English Spanish Contrastive

MEMORIAS DEL VI FORO DE ESTUDIOS EN LENGUAS INTERNACIONAL (FEL 2010)
ISBN: 978-607-9015-22-0
English-Spanish contrastive analysis on word-formation

processes
Mara del Mar Moure Pea
Universidad de Quintana Roo
Abstract
Languages are in constant change and new words spring all the time, and even
though not all of them stick, some come to be part of the languages vocabulary
as full-right members. What is aimed for is to contrast the mechanisms English
and Spanish have for coining words that prior did not belong to the language, to
describe and exemplify each of them and to determine the frequency and
productivity they have in each language.
INTRODUCTION
One intrinsic characteristic of living languages is that of changing; their
speakers get rid of unnecessary or unfashionable elements and give way to new
ones. Similarly, languages have the inner capacity as proclaimed by language
universals- of expanding themselves through a series of mechanisms in order to be
more specific, to name new objects or ideas, to express a non-systemic meaning,
to make distinctions in register and, sometimes, because it just happens to strike
the fancy of a person or a group. This is true for syntax. To illustrate this point,
Spanish speakers have come to place an attribute anteceding the subject as a
resource for expressing irony, and thus Pedro es un hombre menudo has a very
different meaning from menudo hombre es Pedro (Lorenzo, 1994: 346-347); for
semantics, since the very same word may drastically change its meaning over time
and so something that was awful back in the 17th century was referred to as
deserving of awe and it did not have the nowadays quite opposite meaning
(Bryson, 1990: 70); for morphology, for users of a language may overlook certain
established patterns or create new ones in order to express something different, for
example, we can affix twice (or more) the same element and get away with a
dissimilar meaning, like in tatara tatara abuela; for phonetics and intonation, as
Universidad de Quintana Roo Departamento de Lengua y Educacin
http://fel.uqroo.mx - fonael@yahoo.com
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seen in the change English speakers have made to the pronunciation of asked by
removing the /k/ phoneme; indisputably it is true for pragmatics and just as well for
the lexicon of a language. In this paper, the attention will be focused on this latter
element.
What is aimed for is to contrast the mechanisms English and Spanish have
for coining words that prior did not belong to the language, to describe and
exemplify each of them and to determine the frequency and productivity they have
in each language. The way in which I will proceed to do this is by consulting
specialized books on linguistics for both languages, other books with a broader
view on what concerns languages, dictionaries and webpages. Many examples
have been taken from documentary sources and are duly quoted; those which are
not have been taken from my own experience as a speaker of both languages and
from what reasonable intuition I deem fitting.
In a later section of the paper song lyrics -both in English and Spanish- are
going to be used as a source for finding neologisms and corroborating (or not) the
results of my documentary research. It is important to highlight that the intention is
not that of being exhaustive, but rather use them as an excuse to discover some of
the latest neologisms that have sprung up and are yet to be accepted formally by
the authorities of the English and Spanish languages as full-right members of the
language.
It is my believe that this topic deserves the attention of our fellow soon-to-be
teachers of EFL in particular because want it or not we live on the realm of
interlanguage, and knowing the word-formation processes and other particularities
exposed in this paper will probably clarify some of our doubts and help us identify
what belongs to each language separately from what belongs solely to Spanglish
(there goes a portmanteau). In addition to this, the research may very well be
worthy of the attention of linguists in general since despite the copious literature on
English and Spanish coinage there is very little work done in comparing them.

