People have always been interested in language. First records of Sanskrit grammar, morphology and word-formation rules were written down by Panini over 2500 years ago. So it is not surprising that especially now with all the possibilities technology offers, linguists are determined to identify THE word-formation-theory. In the last century there has been a boom in publishing, creating enormous corpora that allow linguists to study a far wider range of written language. Due to the technological possibility of sound and video recording, there are also numerous spoken accounts of language available now (Bauer 1994, 9). In the last decades however, according to Bauer, word-formation is a rather “confused area of study“(2002, xiii), mostly because of its various terminology as well as different methodological and theoretical approaches. Therefore this paper will concentrate on and use the standard terminology Bauer agreed on in English Word-formation.
Bauer notes furthermore the confusion in the field of productivity in word-formation. The fact that word-formation processes are in fact productive and create new lexemes can be proved by consulting any dictionary of neologisms or updates in other dictionaries. Nevertheless, linguists dispute over the extent to which word-formation is productive generally. Here the dispute between transformationalist and lexicalist positions to productivity should be mentioned (2002, 62 f., 75). But since this paper will focus on specific neologisms added to the Oxford English Dictionary, the decision of what is listed as a new and independent lexicon entry was made by someone else and should not be of any concern here.
This paper will deal with the subject of words, especially newly formed words. What exactly are neologisms and how do they come about? What word-formation processes are involved in the creation of new words? How productive are the different types of word-formation? This paper attempts to answer these questions to a certain extent and furthermore picture the contemporary productivity of word-formation patterns by analysing the new word entries of the March 2013 update in the Oxford English Dictionary as a case study.
Index
1. Introduction
2. New Words
2.1. What is a word?
2.2. Inflection v. Derivation
2.3. Neologisms
2.4. Lexicalization
3. Word-formation
3.1. Productivity
3.2. Word-formation processes
3.2.1. Derivation
3.2.2. Conversion
3.2.3. Compounding
3.2.4. Shortening
3.2.4.1. Blending
3.2.4.2. Clipping
3.2.4.3. Acronyms & Initialisms
3.2.4.4. Back-formation
4. Case Study: OED Analysis
5. Conclusion
Appendix: OED Update March 2013: New Word Entries i
1. Introduction
People have always been interested in language. First records of Sanskrit grammar, morphology and word-formation rules were written down by Panini over 2500 years ago. So it is not surprising that especially now with all the possibilities technology offers, linguists are determined to identify THE word- formation-theory. In the last century there has been a boom in publishing, creating enormous corpora that allow linguists to study a far wider range of written language. Due to the technological possibility of sound and video recording, there are also numerous spoken accounts of language available now (Bauer 1994, 9). In the last decades however, according to Bauer, word-formation is a rather “confused area of study“(2002, xiii), mostly because of its various terminology as well as different methodological and theoretical approaches. Therefore this paper will concentrate on and use the standard terminology Bauer agreed on in English Word-formation.1
Bauer notes furthermore the confusion in the field of productivity in word- formation. The fact that word-formation processes are in fact productive and create new lexemes can be proved by consulting any dictionary of neologisms or updates in other dictionaries. Nevertheless, linguists dispute over the extent to which word-formation is productive generally. Here the dispute between transformationalist and lexicalist positions to productivity should be mentioned (2002, 62 f., 75). But since this paper will focus on specific neologisms added to the Oxford English Dictionary, the decision of what is listed as a new and independent lexicon entry was made by someone else and should not be of any concern here.
This paper will deal with the subject of words, especially newly formed words. What exactly are neologisms and how do they come about? What word- formation processes are involved in the creation of new words? How productive are the different types of word-formation? This paper attempts to answer these questions to a certain extent and furthermore picture the contemporary productivity of word-formation patterns by analysing the new word entries of the March 2013 update in the Oxford English Dictionary as a case study.
2. New Words
2.1. What is a word?
Morphology, as the study of morphemes and other units that form words and word-forms, and Lexicology, the study of lexemes, words, their meaning and lexical elements, cannot clearly be separated, as they both engage in word- formation processes as a source of (new) words. Lexicology takes it one step further though, and deals with words that find their place in the mental lexicon and dictionary.
