Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine

Sumy State University

3652 Methodological instructions

on Lexicology

for the students of the speciality 6.0020303 “Philology”

of the full-time course of study

Part 1

Sumy

Sumy State University

2013

Methodological instructions on Lexicology / compiler G. V. Chulanova. – Sumy : Sumy State University, 2013. – 59 p.

Germanic Philology Department

Contents

P.

INTRODUCTION…………………………………………..	4
PART 1. THE OBJECT OF LEXICOLOGY ………………	5
The connection of lexicology with other branches of linguistics ……………………………………………………	6
PART 2. THE DEFINITION OF THE WORD …………...	8
Mmorphological Structure of English Words ……………..	10
Word ………………………………………………………...	14
PART 3. WORD FORMATION …………………………...	18
Affixation …………………………………………………...	20
Conversion ………………………………………………….	25
Compounding (Composition) ………………………………	28
Shortenings …………………………………………………	31
Reduplication ……………………………………………….	34
Sound and Stress Interchange ………………………………	36
Sound Imitation (Onomatopoeia) …………………………..	37
Blending …………………………………………………….	39
Back-Formation …………………………………………….	39
Phrasal Verbs ……………………………………………….	41
PART 4. ETYMOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF MODERN ENGLISH VOCABULARY ……………………………….	43
Borrowings ……………………………………………………	43
Assimilation of Borrowed Words …………………………..	47
International Words …………………………………………	50
Pseudo-International Words ………………………………..	53
Etymological Doublets ……………………………………..	53
Translation–Loans.……………………..…………………..	55
BASIC LITERATURE ……………………………………..	56
SUPPLEMENTARY LITERATURE ……………………...	57

Introduction

“The Course in English and Ukrainian Lexicology” is an attempt to supply students of English and Ukrainian Lexicology with a practical appendix to the lecture and seminar course of lexicology studies. The purpose of this book is to aid the teaching process by which a student becomes aware of English and Ukrainian Lexicology. The book is intended to acquaint students with the main topics treated at seminars in Modern Lexicology (etymology, word-formation, semasiology, phraseology, etc.) and meets the requirements of the programme in this subject. Some sections of exercises offer training in comparative practical work which aims at establishing parallels between English and Ukrainian.

The book is in 8 parts. It includes 8 theoretical chapters, practical assignments for seminars and independent work. The practical assignments are preceded by theoretical notes which contain working definitions of principal concepts. The author lays stress on the practical aspect of lexicology studies.

In most cases, the practical assignments present English words in natural contexts of British and American literature of the 20^th century. The material of the book may also be used in teaching a course of the Theory and Practice of Translation.

This book does not try to cover everything. The author will be much obliged for any criticism.

PART 1. THE OBJECT OF LEXICOLOGY

Lexicology is the branch of linguistics, it is the study of words. The term Lexicology is composed of two Greek morphemes: lexis meaning ‘word, phrase’ and logos which denotes ‘learning, a department of knowledge’. Thus, the literal meaning of the term Lexicology is ‘the science of the word’. Lexicology as a branch of linguistics has its own aims and methods of scientific research, its basic task being a study and systematic description of vocabulary in respect to its origin, development and current use. Lexicology is concerned with words, variable word-groups, phraseological units, and with morphemes which make up words.

The term word denotes the basic unit of a given language resulting from the association of a particular meaning with a particular group of sounds capable of a particular grammatical employment. A word therefore is simultaneously a semantic, grammatical and phonological unit.

The general study of words and vocabulary, irrespective of the specific features of any particular language, is known as general lexicology. Special lexicology is the lexicology of a particular language (e.g. English, Russian, etc.), i.e. the study and description of its vocabulary and vocabulary units. Every special lexicology is based on the principles of general lexicology.

There are two principal approaches in linguistic science to the study of language material, namely the synchronic (Gr. syn – ‘together, with’ and chronos – ‘time’) and the diachronic (Gr. dia – ‘through’) approach. With regard to Special Lexicology the synchronic approach is concerned with the vocabulary of a language as it exists at a given time, for instance, at the present time. It is special Desсriptive Lexicology that deals with the vocabulary and vocabulary units of a particular language at a certain time. It studies the functions of words and their specific structure as a characteristic inherent in the system.