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ENGLISH AND SPANISH MECHANISMS FOR WORD COINAGE

Before going straight to the point at hand, I would like to clarify the meaning
of some terms that will be repeatedly used throughout the paper and whose
understanding is essential for the overall comprehension of the topic.
The online version of the Diccionario de la Real Lengua Espaola has
defined neologism as a vocablo, acepcin o giro nuevo en una lengua, whereas
the online Oxford dictionary defines it in a narrower sense as a newly coined word
or expression. Interestingly enough, I have found that many scholars in both
languages use the term neologism not only for recently acquired words but also for
well-established words that come from a different origin (see Lorenzo, 1994 and
Bryson, 1990). From the same sources I have taken that in Spanish acuar in the
sense that interests us is defined as dar forma a expresiones o conceptos,
especialmente cuando logran difusin o permanencia. Acuar una palabra, un
lema, una mxima and in English to coin is to invent a new word or phrase,
regardless of whether it sticks or not in the language. The corresponding nouns for
these verbs are coinage and acuacin, which came as a surprise to me
because even though I am a Spanish native speaker I would have said
acuamiento instead of acuacin. This error of mine is, as a matter of fact, a
relatively prolific way of coming up with new words that we will later see.
Now, Bryson (1990: 64) has identified six ways in which a language creates
new words, namely: by adding to them, by subtracting from them, by making them
up, by doing nothing to them, by borrowing from other languages and by mistake.
For our purposes here the mechanism of doing nothing to them will be left out for in
any case it belongs to historical semantics, so we will be accepting the English
definition of neologisms that does not take into account the creation of a new
sense to an existent word. Just as well, I will add up one more group to Brysons
classification: by combining them.
In order to take this to more familiar grounds, we can subdivide these
general categories: when we talk about adding up to existent words we are
referring to derivation and compounding, which, in fact, are the two more
productive ways of creating new words in Spanish and English respectively. The
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specific mechanisms associated with subtracting from the words are clipping, and
then we have borrowings, mistakes (backformation or misspelling), and combining
them, which can be subdivided into acronyms and blending (or portmanteaus).
Derivation
Languages can get really specific sometimes, creating words with really
complex meanings such as arachibutyrophobia meaning to have a morbid fear of
peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth (Bryson, 1990: 60) or the still
unaccepted des-desintoxicar (Lorenzo, 1994: 220). The author does not give us a
context in which this word can be used but I figure that a suitable meaning would
be that of city person intoxicated with the noise and smog going to the countryside
to get clean from them and afterwards having to go back to the polluted city. If this
meaning sticks, we can later on derive the adjective des-desintoxicado for the
person who returns to the city after being in the countryside and the noun desdesintoxicacin to name the process. The specific meanings of these two words
have changed from their roots by a process of affixation, which not only changes
the original sense but can also change their grammatical category.
Fromkin, Rodman and Hyams (2003: 83) explain derivational morphology as
the process of derivational morphemes being added to a root morpheme or stem.
Each speaker of a language has a mental stock of affixes and the ways they are
used. In Spanish we would not use the English prefix un- to denote not but we
would rather use in- (or its allomorphs ir- and i-), as in shown in the pair
unnecessary/innecesario. Likewise, all speakers of Spanish know that we can add
the suffix mente to an adjective and thus form and adverb as in rpidamente
(even if they are clueless of what adjectives or adverbs are) and not to nouns like
in ranamente. If a person were determined to express the meaning of doing
something like a frog, he or she would probably come up with something like the
adjective ranesco which in turn can be made an adverb in ranescamente. This
word does not exist (yet) but is possible accordingly with Spanish rules for deriving
and would be understood by the rest of the speakers. Similarly, English speakers
might want to have one word for saying that someone is an only child without
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actually saying that phrase; according to English rules, a possible solution for the
problem would be the creation of the word siblingless and for the general
condition the word siblinglesshood or siblinglessness. They know, in turn that
they cannot say dreamish to mean that they were sort of dreaming, since the
suffix ish is attached to either nouns or adjectives, but not to verbs.
Usually, when people borrow or calque a derived word from another
language that word is going to be adapted to have their own affixes, for instance,
the Spanish equivalent to the French word mcontentement is descontento not
mecontentamiento, because the prefix m- has no meaning in Spanish and
saying descontentamiento, although possible, still sounds too forced when we
already have the noun contento. I cannot be sure which word came from what
language but, either way, what is certain is that there was a change in the affixes
used. However, this general principle is being confronted with a tendency in
Spanish to import and use freely foreign affixes, as noted by Lorenzo (1994). Why
do we have to say in Spanish that oil is a recurso no renovable (non-renewable
resource) when we could have said desrenovable, irrenovable or even
arenovable? The same happens with the suffix landia, which comes directly from
the English word land. It is still more interesting that in English, I believe, is used
as a compound whereas in Spanish it was adapted as a suffix. This proves the
reluctance of Spanish words to form compounds.
The wide productivity of derivation as a process to create new words is
proven by the fact that there are over 240 accepted Spanish words ending in azo
(Lorenzo, 1994: 217) which is not even the most prolific affix. In English occurs the
same, as it can be inferred by the fact that it is has over one hundred common
prefixes and suffixes (Bryson, 1990: 74). Virtually any content word (noun, verb
and adjective) is susceptible of being derived, so the possibilities are limitless. In
Spanish it goes even further and in some dialects people even derive prepositions
and adverbs, for example, encimar is a verb derived from the preposition encima
and it is quite used in Mexican dialect.