But what qualifies as a word? Native speakers usually have a feeling of what a word actually is, there is no consistent definition throughout various languages though. Bauer uses with respect to English alone the terms word, wordform and lexeme to clarify this issue (2002, 11 f.). Lexemes are rather abstract units that represent the meaning of a word, and eventually end up in the lexicon. Word-forms on the other hand represent all possible shapes of a word. This example with the verb 'to kiss' will illustrate the point:
(1) a. The word-forms Kisses, Kissed, Kissing are forms of the lexeme KISS.
b. Kissed is a form of KISS.2
All of them are words, yet in the dictionary you will look for the lexeme KISS. As the smallest grammatical units, morphemes then built up the inner structure of word-forms. Free morphemes as 'kiss' can function as roots, lexemes and words respectively and can stand alone, whereas bound morphemes as '-ed' cannot. Usually bound morphemes are affixes and function as parts of words and word- forms. They occur as prefixes before and suffixes after a base3, but can also take an internal position in a word when they constitute a formative/connective in compound words (Bauer 2002, 13 f.). Bound morphemes can be further categorised as derivational or inflectional. The next section will explain the difference between inflection and derivation.
2.2. Inflection v. Derivation
Inflectional affixes set the tense, person, number and/or case of a word, without affecting its meaning or word class (part of speech). So by adding an affix - in English there are only inflectional suffixes - a grammatical word-form of a lexeme is created. For instance, the plural '-s', past tense '-ed' or third-person '-s' are inflectional endings. They all mark grammatical agreement in the sentence. In the course of time the English language lost a lot of its inflectional endings, for in Old English there still were grammatical endings for all four cases nominative, genitive, dative and accusative in all nouns, adjectives and pronouns (Bauer 2002, 22), as there still are in German.
In contrast to inflection, derivation produces not grammatical word-forms of lexemes but new lexemes; such as the derivational suffix '-hood' creates a new noun, '-ize' forms a new verb and '-al' coins a new adjective. All these derivational endings change the form class (part of speech) of the given lexeme such as noun, adjective, verb, adverb etc. However, there also are class maintaining derivational processes - the prefix 'un-' does not change the part of speech of the word (Bauer 2002, 31): 'do' is a verb, 'undo' is still a verb.
Since derivation and inflection both deal with affixiation, sometimes it is difficult to draw a line between these two processes. The suffix '-ed', for example, can create the past tense of a verb, which would represent inflection. Yet it can form an adjective like 'married' as well, which would then be defined as derivation. The same problem occurs with the suffix '-er', which can be the inflectional ending of a comparative as in 'larger than' or the derivational ending representing someone who does something, as a 'painter' (Bauer 2002, 40). Often there are both types of affixes attached to a stem, then derivational affixes are closer to the stem than inflectional ones, as they can produce a complex base which then can be inflected itself (Jackson et al. 2000, 74) as in example 2:
(2) a. frightened: stem 'fright' + derivational suffix '-en' + inflectional suffix '-ed'
b. untouchables: derivational prefix '-un' + stem 'touch' + derivational suffix '-able' + inflectional suffix '-s'
Nevertheless, as already mentioned derivatives resulting from derivational processes coin new lexemes, which can be added as new entries into a dictionary.
So, derivation actually forms new words, and that is what this paper's focus is put on: new words.
2.3. Neologisms
“[A] neologism [Grk néos 'new,' lógos 'expression'] [is a n]ewly formed linguistic expression (word or phrase) that is recognized by at least part if not all of a language community as the way to denote a new object or state of affairs […] a distinction is drawn between (a) the formation of new expressions on the basis of already available morphological means and word formation rules (e.g. user-friendly, data bank, decriminalize), (b) semantic transfer (e.g. computer virus), (c) loans from other languages (sauté, mesa) […] and (d) expressions with a constituent used metaphorically (e.g. child's play)” (Bussman 1996, 324).
All neologisms start their career as a nonce formation, which is “a new complex word coined by a speaker/writer on the spur of the moment to cover some immediate need” (Bauer 2002, 45). This need may be to create a certain (stylistic) effect, emphasize a point, show an opinion or attitude, save space in a newspaper article or message, the fact that the speaker cannot remember the existing lexeme for the concept in question or simply the need for a name for a new concept.
However, most of the nonce formation will never be used more than once. Only a small number of those spontaneously coined terms will be accepted by the society as a new term and can then be added to the (mental) lexicon, as they are strongly context-bound most of the time. In this context this process will be defined as lexicalization4 and lexicalized neologisms, new dictionary entries respectively, are the concern of this paper. Bussmann defines lexicalization synchronically as “the adoption of a word into the lexicon of a language as a usual formation that is stored in the lexicon and can be recalled from there for use” (1996, 279).
