Compounding in OE and ME. The rise of conversion.

Word composition was highly productive way of developing the vocabulary in OE.

Compound nouns contained various first components – stems of nouns, adjs and verbs; their second components were nouns. The pattern “N+N” was probably the most productive type of all. Compound nouns with adj-stems as the first components were less productive. Compound nouns with verb and adverb-stems were rare.

Compound adjs were formed by joining a noun-stem to an adj. the most peculiar pattern of compound adjs was the so-called “bahuvrihi type” – adj+noun-stem as the second component of an adj.

The remarkable capacity of OE for derivation and word-composition is manifested in numerous words formed with the help of several methods: negative prefix, adj-stem, noun-stem turning into a suffix, suffix.

Derivation: Prefixation (verbs, adjs); suffixation (nouns, adjs). Word composition: nouns, adjs.

In ME word compounding was less productive than in OE period. As before, compounding was more characteristic of nouns and adjs than verbs.

Compound words of the ME were formed after the word-building patterns inherited from OE, modifications of these patterns and new structural patterns. In addition to compounds made of native stems there appeared many hybrids with stems of diverse origin.

Compound nouns were built according to a variety of patterns. The most productive type – 2 noun-stems – was inherited from OE.

Conversion was a new method of word derivation which arose in Late ME and grew into a most productive, specially English way of creating new words. Conversion is effected through a change in the meaning, the gramm paradigm and the syntactic use of the word in the sentence. The word is transformed into another part of speech with an identical initial form, e.g. NE house n and house v.

The growth of conversion is accounted for by gramm and lexical changes during the ME period: reduction of endings and suffixes and the simplification of the morphological structure of the word. After the loss of endings and suffixes a large number of E verbs and nouns became identical in form.

The use of conversion was not restricted to the formation of verbs from nouns, when the new relations within the pairs had been well established, the reverse process could occur as well: nouns came to be derived from verbs.

In present-day E. conversion has grown onto one of the most productive ways of word-building, accounting for the free transformation of nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns through a change in their syntactic position.

Не знайшли потрібну інформацію? Скористайтесь пошуком google:

Генерація сторінки за: 0.005 сек.