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Compounding
Contrary to derivation that is a highly prolific mechanism for the creation of
new words in both languages, compounding is extremely used in English (most
content words have the inner ability to be compounded) but much less frequent in
Spanish. The process in English entails no further complication that deciding
whether use a hyphen, a space or nothing, because the words are added up
without undergoing any changes. Of course there is logic to this; nouns can be
compound with other nouns (goldfish), with verbs (skateboard), with adjectives
(greenhouse), adverbs (nowadays) and even sometimes with prepositions
(upstairs), as well as the combination of the other components. Nonetheless, we
cannot put them in whatever order we want and expect to convey the meaning we
intended; as a general rule the last word is the headword and so we translate
cornfield as campo de maz and not as maz de campo. Although, as Bryson
(1990: 76) points out, English does have
the nifty refinement of making the elements reversible, so that we can
distinguish between a houseboat and a boathouse, between basketwork and a
workbasket, between a casebook and a bookcase.
Furthermore, English can also compound phrases like mother-in-law. I

have also read English native speakers hyphenating phrases that connote irony
such as a-not-so-very-brilliant-day to make it look like one word, and they also use
hyphens for phrases borrowed from other languages such as tte--tte.
Carstairs-McCarthy (6) also considers phrases with noun adjuncts such as an
American History teacher to be compounded.
In Spanish we can also compound words of the same or different
categories, although there are a lot more constrains than in English, and, in
general, when in English they use compounds Spanish speakers opt either for a
phrase (chivo expiatorio for scapegoat) or a derived word (ganadero for
cattleman). Many compound words in Spanish suffer some alteration of the
original spelling, reason why Spanish compounding is not merely juxtaposing word
A to word B. Examples of compound words in Spanish are sacapuntas,
saltibanqui, montacargas, pelirrojo, destapacorchos, subibaja.

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Clipping
Clipping or abbreviation is a quite handy resource that comes from deleting
part (usually the last bit, though not always) of a word. I reckon that clipping is far
more common than what dictionaries lead us to believe, since it is usually done
while speaking and dictionary word researches need abundant written evidence so
that they can be included as separate words. Nevertheless, many clipped words
have stuck and are already part of the lexicon such as gym, exam, lab (Bryson,
1990: 76), info, bro, cab (from cabriolet), maths, etc. In Spanish we have tele,
radio, foto, refri (or frigo in Spain), uni (for university), lic, profe, biblio (for
biblioteca), cine, porfa, etc. Most of the times these words do not change the
original meaning of the word, although sometimes the new word has come to mean
something different, for example cab which is synonym to taxi and cabriolet that
is a brand of cars.
In both languages there is a tendency to clip proper names, to illustrate: Ben
for Benjamin, Will for William, Sam for either Samuel or Samantha, Matt for
Matthew, and in Spanish Bere for Berenice, Lupe for Guadalupe, Marijo for Mara
Jos (here we have also a case of blending), Beto for Roberto or Alberto, Neto for
Ernesto, etc.
Borrowings
Languages that are in contact tend to adopt terms they lack from each other.
According to Bryson (1990: 68) at least half of English common words come from
non-Anglo-Saxon stock. This is a massive amount if we consider that English total
number of words in use collected by the 2nd edition of the Oxford dictionary
amounts to 301, 300 main entries and that number is constantly outdated by the
language itself. Examples of borrowed words are ranch and rancher (slightly
changed from the Spanish word rancho), kindergarten from German, pizza from
Italian, shampoo from and Indian language, rendezvous from French and so on.
Spanish also has a great number of originally foreign words and although I could
not find which percentage, lex Grijelmo (2006) and Mario Len (2000) think they
are already too many.
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Even though Spanish tends to make more changes to borrowed words to

