GOBRINROW

• BORROWING
SAMCYRNO

• ACRONYMS
SNELBD

• BLENDS
SANBOBIRITEVA

•ABBREVIATIONS
LADENORITIVA

• DERIVATIONAL
PYRIDTOVUCTI

• PRODUCTIVITY
SOLS

• LOSS
EREVIDUTAPLIC
GRYNHIM
•REDUPLICATIVE
RHYMING
MESUPIMEH

•EUPHEMISM
New vocabulary or changes in
fashionable usage spread rapidly and
evenly across the country due to our
sophisticated
. communication links.
 LE XI C AL C H AN GE
ARVIN D. VILLACORTA
MAELT
DR. JASMIN SUMIPO
PROFESSOR
 LEXICAL CHANGE

• Refers to a change in the meaning or use of a word, or a generational shift in preference

for one word or phrase over another. 

• Probably the most frequent type of language change and certainly the easiest to observe.
WORD COINAGE IN ENGLISH

• The word formation process in which a new word is created either deliberately or accidentally
without using the other word formation processes and often from seemingly nothing.
BORROWING
• Borrowing words from other languages is an important source of new words, which are called
loan words.

• Borrowing occurs when one language adds a word or morpheme from another language to its
own lexicon.

• This often happens in situations of language contact, when speakers of different languages
regularly interact with one another, and especially where there are many bilingual or multilingual
speakers.
BORROWING
• The pronunciation of loan words is often (but not always) altered to fit the phonological rules of
the borrowing language. For example,

• English borrowed ensemble [ãsãbəl] from French but pronounce it [ãnsãmbəl], with [n] and [m]
inserted, because English doesn’t ordinarily have syllables centered on nasal vowels alone.

• Other borrowed words such as the composer’s name Bach will often be pronounced as the
original German [bax], with a final velar fricative, even though such a pronunciation does not
conform to the rules of English
HISTORY THROUGH LOAN WORDS
• We may trace the history of the English-speaking people by studying the kinds of loan words in
their language, their source, and when they were borrowed.

• Until the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes inhabited England.
• They were of Germanic origin when they came to Britain in the fifth century to eventually
become the English.

• Originally, they spoke Germanic dialects, from which Old English developed.
• These dialects contained some Latin borrowings but few foreign elements beyond that.
HISTORY THROUGH LOAN WORDS
• These Germanic tribes had displaced the earlier Celtic inhabitants, whose influence on Old
English was confined to a few Celtic place names. (The modern languages Welsh, Irish, and
Scots Gaelic are descended from the Celtic dialects.)

• English has borrowed from Yiddish. Many non-Jews as well as non-Yiddish speaking Jews use
Yiddish words.
HISTORY THROUGH LOAN WORDS
• There was once even a bumper sticker proclaiming:
• “Marcel Proust is a Yenta.”
• Yenta is a Yiddish word meaning “gossipy woman.”
• Lox, meaning “smoked salmon,” and bagel, “a doughnut dipped in cement,” now belong to
English, as well as Yiddish expressions like chutzpah, schmaltz, schlemiel, schmuck, schmo,
schlep, and kibitz.
HISTORY THROUGH LOAN WORDS

• English is a lender of many words to other languages, especially in the areas of technology,
sports, and entertainment.

• Words and expressions such as jazz, whisky, blue jeans, rock music, supermarket, baseball,
picnic, and computer have been borrowed from English into languages as diverse as Twi,
Hungarian, Russian, and Japanese
BORROWING

• Loan-translation (calques) usually from classical or prestigious

languages: Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Chinese, French; now English is
donor language to many others
CALQUE

• A word or phrase in one language whose semantic components

(words or parts of words) are translations from another language
CALQUE
• The English phrase "blue blood" is a calque of the Spanish phrase sangre azul (sangre means
"blood" and azul means "blue"), which at one time apparently referred to the visible veins of fair-
skinned people.

