Secondary ways of word-building

a) Sound interchange

b) Stress interchange

c) Blends

d) Sound Imitation

Sound interchange is the way of wordbuilding when some sounds are changed to form a new word. It is non-productive in Modern English, it was productive in Old English. The causes of sound interchange can be different. It can be the result of Ancient Ablaut which cannot be explained by the phonetic laws during the period of the language development. E.g. strike – stroke, to sing – song. It can be also the result of Ancient Umlaut or vowel mutation, e.g. hot –heat, blood – bleed.

In many cases we have vowel and consonant interchange. In nouns we have voiceless consonants and in verbs we have corresponding voiced consonants because in Old English these consonants in nouns were at the end of the word and in verbs in the intervocalic position, e.g. bath – to bathe, life – to live.

Stress interchange can be mostly met in verbs and nouns of Romanic origin: nouns have the stress on the 1^st syllable and verbs on the last syllable, e.g. `accent – to ac`cent, As a result of stress interchange we have also vowel interchange in such words because vowels are pronounced differently in stressed and unstressed position.There are borrowed nouns and verbs with the stress on the first syllable, e.g. exile, figure, process, preface.

It is the way of word-building when a word is formed by imitating different sounds. There are some semantic groups of words formed by means of sound imitation:

a) sounds produced by human beings, such as: to whisper, to mumble, to sneeze, to whistle etc.

b) sounds produced by animals, birds, insects, such as: to hiss, to buzz, to bark, to moo, to twitter etc.

c) sounds produced by nature and objects such as: to splash, to rustle, to clatter, to bubble, to ding-dong, to tinkle etc.

The corresponding nouns are formed by means of conversion, e.g. clang (of a bell), chatter (of children) etc.

Blends are words formed from a word- group or two synonyms. In Blends 2 ways of word building are combined: abbreviation and composition. To form a blend we clip the end of the 1^st component and the beginning of the 2^nd component. As a result we have a compound-shortened word.. One of the 1^st blends in English was the word smog (smoke+ fog)which means smoke mixed with fog Blends formed from 2 synonyms are: slanguage (slang and language)

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