An Introduction to Modern English Word-Formation

Valerie Adams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315504230
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

A series to meet the need for books on modern English that are both up-to-date and authoritative.For the scholar, the teacher, the student and the general reader, but especially for English-speaking students of language and linguistics in institutions where English is the language of instruction, or advanced specialist students of English in universities where English is taught as a foreign language

Chapter 1

The word

1.1 Introductory

The ways in which new words are formed, and the factors which govern their acceptance into the language, are generally taken very much for granted by the average speaker. To understand a word, it is not necessary to be aware of how it is constructed, or of whether it is simple or complex, that is, whether or not it can be broken down into two or more constituents. We are able to use a word which is new to us when we find out what object or concept it denotes. Some words, of course, are more ‘transparent’ than others. We need only have met the separate elements of the adjectives unfathomable, indescribable, to be able to recognize the familiar pattern of negative prefix + transitive verb + adjective-forming suffix on which many words of similar form, like uneatable, are constructed. Knowing the pattern, we can guess their meanings: ‘cannot be fathomed’, ‘cannot be described’ – although we are not surprised to find other, similar-looking words, for example unfashionable, unfavourable, for which this analysis will not work. We recognize as ‘transparent’ the adjectives unassuming, unheard-of, while taking for granted the fact that we cannot use assuming or heard-of. We accept as quite natural the fact that although we can use the verbs to drum, to pipe, to trumpet, we cannot use the verbs to piano, to violin; and we cope effortlessly with the apparent paradox of to dust, meaning either ‘to remove dust from something’ or ‘to apply a dust-like substance to something’.

But when we meet new coinages, like tape-code, freak-out, shutup-ness, beautician, talkathon, we may not readily be able to explain our reactions to them. We may find them acceptable and in accordance with our feelings about how words should be built up; or they may seem to us offensive, and in some way contrary to the rules. Innovations in vocabulary are capable of arousing quite strong feelings in people who may otherwise not be in the habit of thinking very much about language. Quirk (1968) quotes some letters to the press of a familiar kind, written to protest about ‘horrible jargon’, such as break-down (of figures), ‘vile’ words like transportation, and the ‘atrocity’ lay-by (127–8). The apologist who wrote the following in The Times of 3 September 1943 showed an unusually liberal attitude:

On August 27 this journal reported a speech in which Mr Herbert Morrison used the word ‘triphibious’. … On [August 31] a public school man, a master of English, fitted Mr Morrison’s new adjective with its corresponding noun. … A new word that catches on, or can be forced on, is no monster; it is a happy invention. ‘Triphibian’ therefore may now join ‘happidrome’, ‘sportsdrome’, and ‘normalcy’ …

Perhaps the status of the master of English mentioned – Winston Churchill – had something to do with triphibian’s favourable reception. But to protest against lexical innovations is very often to appear ridiculous to later generations: who today would wince at aviation (now that we are thoroughly used to it), about which The Daily Chronicle commented in 1909: ‘You could hardly think of a worse word.’

It is clear that various factors are involved in our attitudes to words. Lay-by was objected to because it appears to be formed from the nonstandard verb to lay (= ‘to lie’), and triphibian is the result of the splitting up of an element amphi-, in amphibian, which anyone with a knowledge of Greek knows means ‘both’ and should not be split. Our knowledge of the classical languages causes us to object to ‘hybrid’ words, composed of a Latin and a Greek element, like television, or a classical and a native element, like speedometer. The objectionableness of break-down and transportation is not a matter of the breaking of rules, and is less easy to pinpoint. Unfamiliarity alone may be enough to cause prejudice against a word. Patrial (1629, = ‘of or belonging to one’s native country’) was recently re-introduced for legal purposes connected with the Immigration Act of 1971. Although obviously useful and of wholly respectable Latin ancestry (from a presumed form patrialis, from patria, ‘fatherland’), it was at once denounced (by a professor of law) as ‘barbarous’. Manual, on the other hand, a word of similar make-up (from Latin manualis, ‘pertaining to the hand’), causes no such reaction – indeed its secure establishment in the language was probably responsible for the prejudice against its synonym of Teutonic origin, handbook, which appeared in Old English, fell into disuse after the Middle Ages, and was denounced in 1838 as a ‘tasteless innovation’ (see Jespersen 1905, §47). Speakers of English appear to be conservative in matters of vocabulary, or at least to think that they are; but it may be that British speakers are more conservative than Americans: during the present century, attention-catching neologisms like aquacade, sexploitation, swelegant, have appeared more frequently in American newspapers and magazines than in British ones.¹