2.4. Lexicalization
Whether a new formed lexeme finds it place in the lexicon depends on a series of factors. “As a rule, the statistical frequency of such [nonce] formations being used again determines whether they will make the transition from the creation of a onetime neologism to a lexicalized word codified in a dictionary” (Bussmann 1996, 328). The status of the person who created the word, the need for a new form, prestige of and attitude to the new word (Bauer 2002, 43) can all affect whether a nonce formation will be accepted by other speakers. If it is, a potential ambiguity of the term will be ignored and it becomes a known and familiar term for a concept. Only after that is it possible to incorporate it in the lexicon, even if it takes on a form, which would not have been created by productive rules of word formation. That is to say it might become opaque and it is no longer transparent how it was formed in the first place (Bauer 2002, 48 f.).
3. Word-formation
Bussmann's definition of neologisms (see 2.3.) and word-formation as the “investigation and description of processes and rule-governed formation of new complex words on the basis of already existing linguistic resources” (1996, 522) suits perfectly to the purpose of this paper, showing which word-formation processes, and other sources of new words are productive and thus produce new lexemes which are added to a dictionary, in this case the OED.
3.1. Productivity
Any process, in word-formation and otherwise, “is said to be productive if it can be used synchronically in the production of new forms, and non-productive if it cannot be used synchronically in this way” (Bauer 2002, 18). This means that a process in word-formation is productive when it produces “new complex words according to the word formation rules of a given language” (Plag 1999, 6) at a given point in time.
“Productivity is one of the defining features of human language, and is that property of language which allows a native speaker to produce an infinitely large number of sentences [and] […] is to be accounted for by the rules of generative grammar” (Bauer, 2002: 63).5
In the same way, productivity allows to form an infinite number of new word- forms by word-formation rules, but most of them will not even occur or only occur as nonce formations and do not enter the lexicon.
Some affixes are more productive than others, because there is a greater need for new lexemes in a certain form class or concept, because of preferences and euphony and, on the other hand, because of restrictions on productivity concerning pragmatics, structure, blocking, phonology, morphology, lexicology, semantics or syntax (Bauer 2002, 84 f., Plag 1999, 37 f.).
While the history of the English languages illustrates a tendency to generalization, by removing most of inflectional affixes, basic Old English types of word-formation processes, such as compounding, derivation or conversion, are still productive today. In late Middle English conversion changed from a marginal to a central type, and new word-formation patterns emerged, such as acronyms, that were not established before WW II. Acronyms and Compounds are currently increasing in number. Furthermore there has been a rise of new creative suffixes as '-aholic, -athon, -gate, -nik, -burger, -mobile, -scape, or -teria' (Faiß 1992, 112 f.).
A statistic about word-formation processes in neologism dictionaries from 1963 to 1975 shows the relative spreading of productivity in the following chart (Leisi and Mair 1999, 83):
illustration not visible in this excerpt
In Bauer's analysis of the frequencies and percentages of types for formation in new words from 1880 to 1982 he finds out that while the productivity of suffixation and neo-classical compounds decreased, the productivity of shortenings all together, prefixation and compounds increased. (1994, 48). Twenty years later Bauer describes compounds, especially noun and neo-classical compounds and conversion as very productive (Bauer 2002, 201 f.) and at the same time diagnoses derivation and compounding as the two most productive word-formation processes.
[...]
1 For full account of all basics and terms see BAUER (2002): English Word-formation
2 Here block capitals are used for lexemes, italics for word-forms
3 Bauer (2002: 20 f.) makes the following distinction between the terms root, stem and base: A 'root' is the part of a word that remains when you delete all inflectional and derivational affixes. Compounds can have two roots. A 'stem' is the part of word to which inflectional affixes are attached. It can contain more than one root or be complex, that is to say have derivational affixes. A 'base' is any word-form that can take an affix, derivational and/or inflectional, which means it can be a root or a stem.
4 There are various types of lexicalization, e.g. phonological (prosodic, segmental), morphological (linking, roots, affixes), semantic or syntactic. For full account see Bauer, 2002: 50 f. In this paper the term lexicalization is used as the general process of becoming a new lexeme in the dictionary.
5 In addition to productivity, creativity is responsible for neologisms as well (Bauer, 2002: 63), however, it is not defined by any rules and cannot be predicted or categorised, therefore it is not going to be discussed in this paper.