• The Spanish rascacielo is a calque of the English "skyscraper" (rasca means "it scrapes" and
cielo means "sky”

• The English phrase "piña colada," which is a simple borrowing of the Spanish phrase rather than
a translation of the words (which mean "strained pineapple")
.
• Some languages borrow freely; others do not , sometimes languages borrow the
same word twice (`doublets;), or borrow a word they already have,

• English `shirt, skirt'; `gauche, gawky', `castle, chateau'; `nurse, nourish'; `lance,
launch'; `rancid, raunchy';

• `pocket, pouch, poach' (`triplets').

REDUCED WORDS
• Speakers tend to abbreviate words in various ways to shorten the messages they convey.
• We used to find this in telegrams and telexes.
• Now it is seen dramatically in the creativity used on messages typed into cell phones in text
messaging and similar communication technologies.

• However, we will concern ourselves with spoken language and observe three reduction
phenomena: clipping, acronyms, and alphabetic abbreviations.
CLIPPING

• Is the abbreviation of longer words into shorter ones, such as fax for facsimile, the British word
telly for television, prof for professor, piano for pianoforte, and gym for gymnasium.

• Once considered slang, these words have now become lexicalized, that is, full words in their own
right.

• These are only a few examples of such clipped forms that are now used as whole words.
CLIPPING

• Other examples are ad, bike, math, gas, phone, bus, and van (from advertisement, bicycle,
mathematics, gasoline, telephone, omnibus, and caravan).

• More recently, dis and rad (from disrespect and radical) have entered the language, and dis has
come to be used as a verb meaning “to show disrespect.
ACRONYMS
• Are words derived from the initials of several words. Such words are pronounced as the spelling
indicates:

• NASA [næsə] from National Aeronautics and Space Administration,

• UNESCO [yunɛsko] from United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, and
• UNICEF [yunisɛf] from United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund.
• Radar from “Radio Detecting and Ranging,”
• laser from “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation,”
ACRONYMS
• SCUBA from “self-contained underwater breathing apparatus,”
• RAM from “random access memory” show the creative efforts of word coiners,
• as does SNAFU, which was coined by soldiers in World War II and is rendered in polite circles as
“situation normal, all fouled up.”

• Recently coined additions are AIDS (1980s), from the initials of acquired immune deficiency
syndrome, and

• SARS (2000s), from severe acute respiratory syndrome.

ACRONYMS
• When the string of letters is not easily pronounced as a word, the “acronym” is produced by
sounding out each letter, as in

• NFL [ɛnɛfɛl ̃ ] for National Football League,

• UCLA [yusiɛle] for University of California, Los Angeles, and
• MRI [ɛmaraɪ ̃ ] for Magnetic Resonance Imaging.
• These special kinds of acronyms are sometimes called alphabetic abbreviations.
Acronyms and Alphabetic Abbreviations
• are being added to the vocabulary daily with the proliferation of computers and widespread use
of the internet, including

• blog (web log),

• jpeg (joint photographic expert group),
• GUI, pronounced “gooey,” for graphical user interface,
• PDA (personal digital assistant), and
• MP3 for MPEG layer 3, where MPEG itself is the acronym for moving picture experts group.
Acronyms and Alphabetic Abbreviations

• Unbelievable though it may seem, acronyms are use somewhere in the English speaking world
number into the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands, a dramatic nod to the creativity
and changeability of human language
ABBREVIATIONS

• A shortened or contracted form of a word or phrase, used to represent the whole, as

• Dr. for Doctor,
• U.S. for United States,
• lb. for pound.
BLENDS
• similar to compounds in that they were produced by combining two words, but parts of the words
that were combined were deleted.

• Smog, from smoke + fog;

• brunch, from breakfast and lunch;
• motel, from motor + hotel;
• infomercial, from info + commercial; and
• urinalysis, from urine + analysis are examples of blends that have attained full lexical status in
English.
DERIVATIONAL COMPOUND
• or compound-derivatives are words in which the structural integrity of the two free stems is
ensured by a suffix referring to the combination as a whole, not to one of its elements: 

• kind-hearted, old-timer, school-boyishness, teenager.