In the chapters that follow, I shall be concerned with some unconventional patterns of word-making, seen against a background of those established and productive patterns on which most generally-acceptable new words are formed. The reader will come across a number of ephemeral formations, illustrated to a large extent by quotations from newspapers. And in Chapter 13, we shall look at some developments that have been taking place over the last four hundred years or so, and it will be clear that it is not only modern word-coiners who break the ‘rules’ (cf the characteristic remark of a correspondent to the press quoted by Quirk (1968, 127): ‘In these days of scientific as opposed to cultural education we need specially to be on our guard against debasement of language’). From an inspection of a range of established and transient coinages, we may gain some idea of the various forces at work in English word-formation and, incidentally, come to appreciate the irrelevance of Fowler’s indignant protest: ‘word-making, like other manufactures, should be done by those who know how to do it. Others should neither attempt it for themselves, nor assist the deplorable activities of amateurs by giving currency to fresh coinages before there has been time to test them’ (1965, 253).²

1.2 Word-formation and linguistics

The subject of word-formation has not until recently received very much attention from descriptive grammarians of English, or from scholars working in the field of general linguistics. As a collection of different processes – compounding, affixation, ‘conversion’, ‘backformation’ and so on, about which, as a group, it is difficult to make general statements, word-formation usually makes a brief appearance in one or two chapters of a grammar. And the subject has not been attractive to linguists for two reasons – its connections with the non-linguistic world of things and ideas, for which words provide the names, and its equivocal position as between descriptive and historical studies. A few brief remarks, which necessarily present a much over-simplified picture, on the course which linguistics has taken in the last hundred years will make this clearer.

The nineteenth century, the period of great advances in historical and comparative language study, saw the first claims of linguistics to be a science, comparable in its methods with the natural sciences which were also enjoying a period of exciting discovery. These claims rested on the detailed study, by comparative linguists, of formal correspondences in the Indo-European languages, and their realization that such study depended on the assumption of certain natural ‘laws’ of sound change. As Robins observes in his discussion of the linguistics of the latter part of the nineteenth century:

The history of a language is traced through recorded variations in the forms and meanings of its words, and languages are proved to be related by reason of their possession of words bearing formal and semantic correspondences to each other such as cannot be attributed to mere chance or to recent borrowing. If sound change were not regular, if word-forms were subject to random, inexplicable, and unmotivated variation in the course of time, such arguments would lose their validity and linguistic relations could only be established historically by extra-linguistic evidence such as is provided in the Romance field of languages descended from Latin. (1967, 183)

The rise and development in the twentieth century of synchronic descriptive linguistics meant a shift of emphasis from historical studies, but not from the idea of linguistics as a science based on detailed observation and the rigorous exclusion of all explanations dependent on extra-linguistic factors. As early as 1876, Henry Sweet had written:

before history must come a knowledge of what exists. We must learn to observe things as they are, without regard to their origin, just as a zoologist must learn to describe accurately a horse or any other animal. Nor would the mere statement that the modern horse is a descendant of a three-toed marsh quadruped be accepted as an exhaustive description … Such however is the course being pursued by most antiquarian philologists. (1875–6, 471)

The most influential scholar concerned with the new linguistics was Ferdinand de Saussure, who emphasized the distinction between external linguistics – the study of the effects on a language of the history and culture of its speakers, and internal linguistics – the study of its system and rules. Language, studied synchronically, as a system of elements definable in relation to one another, must be seen as a fixed state of affairs at a particular point in time. It was internal linguistics, stimulated by de Saussure’s work (1916), that was to be the main concern of twentieth-century scholars, and within it there could be no place for the study of the formation of words, with its close connections with the external world and its implications of constant change. Any discussion of new formations as such means the abandonment of the strict distinction between history and the present moment. As Harris expressed it in his influential Structural Linguistics (1951, 255): ‘The methods of descriptive linguistics cannot treat of the productivity of elements since that is a measure of the difference between our corpus and some future corpus of the language.’ Leonard Bloomfield, whose book, Language (1933), was the next work of major influence after that of de Saussure, re-emphasized the necessity of a scientific approach, and the consequent difficulties in the way of studying ‘meaning’, and until the middle of the nineteen-fifties, interest was centred on the isolating of minimal segments of speech, the description of their distribution relative to one another, and their organization into larger units. The fundamental unit of grammar was not the word but a smaller unit, the morpheme, about which Chapter 11 will have more to say.

