Лекции по лексикологии английского языка. Гусева Г.В. - 24 стр.

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Lecture 7

Word-Building

I. Types of Word-Building

Word-building is one of the main ways of enriching vocabulary. There are

four main ways of word-building in Modern English: affixation, composition,

conversion, shortening. There are also secondary ways of word-building: sound-

interchange, stress interchange, sound imitation, blends, back formation

(disaffixation).

Sound-interchange is the way of word-building when some sounds are

changed to form a new word, e.g. to strike – stroke, to sing – song.

Stress interchange can be mostly met in verbs and nouns of Romanic origin:

nouns have the stress on the first syllable and verbs on the last syllable, e.g. accent

– to accent.

Sound imitation is the way of word-building when a word is built by

imitating different sounds:

a) sounds produced by human beings: to whisper, to mumble;

b) sounds produced by animals, birds, insects: to moo, to hiss, to buzz;

c) sounds produced by nature and objects: to splash, to bubble, to clatter.

Blends are words formed from a word-group or two synonyms, e.g. hustle

(hurry and bustle), cinemaddict (cinema addict).

Backformation (disaffixation) is the way of word-building when a word is

formed by dropping the final morpheme to form a new word, e.g. to bach (from

bachelor), to televise (from television). The part-of-speech meaning of the primary

word is changed, verbs are formed from nouns.