Sound Imitation

There are some semantic groups of words formed by means of sound imitation:

1) sounds produced by human beings;

2) sounds produced by animals, birds, insects, etc.;

3) sounds produced by nature (trees, water, wind, etc.);

As a matter of fact, the problem of sound imitation is connected with the major concern of linguistics and one of the most important problems of philosophy, i.e. how human language appeared. There are a great deal of theories and hypotheses explaining the origin of the human language.

Blending (Contamination)

One of the first blends that appeared in English was 'smog' which is the combination of two clipped nouns: 'smoke' and 'fog'.

Blends can be formed in the following ways:

1) the beginning of the first word and the whole second word are joined;

2) the whole first word and the end of the second word are joined;

3) the whole first word and the whole second word, partially overlapping each other;

4) the beginning of the first word and the end of the second word are joined;

5) the word (or its part) is put inside another word;

Blending is mostly used in popular speech. This way of word-building is new in English but quite productive: a lot of neologisms of this kind appear in the language.

Back Formation

The process is based on analogy. Prof. Yartseva explains this mistake by the influence of the whole system of the language on separate words, e.g.: it is characteristic of English to form nouns denoting the doer of the action from verb stems by means of the suffix -er (speak –speaker). So when the French noun 'beggart' was borrowed (a wandering monk) the final syllable 'ar' was easily associated in the minds of Englishmen with the suffix -er because it was pronounced in the same way. So the corresponding verb was formed from the noun by dropping the final syllable. In this way the verb 'to beg' appeared in English. This way of word-building is opposite to 'derivation'. Therefore it is called 'back-formation'.

The same way of word-building is used in other languages, e.g. a Dutch word 'zondek' was borrowed into Russian in the form of 'зонтик', 'ик' was understood as a diminutive suffix, so the word 'зонт' appeared in Russian.

In the second quarter of the 20^th century a new type of backformation appeared in English: compound verbs are formed from compound nouns and from word combinations.

Backformation is connected with misunderstanding structure of words.

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