The next major change of emphasis in linguistics was marked by the publication in 1957 of Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures. As Chomsky stated it, one of the aims of linguistics was now seen to be to make a grammar mirror ‘the behavior of the speaker who, on the basis of a finite and accidental experience with language can produce and understand an indefinite number of new sentences’ (15). The idea of productivity, or creativity, previously excluded from linguistics, or discussed in terms of probabilities in the effort to maintain the view of language as existing in a static state,³ was seen to be of central importance. But still word-formation remained a topic neglected by linguists, and for several good reasons. Chomsky (1965, Chapter 1) made explicit the distinction, fundamental to linguistics today (and comparable to that made by de Saussure between langue, the system of a language, and parole, the set of utterances of the language), between linguistic competence, ‘the speaker-hearer’s knowledge of his language’ and performance, ‘the actual use of language in concrete situations’ (Chomsky 1965, 4). Linked with this distinction are the notions of ‘grammaticalness’ and ‘acceptability’; in Chomsky’s words, ‘Acceptability is a concept that belongs to the study of performance, whereas grammaticalness belongs to the study of competence’ (1965, 11). A ‘grammatical’ utterance is one which may be generated and interpreted by the rules of the grammar; an ‘acceptable’ utterance is one which is ‘perfectly natural and immediately comprehensible … and in no way bizarre or outlandish’ (1965, 10). It is easy to show, as Chomsky does, that a grammatical sentence may not be acceptable. For instance, this is the cheese the rat the cat caught stole appears ‘bizarre’ and unacceptable because we have difficulty in working it out, not because it breaks any grammatical rules. Generally, however, it is to be expected that grammaticalness and acceptability will go hand in hand where sentences are concerned.

The ability to make and understand new words is obviously as much a part of our linguistic competence as the ability to make and understand new sentences, and so, as Pennanen (1972, 293) points out, ‘it is an obvious gap in transformational grammars not to have made provision for treating word-formation’. But, as we noticed in the first section of this chapter, we may readily think of words, like to piano, to violin, against which we can invoke no rule, but which are definitely ‘unacceptable’ for no obvious reason. The incongruence of grammatically and acceptability, that is, is far greater where words are concerned than where sentences are concerned. It is so great, in fact, that the exercise of setting out the ‘rules’ for forming words has so far seemed to many linguists to be of questionable usefulness. The occasions on which we would have to describe the output of such rules as ‘grammatical but non-occurring’ (cf Zimmer 1964, 18) are just too numerous. And there are further difficulties in treating new words like new sentences. A novel word (like handbook or patrial) may attract unwelcome attention to itself and appear to be the result of the breaking of rules rather than of their application. And, as we saw with aviation, the more accustomed to a word we become, the more likely we are to find it acceptable, whether it is ‘grammatical’ or not – or perhaps we should say, whether or not it was ‘grammatical’ at the time it was first formed, since a new word once formed, often becomes merely a member of an inventory; its formation is a historical event, and the ‘rule’ behind it may then appear irrelevant.

I shall largely ignore these problems and issues, since I am concerned in this book mainly to describe and exemplify the results of some present-day processes of word-formation. I shall return briefly in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 The word
• 2 Word classes
• 3 Some terms and definitions
• 4 Derivation by zero suffix
• 5 Noun compounds
• 6 Adjective compounds
• 7 Verb compounds and backformation
• 8 Compounds containing particles
• 9 Neo-classical compounds
• 10 Clippings and acronyms
• 11 Morphemes, phonaesthemes and blends
• 12 Compound-blends
• 13 Group-forming
• 14 Word-formation and rules
• References and abbreviations
• Index