make them fit into the Spanish system than English, I have found from the
literature consulted that still English is more receptive to borrowings and in general
praises itself for this ability whereas Spanish authorities tend to be very reticent to
accept recent words with foreign origins. This overprotection of the language purity
has taken us to the point where the term Gallicism or Anglicism connote a
pejorative sense. What is even more, Spanish makes a distinction between
neologisms that are needed because we lacked the concept and those that are
superfluous (Moreno de Alba, 2003: 560, 586), category that is full of examples
from borrowing.
However, regardless of the reserve of some Spanish purists, the community
of speakers embraces wave after wave of such words. Nowadays the language
from which we borrow the most is indisputably English and this is especially true
for Mexico both for its geographical and cultural proximity. Common youth talk
includes expressions such as cool or in, bye, Ok, me llamas al phone,
parkea el coche, pushea el botn, conectate al chat, cliqueas el link de la
izquierda y ah posteas el mensaje and a long etcetera. Moreno de Alba (2003)
states that most verbs borrowed from other languages are adapted to fit the 1
group (ending with ar, -ear), some are included in the 2nd (ending with er) and
only a few join the 3rd group (termination ir).
Backformation
Backformation has been over the centuries the word-formation process that
language purists have fought the most. The online Oxford dictionary defines
backformation as a word that is formed from what appears to be its derivative (e.g.
edit from editor). Evidently, this process relies on the speakers internalization of
the language system. Aware or not, we see patterns in language, that is why we
can give a good guess at a word we have not seen before, lets say manliness, if
we understand the root and know what the suffixes ly and ness are for.
However, sometimes words resemble a pattern while they actually are exceptions
to it; people then generalize the rule and make up a logical word out of it. Of
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course, this means that initially words created by backformation started as

mistakes which explains the reluctance of grammarians and lexicographers to
welcome them into the vocabulary.
To illustrate this point, here I quote an example from Bill Bryson (1990: 65):
The words grovel and sidle similarly came into English because the original
adjectives, grovelling and sideling, were assumed to contain the participles
ing, as in walking and seeing. In fact, it was the suffix ling, but this did not stop
people from adding a pair of useful verbs to the language.
Some other famous cases of backformation that caused purists opprobrium

and that now seem invaluably helpful to us are edit (from editor), enthuse (from
enthusiasm) and donate (from donation), greed (from greedy), beg (from
beggar) and difficult (from difficulty).
I could not find much information specifically on Spanish cases of
backformation so here is when the reasonable intuitions I mentioned at the
beginning come into play. One paradigmatic example is the word influenciar
derived from influencia which in turn came from influir, resulting in the duplication
of a verb with the same meanings. From this I can infer that something similar must
have happened with the synonyms usar and utilizar; probably usar was the
original term and then we derived til from which utilizar was nothing but the
logical step to take. I would not dare saying that some other verbs that are
repeated in Spanish such as desertificar and desertizar, concientizar and
concienzar, optimizar and optimar, come from backformation but more likely
have been borrowed back into the language from another one with some distinctive
changes.
Due to the lack of information on this topic in particular and because in
English I have seen pretty much the same examples in different literature, I must
assume that backformation is not a very productive process for coinage. I believe
this must owe to social factors; since backformation is perceived as a mistake
people who use words derived from it might be constantly corrected or stigmatized,
causing the gradual disappearance of the term or else only a dialectal use.

