Primary ways of word-building

a) Word composition.

b) Conversion.

c) Abbreviation.

d) Affixation or derivation.

All morphemes are subdivided into 2 large classes: root and affixes. Words which consist of a root and a affix are called derived words or derivatives and are produced by the process of word-building known as affixation. Affixes can also be classified into productive and non-productive. By productive affixes we mean the ones, which take part in deriving new words in this particular period of language development. Derived words are extremely numerous in the English vocabulary. This type is widely represented by a great number of words belonging to the original English stock or to earlier borrowings (house, book, room, work, port, street, etc.).

In Modern English, has been greatly enlarged by the type of word-building called conversion (e.g. to hand, v; formed from the noun hand; to can, v. from the noun can; to pail, v. from pail, adj.) Conversion consists in making a new word from some existing word by changing the category of a part of speech, the morphemic shape of the original word remaining unchanged.

Another wide-spread word-structure is a compound word consisting of two or more stems (e.g. dining-room, bluebell, mother-in-law, good-for-nothing). Words of this structural type are produced by the word-building process called composition. Compounds are not homogeneous in structure. Traditionally 3 types are distinguished: neutral, morphological, syntactic.

The somewhat odd-looking words like flu, pram, lab, V-day, H-bomb are called shortenings, constructions or curtailed words and are produced by the way of word-building called shortening (construction). Shortening are produced in 2 different ways. 1^st is to make a new word from a syllable (rarer, 2) of the original word. Second may lose its beginning (as phone, fence), its ending (as vac. from vacation, ad –from advertisement) or both the beginning and ending (as flu from influenza).

The four types (root words, derived words, compounds, shortenings) represent the main structural types of Modern English words, and conversion, derivation, composition the most productive ways of word-building.

In reduplication new words are made by doubling a stem, either without any phonetic changes as in bye-bye or with a variation of the root-vowel or consonant as in ping-pong, chit-chat.

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