• In the coining of the derivational compounds two types of word-formation are at work.
• The essence of the derivational compounds will be clear if we compare them with derivatives and
compounds proper that possess a similar structure.
DERIVATIONAL COMPOUND
• Take, for example, 
• brainstruster, honeymooner and mill-owner.
• The ultimate constituents of all three are: noun stem + noun stem +-er.
• Analysing into immediate constituents, we see that the immediate constituents (IC’s) of the
compound mill-owner are two noun stems, the first simple, the second derived: mill + owner.
DERIVATIONAL COMPOUND
• The process of word-building in these seemingly similar words is different: 
• mill-owner is coined by composition, 
• honeymooner — by derivation from the compound honeymoon. 
• Honeymoon being a compound, honeymooner is a derivative.
• Now brains trust ‘a group of experts’ is a phrase, so brainstruster is formed by two simultaneous
processes — by composition and by derivation and may be called a derivational compound.

• Its IC’s are (brains + trust)+ -еr. The suffix -er'is one of the productive suffixes in forming
derivational compounds.
DERIVATIONAL COMPOUND
• Another frequent type of derivational compounds are the possessive compounds of the type kind-
hearted: adjective stem + noun stem + -ed.

• Its IC’s are a noun phrase kind heart and the suffix -ed that unites the elements of the phrase and turns
them into the elements of a compound adjective.

• Similar examples are extremely numerous. Compounds of this type can be coined very freely to meet the
requirements of different situations.

• The first element may also be a noun stem: bow-legged, heart-shaped and

• very often a numeral: three-coloured.
DERIVATIONAL COMPOUND
• The derivational compounds often become the basis of further derivation.
• War-minded : : war-mindedness;
• whole-hearted : : whole-heartedness : : whole-heartedly,
• schoolboyish : : schoolboyishness;
• do-it-yourselfer : : do-it-yourselfism.
REDUPLICATIVE COMPOUNDS

• The group consists of reduplicative compounds that fall into three main subgroups:
Reduplicative compounds proper,
Ablaut combinations,
Rhyme combinations.
REDUPLICATIVE COMPOUNDS PROPER
• Actually it is a very mixed group containing usual free forms, onomatopoeic stems and pseudo-
morphemes.

• Onomatopoeic repetition exists but it is not very extensive: 

• hush-hush ‘secret’, 
• murmur (a borrowing from French) 
• pooh-pooh (to express contempt).
• In blah-blah ‘nonsense’, ‘idle talk’ the constituents are pseudo-morphemes which do not occur
elsewhere.
ABLAUT COMBINATIONS
• Are twin forms consisting of one basic morpheme (usually the second), sometimes a pseudo-
morpheme which is repeated in the other constituent with a different vowel.

• The typical changes are [ı] — [æ]: 

• chit-chat ‘gossip’ (from chat ‘easy familiar talk’), 
• dilly-dally ‘loiter’, 
• knick-knack ‘small articles of ornament’, 
• riff-raff ‘the mob’, 
ABLAUT COMBINATIONS
• shilly-shally ‘hesitate’, 
• zigzag (borrowed from French),
• and [ı] — [o]: 
• ding-dong (said of the sound of a bell), 
• ping-pong ‘table-tennis’, 
• singsong ‘monotonous voice’, 
• tiptop ‘first-rate’.
RHYME COMBINATIONS 
• Are twin forms consisting of two elements (most often two pseudo-morphemes) which are joined to rhyme:
•  boogie-woogie,
• flibberty-gibberty ‘frivolous’, 
• harum-scarum ‘disorganised’, 
• helter-skelter ‘in disordered haste’, 
• hoity-toity ‘snobbish’, 
• humdrum ‘bore’, 
RHYME COMBINATIONS
• hurry-scurry ‘great hurry’,
•  hurdy-gurdy ‘a small organ’, 
• lovey-dovey ‘darling’,
•  mumbo-jumbo ‘deliberate mystification, fetish’, 
• namby-pamby ‘weakly sentimental’, 
• titbit ‘a choice morsel’, 
• willy-nilly‘compulsorily’
RHYME COMBINATIONS
• About 40% of these rhyme combinations (a much higher percentage than with the ablaut
combinations) are not motivated: 

• namby-pamby, razzle-dazzle.
• The pattern is emotionally charged and chiefly colloquial, jocular, often sentimental in a babyish
sort of way.