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Acronyms
The online Oxford definition for acronym is a word formed from the initial
letters of other words (e.g. laser, Aids). The DRAE version, however, distinguishes
two meanings:
1. m. Tipo de sigla que se pronuncia como una palabra; p. ej., o(bjeto)
v(olante) n(o) i(dentificado). 2. m. Vocablo formado por la unin de elementos
de dos o ms palabras, constituido por el principio de la primera y el final de la
ltima, p. ej., ofi(cina infor)mtica, o, frecuentemente, por otras combinaciones,
p. ej., so(und) n(avigation) a(nd) r(anging), Ban(co) es(paol) (de) (crdi)to.
The sense given to the second meaning is what we call blending. In spite of
the fact that the English entry makes no allusion to the pronunciation of acronyms,
it is also possible to read them out if the resulting word compels to English phonetic
system. So UFO, radar (not longer capitalized) and AIDS are pronounce like they
would pronounce any other word and UNDP, OAS, UCLA, etc. are spelt out. The
same applies for Spanish although we prefer to read them out so many
organizations manipulate their names to be suitable for pronouncing, like
MERCOSUR (Mercado Comn del Sur). The common thing is that neither
prepositions nor connectors are taken into account to figure in the acronym but
sometimes this is overseen in favor of a smoother pronunciation like in the
acronym SEyC (Secretara de Educacin y Cultura).
Usually, technical terms and organization names are put into an acronym
(this works for both languages), but common phrases can also follow this pattern,
for example asap (as soon as possible), R.I.P. (rest in peace), btw (by the way),
omg (oh my god), lol (laughs out loud) and so on. The latter two may be well in
their way to become standard words. In Spanish we can also make an acronym out
of a common phrase, for instance Q.D.T.B. (que Dios te Bendiga), although it is
rather rare. In general English speakers seem keener on creating acronyms than
Spanish speakers. The possibilities for acronyms are limitless in both languages; it
depends only in the need for them and the general acceptance of its use.

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Blending
Also called portmanteaus; a blend results from combining two words, usually
the beginning of one and the ending of the other although this may vary. From
what I have noticed this is a very popular process for brands and advertising, as
well as when the intention is satirical or comical, but recently they have being used
more and more in technical papers or by some witty journalists. Some well-known
blends in English are smog (smoke + fog), glocal (global + local), Spanglish
(Spanish + English), knankles (knees + ankles), replubicrat (republican +
democrat, from Oxford online), etc.
In Spanish we have Tex-Mex (Texas +
Mxico), Portuol (portugus + espaol), PRIAN (combination of the acronyms

PRI + PAN), reflacin (recesin + inflacin, which is in turn a calque from English
stagflation), magitel (mgica + tela), etc.
The nature of the process of blending is quite open-ended; nonetheless, the
permanence of the created words depends first on peoples creativity on whether
others like it and use it or not. I believe there are much more blends than what
written information can gives us, especially in slang
NEOLOGISMS IN SONG LYRICS

Music is a good way for words to reach people. If you come up with a word
and use it in a song that turns up to be a hit it is very likely that that word will end
up being part of the language. This is the reason why I have chosen to look into
song lyrics and not something else.
The way in which I have done it is browsing the Internet for lyrics with funnylooking words, checking in the Oxford online dictionary and the Spanish DRAE
online - since they are constantly updated- whether they have been accepted or
not, and then trying to come to some conclusions on their use and their relation
with what I found out in theory. Borrowings are not taken into account for it is only
too common to mix languages in songs.

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Crunk
The word crunk, a blend standing for crazy drunk, was first introduced by
musician Lil Jon in his album Get crunk, who u wit in 1997. The term was so
successful that it has inspired the name of a music genre that combines electro
and hip-hop and the Oxford dictionary has already accepted it to form part of the
next edition.
ero
ero (clipping of compaero) is a popular slang word in the central part of
Mexico. It was spread to other parts of Mexico and abroad thanks to the son ero
by Molotov (1999). As it was a term used mainly in low social classes it has also
come to be a pejorative way to call its users.
Picker
The English band Artic Monkeys (2007) released the song (and instant hit)
Teddy picker referring to a game. Even though to derive picker from the verb
pick seems like a quite acceptable thing to do, the Oxford dictionary still does not
recognize the validity of that word.
Corazonado
Ricky Martin (1998) released the single corazonado, which is a very creative
derivation. To me it seems to be backformation, because we have the term
descorazonado (still not recognized by the DRAE for being a calque of English
heartless) which evidently means to be cruel. However, there is no evident
meaning to corazonado except what we can infer from the antonym of
descorazonado which would be something like compassionate.
Frengers
The word frengers is a portmanteau of friends + strangers popularized by
the rock band Mew (2003) in the album carrying the same name.

