TOPIC 10: LXICO. CARACTRISTICAS DE LA FORMACIN DE PALABRAS EN INGLS. PREFIJACIN, SUFIJACIN Y COMPOSICIN. Good morning.

My name is ________ and I am going to present Topic 10: Lxico. Caractersticas de la formacin de palabras en ingls. Prefijacin, sufijacin y composicin.

Miss, whats a weather forecast?. And two minutes later: What does foresee mean?. And then: Whats a foreword, Miss?. How many times have you, and your pupils, encountered this kind of vocabulary problems only because not enough attention was paid to affix connections between words? How many of these problems could be easily solved if only word formation rules and processes were clearly explained to our pupils? Throughout this topic we are going to analyse word formation in English, one of the areas studied by lexicology, which is the branch of linguistics dealing with the theoretical study of lexical items and how language creates them. Thus, we will explore the different building blocks available for creating new lexical items in English. Word-formation in English is composed of several processes, being inflection and derivation the most important ones. Nevertheless, we will also concentrate on other devices used to create new words. And, finally, we will comment on the classroom implications regarding this topic and the ways in which all we know about it can be applied into a real classroom. But, before dealing with the main internal changes of the English language, how do we define the concept of word-formation? The vocabulary of any language is a living entity. This means that new words are continuously coming into the language, what is called neologisms, while others are going out, that is, they are no longer used, what is known as archaisms. By word-formation processes we mean the different devices used in English to build new words from existing ones. Each word-formation process will result in the production of a specific type of word. So, if we know that the association of

TOPIC 10: LXICO. CARACTRISTICAS DE LA FORMACIN DE PALABRAS EN INGLS. PREFIJACIN, SUFIJACIN Y COMPOSICIN. different constituent morphemes creates complex lexical items, then, we can analyse any complex word into its various constituents.

Although there are many processes which enrich the English language, as for instance loans from other languages and historical transfers, the word-formation rules are the most active and common structures used in order to create new words. And which are the major processes involving word-formation? Basically two: inflection and derivation. Inflection is a grammatical process that combines words and morphemes to produce alternative grammatical forms of words. For example, the plural morpheme is an inflectional morpheme. This implies that the plural form roses does not represent a lexical item different from the singular form rose, it is simply an inflectional variant of the same word. On the other hand, derivation is a lexical process which actually forms a new word out of an existing one by the addition of a derivational affix. Apart from creating new lexical items, it can also change the morphological category of the original word. For example, taking the adjective free and adding the derivational affix dom, we get the new word freedom, which is not an adjective anymore, but a noun. So, while the application of inflection leads to the formation of alternative grammatical forms of the same word, derivation creates new vocabulary items. But, as we said before, in addition to inflection and derivation, there are other word-formation processes in English. They are not as productive as the other two but, however, it is interesting to have a look at them since they may offer other possibilities of word-formation.

TOPIC 10: LXICO. CARACTRISTICAS DE LA FORMACIN DE PALABRAS EN INGLS. PREFIJACIN, SUFIJACIN Y COMPOSICIN. These are: reduplication, back formation and clipping, acronyms and blending. The process of reduplication is characterised by having compound words whose constituents are either identical or only slightly different. Most of them are informal, familiar and many belong to the sphere of child-parents talk. The main uses of these compounds are: to imitate sounds, for example: tick-tock for the sound of a clock. - to suggest alternative movements, like flip-flop. - to suggest instability, nonsense, for instance hocus-pocus. - to intensify, as in teeny-weeny. The two following processes, back formation and clipping, can be classed together as both are types of reduction. These processes make a shorter word from a longer one. Back formation uses derivational analogy to create typically verbs out of nouns or adjectives that existed before. Some examples are edit from editor, laze from lazy or burgle from burglar. Unlike back formation, clippings are shortenings without regard to derivational analogy and they are frequent in informal language. Some examples are: exam from examination, ad from advertisement, demo from demonstration or plane from airplane. The following process is formed by acronyms. Acronyms are words formed from the initial letters of words that make up a name. They can be: Either pronounced as sequences of letters: DIY (do-it-yourself), FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation). - Or pronounced as words: NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). Concerning orthography, they are usually written in capital letters, but, when they are well-established words and the awareness of their being initials is lost, they are written in small letters, asap (as soon as possible).

TOPIC 10: LXICO. CARACTRISTICAS DE LA FORMACIN DE PALABRAS EN INGLS. PREFIJACIN, SUFIJACIN Y COMPOSICIN. And the last one of the minor processes is blending. This is a very productive process that consists in the blending of two words to form a new one. It can be regarded then as a combination of clipping and compounding. Some examples are the following: brunch, which refers to the combination of breakfast + lunch, motel which is motor + hotel or travelogue which is travel + catalogue. This process was born during the 80s with commercial advertisements. As we said before, derivation is one of the major and most productive word-formation processes in English and, therefore, we must pay attention to it in depth. Derivation is a lexical or morphological process that consists in adding affixes to already existing bases in order to create a new word with new meaning. But, what is the difference between a word and a base? In order to have a better understanding of this process, it would be useful to clarify the meaning of these concepts and others such as stem or root. By word we mean the smallest unit of speech that can be composed of a stem and some morphemes. The stem, then, is the basis of the lexical item containing the lexical meaning and stripped from all the morphemes. For instance, the word nation has the stem nati (which means being born) and the morpheme on (which has the grammatical meaning of referring to a place). But, as you know, the stem nati does not have a complete meaning by its own. It is just the part of the word that remains when all the inflectional affixes have disappeared. If we look for the basic word with full meaning, we will have to refer to it as the base. In this case, nation would be the base. Derivation takes one of these three forms: affixation, compounding or conversion. Lets focus first on the process of affixation. It is a word formation process that consists in the attaching of an affix to a stem to produce a

TOPIC 10: LXICO. CARACTRISTICAS DE LA FORMACIN DE PALABRAS EN INGLS. PREFIJACIN, SUFIJACIN Y COMPOSICIN. new lexeme. An affix is a bound form that can only occur attached to a stem. There are two kinds of derivational affixes: class-changing and classmaintaining. Class-changing affixes change the word class of the word to which they are added. If we take the verb resign and add the affix ation we will end up with the noun resignation. On the other hand, class-maintaining affixes do not change the word class of the word, but they do change its meaning. For instance, adding the affix hood to the concrete noun child, the word resulting childhood has not the same meaning as the original one, in fact, it has become an abstract noun. Nevertheless, we will divide affixes depending on whether they occur before (prefixes) or after the stem (suffixes). Lets start by analysing prefixes, which could be classified in 8 broad semantic categories: 1. Negative meaning: A-, DIS- (amoral, disorder). 2. Degree or size: SUPER-, UNDER- (supermarket, underage). 3. Pejorative meaning: MAL- MIS- (malnutrition, misfortune). 4. Locative: INTER-, SUB- (international, subway). 5. Time and order: EX-, POST- (ex-president, post-war). 6. Orientation proconsul). 7. Conversion: A-, EN- (asleep, endanger). 8. Neo-classical: BI-, MULTI-, NEO- (bilingual, multicolour). Lets continue now with the group of affixes that occur after the stem: the suffixes, which will be grouped according to the word class that results when they are added to a base: _ Nominalizers: when they create both abstract and concrete nouns. Suffixes such as DOM, -HOOD or ISM, among others, create and attitude: ANTI-, PRO(anti-constitutional,

TOPIC 10: LXICO. CARACTRISTICAS DE LA FORMACIN DE PALABRAS EN INGLS. PREFIJACIN, SUFIJACIN Y COMPOSICIN. abstract nouns (kingdom); while with suffixes like MENT, -ATION or EE we will have verbs becoming nouns (argument). _ Verbalizers: suffixes that create verbs out of either nouns or adjectives. For instance, EN or FY added to a noun base (frighten), and IFY or IZE to adjectives (legalize). _ Adjectivizers: suffixes that make adjectives from nouns and even verbs. LESS, -ISH or LY from nouns (childish), and IVE or ABLE from verbs (creative). _ Adverbializers: suffixes that form adverbs from adjectives and sometimes nouns. The suffix LY is the most productive derivational affix to form adverbs from adjectives (slowly). Suffixes like WARD and WISE create adverbs out of nouns (clockwise). Having finished with the first derivational process of word-formation, lets concentrate now on the second: compounding. A compounding is a lexical unit of more than one base that functions semantically and grammatically as a single word. For example: bedside, black market or carwash. In principle, any number of bases may be involved, but in English, except for few cases, compounds only comprise two bases. As a general rule, the first element in the compound receives the main stress and the second element a secondary stress. Compounds must consist of more than one root, but the different roots need not belong to the same word class. When the two constituents of the compound belong to the same class (e.g. noun + noun; verb + verb), it may be assumed that the resulting compound also belongs to the same word class. But, when the two constituents of the compound belong to different word classes, the classification of the resulting compound cannot be taken for granted. We shall consider the classification of compounds according to the resulting word class. As a general rule, the word class of the last element of the compound determines the class of the compound. For example: -NOUN COMPOUNDS: created by the combination of either Noun + Noun (ashtray), Verb + Noun (pick-pocket), Adjective + Noun 6

TOPIC 10: LXICO. CARACTRISTICAS DE LA FORMACIN DE PALABRAS EN INGLS. PREFIJACIN, SUFIJACIN Y COMPOSICIN. (blackbird), or Adverb + Noun (afterthought). There is also a special case where a Verb + Adverb forms a noun (drive-in). -Within VERB COMPOUNDS, we will find that any root + a Verb will result in a verb compound (house-keep). -ADJECTIVE COMPOUNDS appear when any root, except for verbs, combines with an adjective (earth-bound). - ADVERB COMPOUNDS, which are created by the combination of two adverbs (throughout). As far as orthography is concerned, we can classify compounds into three sections: those separated with a hyphen like living-room, those separated just with a space like toy factory and those joined like greenhouse. Its time now to finish the process of derivation by analysing the last form of word-formation: conversion. Conversion or functional shift is the derivational process whereby an item is adapted or converted to a new word-class without the addition of an affix. Usually, the same word-form can be used as a verb or a noun, with only the grammatical context enabling us to know which category it belongs to. This process has greatly enlarged the English vocabulary in a very economical way. Lets classify now the words produced by conversion, which are primarily nouns, adjectives and verbs: A) CONVERSION TO NOUNS. From verbs (a call), and from adjectives, where the noun is implicit (the rich). B) CONVERSION TO ADJECTIVES. The noun form occurs in predicative as well as in attributive position since the latter is freely available for nouns within the grammar of the noun phrase: A brick garage The garage is brick C) CONVERSION TO VERBS. From nouns (to mail), and from adjectives (to empty). D) MINOR CATEGORIES OF CONVERSION: Although it is not very usual, other word-classes like conjunctions or prepositions may be converted 7

TOPIC 10: LXICO. CARACTRISTICAS DE LA FORMACIN DE PALABRAS EN INGLS. PREFIJACIN, SUFIJACIN Y COMPOSICIN. to nouns or verbs informally speaking. Furthermore, many of these word classes can undergo conversion into more than one other word class, for instance to go down (adverb particle), to down a beer (verb) and to have a down on someone (noun). Finally, it should be noted that even a whole phrase may undergo conversion and act as noun (a forget-me-not) or as an adjective (a notto-be-missed opportunity). The widespread use of conversion shows the importance of the criterion of syntactic function in determining word-class membership in English. Very often it is by its function rather than by its morphological form that we can tell the word-class to which a word belongs. To end up, how can we use and apply all we know about the different word-formation processes to our pupils learning? We, as teachers, know the importance of the learning of vocabulary and how difficult it is sometimes for our students. Therefore, we must try to facilitate them various ways to expand and enlarge it. First of all, we must make pupils aware of the regularities of the wordformation processes and the interconnections between morphemes and words by, for example, relating their previous knowledge (already known vocabulary) to new words with some morphemes in common. There are also many word games and puzzles we can try in the foreign language classroom so that pupils discover and become intuitive about morpheme and word combinations. We must not underestimate their linguistic intuition, since all languages possess word-formation devices. In short, the main objective when teaching vocabulary is that pupils become able to identify the components of a word and deduct its meaning both by relating them with already known vocabulary and by analysing the kind of process behind its formation, creating thus a net of interconnections and associations among the lexical items of the vocabulary they possess and expand day after day.

The bibliography I have used to prepare this topic is: 8

TOPIC 10: LXICO. CARACTRISTICAS DE LA FORMACIN DE PALABRAS EN INGLS. PREFIJACIN, SUFIJACIN Y COMPOSICIN. *Bauer, Laurie, English Word Formation, published by CUP in 1993. *Burkhanow, Igor, Lexicography, A Dictionary of Basic Terminology, published in Poland in 1998. *Quirk et Al, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, published by Longman in 1985. *Crystal, D., The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language, CUP, 2000 And the web page: www.cilt.org.uk THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR YOUR ATTENTION