• The expressive character is mainly due to the effect of rhythm, rhyme and sound suggestiveness.
VERB (OR NOUN) PLUS PARTICIPLE
• Germanic languages have many verb+ participle constructions, e.g.
`Go away, run out/in/up/down' etc.
• Revived during 60's and 70's:
`turn on, tune out, drop out; flake out; rip off, wig out;'
• more recently:
 `max out, wimp out'; 'job out; to get a buy-in';
• particle plus noun: upscale, downscale, downsize, download/upload, uplink
PRODUCTIVITY

• Distinction is usually made between:

Dead affixes,
Living affixes.
PRODUCTIVITY- Dead affixes
•  are described as those which are no longer felt in modern English as component parts of words;
they have so fused with the base of the word as to lose their independence completely. It is only
by special etymological analysis that they may be singled out, e.g. 

• -d in dead, seed, -le, -l, -el in bundle, sail, hovel; -ock in hillock; -lock in wedlock; -t in flight,

gift, height.

• It is quite clear that dead suffixes are irrelevant to present-day English word-formation, they
belong in its diachronic study.
PRODUCTIVITY- Living affixes
• may be easily singled out from a word, e.g.
• The noun-forming suffixes -ness, -dom, -hood, -age, -ance, as in darkness, freedom, childhood,
marriage, assistance, etc.

• Or the adjective-forming suffixes -en, -ous, -ive, -ful, -y as in wooden, poisonous, active,
hopeful, stony, etc.

• However, not all living derivational affixes of modern English possess the ability to coin new
words. Some of them may be employed to coin new words on the spur of the moment, others
cannot, so that they are different from the point of view of their productivity. Accordingly they
fall into two basic classes — productive and non-productive word-building affixes.
TABOO, EUPHEMISM
• Some items may acquire taboo, because of vulgarity
• A source of synonymy also well worthy of note is the so-called euphemism in which by a shift of
meaning a word of more or less ‘pleasant or at least inoffensive connotation becomes
synonymous to one that is harsh, obscene, indelicate or otherwise unpleasant.

• The euphemistic expression merry fully coincides in denotation with the word drunk it

substitutes, but the connotations of the latter fade out and so the utterance on the whole is milder,
less offensive.
TABOO, EUPHEMISM
• The effect is achieved, because the periphrastic expression is not so harsh, sometimes jocular and
usually motivated according to some secondary feature of the notion:

•  naked : : in one’s birthday suit, 

• pregnant : : in the family way.
• Very often a learned word which sounds less familiar is therefore less offensive, as in 
• drunkenness : : intoxication;
• sweat : : perspiration.
TABOO, EUPHEMISM
• Euphemisms can also be treated within the synchronic approach, because both expressions, the
euphemistic and the direct one, co-exist in the language and form a synonymic opposition. Not
only English but other modern languages as well have a definite set of notions attracting
euphemistic circumlocutions.

• These are notions of death, madness, stupidity, drunkenness, certain physiological processes,
crimes and so on. For example: 

• die : : be no more : : be gone : : lose one’s life : : breathe one’s last : : join the silent majority : :
go the way of alt flesh : : pass away : : be gathered to one’s fathers.
LOSS

• Many words go out of fashion, or the technology associated with them is

replaced with new technology.

• Words become archaic or obsolete.

• What is a `snood', a 'swale', a `thane', a `quidity'?
WORD FROM NAMES - EPONYM

• Is a word derived from the proper name of a person or place.

WORD FROM NAMES - EPONYM

• Fourth Earl of Sandwich

Sandwich, for instance-- famously consumed (if not invented) by John Montagu, Fourth Earl of
Sandwich, who put his food between two slices of bread so that he could eat while he gambled.
WORD FROM NAMES - EPONYM

• Louis Pasteur
Pasteurization, from the name of the fearless French chemist who invented the process.
• St. Valentine
Valentine, from the saintly name of not one but two early Christian martyrs.
SOUND IMITATION
 (Onomatopoeia or echoism)
• Is consequently the naming of an action or thing by a more or less exact reproduction of a sound
associated with it.

