Lecture 4.

Major and Minor Types of Word-Building

Plan:
1. The notion of morphemes. What morphemes are words made of?

2. The definition of word-building.

3. Word-building processes: major and minor:

Major -

1) Affixation

2) Conversion

3) Shortening, abbreviations, acronyms

4) Composition

5) Blending (contamination)

Minor -

6) Semi-affixes

7) Onomatopoeia (sound-imitation)

8) Reduplication

9) Back-formation

Terms and definitions:

Word-building is the process of creating words from the material available in the
language after certain structural and semantic formulas and patterns.
Morphemes are the smallest meaningful language units, which also have
a meaning and constitute a certain sound complex, but are not autonomous.
Affixes precede or follow root-morpheme. They are subdivided into prefixes and
suffixes.

1
Conversion is one of the major word-building processes when a new word is
coined in a different part of speech without adding any derivative component and
with a different characteristic.
Shortening (clipping) is a type of word-building shortening of spoken words.
Compound words are words consisting of at least two stems which occur in the
language as free forms.
Blending (contamination) is a process of word-building when a new word is
constructed of the fragments of other words.
Semi-affixes are affixes that can function in the language both as words and as
affixes, so they stand midway between roots and affixes.
Onomatopoeia (sound-imitation) is the naming of an action or thing by a more or
less exact reproduction of a sound associated with it.
Reduplication is doubling of stems.
Back-formation (reversion) is a type of derivation of new words by subtracting
a real or supposed affix from existing words through misinterpretation of their
structure.

2
 QUIZ ON WORD-BUILDING
Task: state the type of word-building, be ready to explain your choice

Word Type of word-building

Facebook
employer
USSR
to blood-transfuse
to can
sportsman
to mew
ladybug
e-book
demo
walkie-talkie
duckling
ozone-friendly
Chunnel
goody-goody
GIF
water-proof
word-building