Principles of classification of English consonants and vowels Principles of classification of English consonants

Instrumental meaning:

parts of human body - to finger ( to touch with fingers

tools, machines, weapons - to free- wheel ( to go with the engine switched off)

AGENT:

to crowd - to come together in large numbers

to ape - to imitate in a foolish way as an ape does

to bag - to put in a bag

to bottle - to store in bottles

 

Some authors don't consider conversion in: - laugh - to laugh; work - to work; - drink - to drink.

Etymology: OE noun lufu; verb lufian.

The point was in dropping of the ending. However, still this zero affixation is no point since there's same stem and different paradigm.

Categories of speech that are especially affected by conversion:

- verbs made from nouns are the most numerous - # to hand, to blacklist, to bottle;

- nouns from verbs - # a go, a make, a cut;

- verbs from adjective - # to pale, to yellow, to grey;

- adjectives from nouns - a native, a relative, a Russian

- but there are also: to down, ifs and buts; ins and outs (FROM ANY PART OF SPEECH).

Criteria of direction of conversion:

-- semantic - defines the frequency of usage; also if one word is used only in one of its forms # to neighbour - a neighbour.

-- Stylistic

-- Type of semantic structure

-- Formal criteria - morphological structure of the word (suffixes etc.) - shows the original part of speech: a document - to document.

 

2.2.2

 

2.2.3 Affixation

Affixation has been one of the most productive ways of word-building throughout the history of English. It consists in adding an affix to the stem of a definite part of speech. Affixation is divided into suffixation and prefixation.

There's not rigid classification of suffixes. No definition of a suffix, esp when we speak about semi-affixes. # iceberg; ice-cream - some believe that ice is a prefix in cases when it has lost its concrete meaning.

Classification according to their origin (etymological point of view):

- native; (-er, -dom)

- borrowed. (-tion, -age)

Classification #2.

-- productive - ones which take part in deriving new words in this particular period of language development - look for them among neologisms and nonce-words - er, -ess, -ism, -ing, -ist, -ant; -y; -ed; -less, -able, un-, re-, dis. Nonce-words are coined and used only for this particular occasion.

# unputdownable

-- Non-productive

# th, -hood, -dom; -en, -ous.

There are a number of high-frequency affixes which are no longer used in forming new words.

# -ly, -ful, -ent, -al, -ant.

Semantics of Affixes.

Three main approaches:

- no meaning, the role is to shape the word structure.

# syntactic derivation - the rich, the old

- affixes may be characterized as bearing some shade of meaning

# modificational affixes; emotional affixes - dog - doggy

- affixes bear the meaning of a category

# categorized meaning (very vast) - er - designating persons from the object of their occupation - # doer, painter; - ful - full of sth # wonderful; ish - implies insufficiency of quality - greenish.

Not only the suffix adds its own meaning to the meaning of the root but the suffix is also affected by the root and undergoes certain semantic changes.

WORDS

A great many words can consist of smaller meaningful structural units which are called morphemes. From the semantic point of view all morphemes are subdi­vided into two large classes: root morphemes (roots) and affixational morphemes (affixes). The root is the lexical nucleus of a word. It is common to a set of words that make up a lexical word-cluster, e.g. act in act, actor, action, active, inactive; theor- in theory, theorist, theoretician, theoretical, etc. There exist many roots which coincide with root-words, e.g. man, son, desk, tree, black, red, see, look, etc.

The affixes, in their turn, fall into prefixes which precede the root (un-: happy, rewrite, discover, decipher, impossible, misbehaviour, etc.) and suffixes which follow the root (friendship, peaceful, worker, teaching, realize, calmly, j etc.).

The part of a word which remains unchanged in all the forms of its para­digm is called a stem, e.g. girl- in girls, girl’s, girls’; darken in darkens, darkened, darkening.

Stems that coincide with roots are known as simple stems, e.g. boy’s, trees, reads, etc.

Stems that contain one or more affixes are derived stems, e.g. teacher’s, misfires, governments, undecipherable, etc.

Binary stems comprising two simple or derived stems are called compound stems, e.g. machine-gunner’s, ex-film-star, gentlemanly, school-boyish, etc.

From the structural point of view morphemes fall into three types: free morphemes, bound morphemes, and semi-bound morphemes.

A free morpheme can stand alone as a word, e.g. friendly, friendship (cf. a friend).

Bound morphemes occur only as constituent parts of words, e.g. free­dom, greatly, poetic; depart, adrift, enlarge, dishonest, misprint; conceive, de­ceive, receive; desist, resist, subsist, etc.

Semi-bound morphemes can function both as affixes and as free mor­phemes (i.e. words). Cf. after, half, man, well, self and after-thought, half- baked, chairman, well-known, himself.

In Modern English one can often meet morphemes of Greek and Latin origin which have a definite lexical meaning though are not used as autonomous words, e.g. tele- ‘far^[1], -scope ‘seeing, -graph,-’writing’, etc. Such morphemes are usually called

combining forms or bound root morphemes.

Positional variants of a morpheme are known as allomorphs. Thus the prefix in (intransitive, involuntary) can be represented by allomorph il- (illegal, illiteracy), im- (immortal, impatience) ir- (irregular, irresolute).

Several morphemes are polysemic, i.e. a certain form, being a component of words which belong to the same part of speech, can express different meanings. Cf. bluish (a.):: Spanish (a.); baker (n.):: boiler (n.); sculptor (n.):: reactor (n.).

Homonymic morphemes have the same form and different meaning, being components of words that belong to different parts of speech, e.g. quickly (adv.) :: lovely (a.); soften (v.):: silken (a.). One should distinguish between the hom­onymy of derivational affixes, on the one hand, and the homonymy of such affixes and inflections, on the other, e.g. worker (n.) :: longer (comp. d. of a.); golden (a.):: taken (Past part.).

3. Word formation in English.

AFFIXATION

 

Affixation is a word-formative process in which words are created by add­ing word-building affixes to stems. Affixation includes prefixation, i.e. form­ing new words with the help of prefixes, and suffixation, i.e. forming new words with the help of suffixes.

From the etymological point of view affixes are classified according to their origin into native (e.g. -er, -nese, -ing, un-, mis-, etc.) and borrowed (Romanic, e.g. -tion, -ment, -ance, re-, sub-, etc.; Greek, e.g. -ist, -ism, anti-, etc.).

Affixes can also be classified into productive (e.g. -er, -ness, -able, -y, -ize, un-, re-, die-, etc.) and non-prpductiye (_?th,-h^od -en, -ous, etc.). Suffixes de­rive a certain part of spe^ch^henc^n^^^md^fisfinguish: noun-forming, ad­jective-forming, verb-forming and adverb-forming suffixes.

Composition (compounding)

Compounds represent one of the most typical and specific features of English word-structure.

Compounds are produced by combining two or more stems.

The aspect of identification of a compound word:

-- two or more stems

There's a problem: in which case the word is a combination or compounding?

Criteria for differentiation:

-- phonetic - emphasis: compounds have one main stress

-- morphological - morphological unity of a compound: every compound has one paradigm;

-- syntactic - limitation of collocations of compound words;

-- semantic - semantic unity of a compound word; meaning's not transparent;

-- orthographic - whether it's hyphenated; written as one word.

There are three important peculiarities distinguishing compounding in English from compounding in other languages:

-- Both constituents of an English compound are free forms.

Examples: