Introducing English Linguistics

Other word formation processes.
There are many other word formation
processes beyond those already discussed. Some of these processes are
very common; others are quite rare and have not over time contributed
many new words to the English language.
Compounding, according to Plag (2003: 132), is “the most productive
type of word-formation process in English.” Historically, it has a long tra-
dition in English: two-thirds of the words in the Old English poem Beowulf,
for instance, are compounds. Compounding involves combining two base
morphemes to create a word with a new meaning that is not necessarily a
sum of the meanings of the individual words. For instance, hot and house
have individual meanings, and a hothouse is certainly a building kept at a
high temperature. But it is not simply any kind of “overheated” building
but one in which plants requiring very high temperatures are grown.
Orthographically, compounds can be spelled as a single word (e.g. police-
man), as a hyphenated word (e.g. word-formation), or as two separate words
(e.g.  police officer). But practice will vary. In this section, word formation is
spelled as two words, whereas in the quote above, it is spelled with a
hyphen. On the one hand, these differences may simply reflect a greater
preference for hyphenation of compounds in British English than American
English (Quirk et al. 1985: 1569). On the other hand, the differences indicate
how semantically integrated the two units are: policeman has been in the
language much longer than police officer, which is much newer. Over time,
it is quite possible that police officer will be spelled as a single word.
In speech, compound words have a specific pattern of stress. One sylla-
ble in the first element will receive primary stress, and one syllable in the
second element secondary stress. Consider the examples below:
whíte hóuse (‘a house colored white’)
Whítehòuse (‘the house in Washington, DC where the president of the
United States lives’)
In the first pair of words, the adjective white merely modifies house. Thus,
both words would receive relatively equal stress. In the second pair of
words, however, the first element, White, would receive much greater
stress than house. This is the typical pattern of stress found in compounds.
Compounds are formed through various combinations of parts of speech:
noun 
 noun: letter carrier, birthmark, life raft, clergyman, talk radio, fire
fighter, streetlight, salesperson, deathwatch, human shield, spacewalk,
sandcastle, senior moment, podcast
adjective 
 noun: close call, small talk, blacklist, blackberry, heavyweight, bigwig
preposition 
 preposition: upon, within, unto, into, onto
verb 
 noun: chokehold, playroom, treadmill, call box, punch card, hitman
verb 
 preposition: breakdown, walkup, teach-in, playoff, takeout, startup,
walkthrough, drawdown
These categories do not exhaust the types of compounds that are possible
in English, but do demonstrate that it is a highly productive type of word
formation process.
English words: Structure and meaning
179

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Affixation and lexical borrowing are very common too. Because English
contains so many different prefixes and suffixes, affixation has always, as
an earlier section demonstrated, played an important role in forming new
vocabulary. Some more recent words formed through affixation that have
appeared on the American Dialect Society’s Words of the Year lists include
texter (an individual who sends text messages), subprime (a risky loan made
to people seeking home mortgages), boomeritis (diseases affecting baby
boomers as they age), and flexitarian (someone who claims to be a vege-
tarian but sometimes eats meat).