce blends in the original English-language version of the show, working on the underlying hypothesis that, despite their novelty, the audience is nonetheless able to easily decipher the blends due to a number of formal choices enhancing the recognizability of their source elements. The second part then examines the translation of these blends into Hexagonal French by taking account of formal and semantic considerations influencing whether the English nonce blends are rendered as blends in French and, if so, whether the latter display the same formal tendencies as in English. It is found that Simpsonian nonce blends notably stand out in terms of preferred type of lexical shortening and prevalence of segment overlap and phonological headedness, in both English and French. These results indicate that, against a widely-held view among morphologists, blends may not constitute a homogeneous class from a formal standpoint.

This article presents a scientific-discourse and an overview systematically on the word-formation process that how the impacts and strategies of morphology produce a significant enrolment in the productive-pedagogies to teach and enhance the different parameters and paradigms of vocabulary’s re-structure and lexicography. The determinations of researchers define and describe the mechanism of affix morphemes (derivational and inflectional- prefixes, infixes, suffixes) in the formation of new words with the complete lexical-semantic meaning and syntactic-structure, which are developed through the general morphological processes in the morphosyntax. Since forms-formations in morphology and syntax are significant disciplines in linguistics, L2 students must identify the functional roles of phonetics, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics scientifically. This research attempt intends to specify the strategies, knowledge, and information employed by L2 students of the first-year graduation when they face new words while reading the texts. Even learners have a tendency to ignore a large amount of new vocabulary they encountered due to poor enhancement of the weak vocabulary awareness and immature and traditional pedagogical course policies at their schooling. They must beware of morphological misanalysis and false-etymology. The article also advocates instructors that L2 students to individual’s phonological awareness, knowledge of orthography, vocabulary, word form-formation and visual memory skills. Learners are advised to aware of the enhancement of word theories and all kind of word formations and processes for their productive reading performances, creative writing drafts, figurative expressions and critical thinking lexicon logically at the course level throughout this research attempt.
APA Cite - Yadav, M.K. & Yadav, M.S. (2021). An Overview on the Impacts and Strategies of Morphology in English Language Teaching to the L2 Learners. International Journal of Research, 8(3),311-329.

The following paper  looks at the issue of equivalence in Maciej Słomczyński’s translation of word-experiments in James Joyce’s
“Ulysses”. This brief analysis will attempt to reflect both structural and
culturally based differences between the languages, and the use of formal
and dynamic equivalence in the renderings.

The aim of this journal article is to assess the productivity of the Old English adjectival suffixes -cund and -isc by analysing the textual occurrences of these affixes in The Dictionary of Old English Corpus. The result of the measure of productivity, which is is based on Baayen's framework (1992, 1993), is that -isc is more productive than -cund. Along with this conclusion, some relevant points arise from the analysis, including the restricted competition between -isc and -cund, the absence from dictionaries of the nominal bases of derivation of -isc adjectives and the semantically predictable formations. On the methodological side, the analysis that has been carried out demonstates that lexicographical sources, dictionaries and databases in isolation cannot give an accurate picture of productivity, whereas an analysis that combines the use of textual and lexicographical sources allows for a suitable assessment of the productivity of morphological processes in a historical language.

Strict compositionality in morphological theory is problematic for explaining how language-users comprehend phenomena like the partial yet non-decomposable forms in phonaesthemes and in blends like EDUTAINMENT. An alternative account, based on discriminative learning, proposes that language-users associate linguistic cues (e.g., short segment or letter strings) with multiple simultaneous possible lexical and grammatical meanings. We evaluate this account on off-line human identifications of partial word-forms, using English blend words as our test case. We hypothesize that readers' ability to parse out source meanings from written blend forms should be correlated with how strongly a na\"ive discriminative reading  model associates the cues in each form with the correct source meanings. We provide evidence for this claim in two experiments, in which the discriminative learning model reliably predicted participants' success rate in guessing the sources of both attested and novel blends. This finding supports discriminative learning as a realistic model of how readers parse wordforms and map them to meanings. Further, the result points towards a novel, precise account of blend processing.

English relies heavily on suffixation in deriving new words. The suffix -ism is used to form nouns in both general and specialised languages. In linguistics terminology, -ism is used to denote a range of technical concepts. The technical use of -ism and differences in term formation between Arabic and English have some implications for the translation of linguistic terms into Arabic. The aim of this study is to identify the technical senses of -ism in linguistics terminology in English and the translation techniques used by Arab lexicographers in rendering those senses into Arabic. The study findings show that (a) -ism has ten technical senses in linguistics terminology, (b) Arabic has the potential for translating the ten senses either lexically or morphologically, (c) different Arab lexicographers use different translation techniques, most of which produce denotatively acceptable equivalents, but only some techniques produce morphologically concise equivalents, and (d) formal cons...

Blends, unlike compounds, are excluded from grammar and word-formation in the traditional view, hence they are dichotomous under the either-or paradigm. From a cognitive linguistic standpoint, this book investigates the nature of the link between compounds and blends. To accomplish such a task, a data set on both kinds of word-formation is investigated to determine whether the border between the two types of neologism is clear. The researcher’s hypothesis that the boundaries between compounds and blends are blurred is confirmed, including cases belonging to the fuzzy border. An alternative classification might be one that considers compounds and blends to be shades of grey. Only typical compounds and typical blends show some "difference" at the level of form, which can be explained as a metonymical extension. In addition, the internal structure of both compounds and blends is investigated to discover the schemas present. Compounds and blends have roughly the same schemas, according to the findings.

This article concerns a phenomenon, claimed to be semantic in nature, which can be observed in expressions from conceptually distant categories. The phenomenon in question consists in the modification of lexical categories in which the form of the words is retained, but their meanings undergo essential, yet analogous, shifts. The two domains selected for the purpose of this study are so-called meteorological expressions (e.g., it's raining, snow fell etc.) and the names of political states (France, Mexico, Vietnam etc.). These domains are mutually independent and constitute unrelated areas of knowledge. What is intriguing, however, is the similarity of the semantic shifts, also known as conversion or zero-derivation, which occur in these categories. The term "semantic extension" has been chosen as a convenient shorthand for the phenomenon in question. The article argues that due to altered profiles imposed on essentially the same base, the semantic extension under investigation results in shifts between the profiles of a "setting", a "participant" and a "pro-cess". In a comparative perspective between the two domains in question, zero-derived settings and participants alternate on a regular basis. The analysis applied here adopts tools exploited in cognitive grammar (e.g., profile, base). If semantic extensions towards settings and participants can be confirmed in such distant domains, further research can be undertaken in other domains. If related semantic effects are found in more domains, the semantic categories of a setting and a participant should be included in descriptive grammars.

This article investigates the formation of English acronyms used to name school events in an
Indonesian setting. The data collected from Instagram and offline sources were taken from April
to August 2018 and were classified and analyzed following Mattiello’s [2013] and Soeparno’s
[1985] frameworks.
There were 29 non-elliptic acronyms and 21 elliptic acronyms, of which six content words are not
represented in the acronym; yet, two function words are. This research found one acronym with
a consonant addition, and 24 extended acronyms. The initials retained could be followed by a
non-immediate letter. Five inverted acronyms were also found, one of which involved two letters
from two source words. There were seven multiple acronyms in this current research, four of
which include acronyms and three of initialisms in their sources. The study also found 19 acrostic
acronyms, six of which were semantically relevant.
The research concludes that the English acronyms examined were also influenced by Indonesian
acronym rules, especially at the length of the retained parts and the position of the retained
parts in the source words. There is frequent use of non-initials and more letters retained from
the source words in composing the acronyms.