• For instance words naming sounds and movement of water: babble, blob, bubble, flush, gurgle,
gush, splash, etc.

• It would, however, be wrong to think that onomatopoeic words reflect the real sounds directly,
irrespective of the laws of the language, because the same sounds are represented differently in
different languages.
SOUND IMITATION
 (Onomatopoeia or echoism)

• Onomatopoeic words adopt the phonetic features of English and fall into the combinations
peculiar to it.

• The majority of onomatopoeic words serve to name sounds or movements.

• Most of them are verbs easily turned into nouns: bang, boom, bump, hum, rustle, smack, thud,
etc. 
BACK-FORMATION
• (Also called reversion) is a term borrowed from diachronic linguistics.
• It denotes the derivation of new words by subtracting a real or supposed affix from existing
words through misinterpretation of their structure.

• The process is based on analogy. The words beggar, butler, cobbler, or typewriter look very much
like agent nouns with the suffix -er/-or, such as actor or painter.

• Their last syllable is therefore taken for a suffix and subtracted from the word leaving what is
understood as a verbal stem.
BACK-FORMATION
• In this way the verb butle ‘to act or serve as a butler’ is derived by subtraction of -er from a
supposedly verbal stem in the noun butler. Butler ( buteler, boteler from bouteillier ‘bottle
bearer’) has widened its meaning.

• Originally it meant ‘the man-servant having charge of the wine’.

• It means at present ‘the chief servant of a rich household who is in charge of other servants,
receives guests and directs the serving of meals’.
BACK-FORMATION
• Thevery high frequency of the pattern verb stem + -er (or its equivalents) is a matter of
common knowledge.

• Nothing more natural therefore than the prominent part this pattern plays in back-formation.
Alongside the examples already cited above are 

• burgle v <— burglar n; 
• cobble v <— cobbler n; 
• sculpt v <—sculptor n.
SEMANTIC CHANGE

• When the meaning of a word becomes broader, it means everything it used to mean and more.
• The middle English word dogge referred to a specific breed of dog, but was eventually broadened
to encompass all members of the species canis familiaris.

• The word holiday originally meant a day of religious significance, from “holy day.”

• Today the word refers to any day that we do not have to work.
SEMANTIC CHANGE

• Picture used to mean “painted representation,” but now you can take a picture with a camera, not
to mention a cell phone.

• Quarantine once had the restricted meaning of “forty days’ isolation,” and
• manage once meant simply to handle a horse
MEANING SHIFTS

• kind of semantic change that a lexical item may undergo is a shift in meaning.
• The word knight once meant “youth” but shifted to “mounted man-at-arms.”
• Lust used to mean simply “pleasure,” with no negative or sexual overtones.
• Lewd was merely “ignorant,” and
• immoral meant “not customary.”
MEANING SHIFTS
• Silly used to mean “happy” in old English.
• By the middle English period it had come to mean “naive,” and
• only in modern English does it mean “foolish.”
• The overworked modern English word nice meant “ignorant” a thousand years ago. When Juliet
tells Romeo, “I am too fond,” she is not claiming she likes Romeo too much. She means “I am
too foolish.
BRAND NAMES

• Words may be created outright to fit some purpose. The advertising industry has added
many words to English, such as,

• Kodak, Nylon, Orlon, and Dacron.

• Xerox, Band-aid, Kleenex, Jell-o, Brillo, and Vaseline
• Scotch tape for cellulose tape
phobias
• Greek roots borrowed into English have also provided a means for coining new words.
Thermos “hot” plus metron “measure” gave us thermometer. From akros “topmost” and
phobia “fear,” we get acrophobia, “dread of heights.”

• Triskaidekaphobia: a profound fear of number 13

• logizomemechaphobia: “fear of reckoning machine” from greek logizomai “ to reckon or compute”
+ mekhane “device” + phobia

• ellipsosyllabophobia: “fear of words with a missing syllable” from greek elleipsis “ a falling short”
+ syllabẽ “ syllable” + phobia
.
Thank you
and have a
good day!