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Even though the examples that I show you here are very scarce, there is a
vast number of coined words in songs, which I dont have the time or analytical
means to further analyze. Nevertheless, what I have found more in songs -besides
borrowings and compounds (in English) that are only too common- are blends and
derivation, both aiming at giving an attractive twist to a word. So creativeness is a
premise for neologisms in songs.
CONCLUSION
As Grijelmo (2006: 301) says una lengua que nunca cambiara slo podra
hablarse en un cementerio. Languages are constantly changing and in order to
expand they have a series of word-formation processes. In English and Spanish
we have corresponding coinage mechanisms, although they vary in frequency and
productivity. These processes are derivation, compounding, clipping, borrowing,
backformation, acronyms and blending. Derivation and borrowing are highly prolific
mechanisms in both languages; compounding is very much used in English but not
so common in Spanish; the rest are less prolific and more or less equally frequent
in both languages.
From the literature revised, I can conclude that Spanish is more reticent to
neologisms, particularly those who have entered the language from foreign words.
English, on the other hand, on the overall praises itself for being so receptive and
having such a wide lexicon.
The particular status of English nowadays gives it much more freedom. As
music, science, politics and other fields are predominantly monopolized by the
English speaking world other languages feel defensive for such a heavy load of
terms that can be barely assimilated by the language and so there is a tendency
for acquiring needless words and expressions in detriment for their mother tongue.
Talking about the reason behind word-formation and especially about the
use and frequency of certain mechanisms says a lot of the culture, and even
though it is not my intention to go any further in this essay, it is important to
highlight the social, political and cultural factors that influence the change in word
coinage over time. But that is material for another study.
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Referencias
Artic Monkeys. (2007). Album: Favourite worst nightmare. Retrieved from: http://www.arcticmonkeys.com/discography/ on May 11th 2010.
Bryson, B. (1990). Mother tongue: the English language. Penguin books: England.
Carstairs-McCarthy. Phrases inside compounds: a puzzle for lexicon-free morphology.
Retrieved from http://www.pulib.sk/skase/Volumes/JTL04/03.pdf on May 13th 2010 on May
13th 2010.
Fromking, V., Rodman., and Hyams, N. (2003). An introduction to language. Thomson.
Grijelmo, A. (2006). Defensa apasionada del idioma espaol. Santillana: Spain.
Len, M. (2000). Manuel de traduccin e interpretacin. Luna publicaciones: Madrid.
Lil Jon. (1997). Album: Get crunk, who u wit: da album. Retrieved from:
http://www.starpulse.com/Music/Lil_Jon/Discography/ on May 11th 2010.
Lorenzo, E. (1994). El espaol de hoy: lengua en ebullicin. Editorial Gredos: Madrid.
Mew. (2003). Album: Frengers. Retrieved from:
http://www.cduniverse.com/search/xx/music/artist/Mew/a/albums.htm on May 14th 2010.
Molotov. (1999). Album: Apocalipshit. Retrieved from:
http://babox.altervista.org/molotov/discografia.htm on May 11th 2010.
Moreno de Alba, J. G. (2203). Suma de minucias del lenguaje. Fondo de Cultura Econmica:
Mxico.
Ricky Martin. (1998). Album: Vuelve. Retrieved from:
http://rickymartin.publispain.com/discografia.htm on May 14th 2010.
Biodata
Mara del Mar Moure Pea is currently an undergraduate student of the majors of
English Language and International Relations at the University of Quintana Roo.
Contact: 0708927@uqroo.mx

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