The diachronic approach in terms of Special Lexicology deals with the changes and the development of vocabulary in the course of time. It is special Historical Lexicology or etymology that deals with the evolution of the vocabulary units of a language as time goes by. This branch of linguistics discusses the origin of various words, their change and development.

Lexicology also studies all kinds of semantic grouping and semantic relations: synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, semantic fields, etc.

The theoretical value of lexicology becomes obvious if we realise that it forms the study of one of the three main aspects of language, i.e. its vocabulary, the other two being its grammar and sound system.

Lexicology came into being to meet the demands of many different branches of applied linguistics, namely of lexicography, standardisation of terminology, information retrieval, literary criticism and especially of foreign language teaching. It helps to stimulate a systematic approach to the facts of vocabulary and an organised comparison of the foreign and native language.

The connection of lexicology with other branches of linguistics

The treatment of words in lexicology cannot be divorced from the study of all the other elements in the language system to which words belong. The word is studied in several branches of linguistics and not in lexicology only, and the latter is closely connected with general linguistics, the history of the language, phonetics, stylistics, grammar and such new branches of our science as sociolinguistics, paralinguistics (the study of non-verbal means of communication (gestures, facial expressions, eye-contact, etc.)., pragmalinguistics (the branch of linguistics concerned with the relation of speech and its users and the influence of speech upon listeners) and some others.

The importance of the connection between lexicology and phonetics can be explained if we remember that a word is an association of a given group of sounds with a given meaning, so that top is one word, and tip is another. Word-unity is conditioned by a number of phonological features. Phonemes follow each other in a fixed sequence so that [pit] is different from [tip].

There is also a close relationship between Lexicology and Stylistics or, to be more exact, Linguo-Stylistics.Linguo-Stylistics is concerned with the study of the nature, functions and structure of stylistic devices, on the one hand, and with the investigation of each style of language, on the other.

A close connection between lexicology and grammar is conditioned by the manifold ties between the objects of their study. Grammar is the study of the grammatical structure of language. It is concerned with the various means of expressing grammatical relations between words and with the patterns after which words are combined into word-groups and sentences. Even isolated words as presented in a dictionary bear a definite relation to the grammatical system of the language because they belong to some part of speech and conform to some lexico-grammatical characteristics of the word class to which they belong. Words seldom occur in isolation. They are arranged in certain patterns conveying the relations between the things for which they stand, therefore alongside with their lexical meaning they possess some grammatical meaning.

The two kinds of meaning are often interdependent. That is to say, certain grammatical functions and meanings are possible only for the words whose lexical meaning makes them fit for these functions, and, on the other hand, some lexical meanings in some words occur only in definite grammatical functions and forms and in definite grammatical patterns.

The ties between lexicology and grammar are particularly strong in the sphere of word-formation which before lexicology became a separate branch of linguistics had even been considered as part of grammar. The characteristic features of English word-building, the morphological structure of the English word are dependent upon the peculiarity of the English grammatical system. The analytical character of the language is largely responsible for the wide spread of conversion and for the remarkable flexibility of the vocabulary manifest in the ease with which many nonce-words are formed on the spur of the moment.

Language is the reality of thought, and thought develops together with the development of society, therefore language and its vocabulary must be studied in the light of social history. A word, through its meaning rendering some notion, is a generalised reflection of reality. The branch of linguistics, dealing with causal relations between the way the language works and develops, on the one hand, and the facts of social life, on the other, is termed sociolinguistics.

PART 2. THE DEFINITION OF THE WORD

Lexicology studies various lexical units: morphemes, words, variable word-groups and phraseological units. We proceed from the assumption that the word is the basic unit of language system, the largest on the morphologic and the smallest on the syntactic plane of linguistic analysis. The word is a structural and semantic entity within the language system. The modern approach to word studies is based on distinguishing between the external and the internal structures of the word. By external structure of the word we mean its morphological structure (the following morphemes can be distinguished: the prefixes, the suffixes, the root). The internal structure of the word, or its meaning, is referred to as the word’s semantic structure. It is the word’s main aspect.

The definition of every basic notion is a very hard task: the definition of a word is one of the most difficult in linguistics because the simplest word has many different aspects. It has a sound form because it is a certain arrangement of phonemes; it has its morphological structure, being also a certain arrangement of morphemes; when used in actual speech, it may occur in different word forms, different syntactic functions and signal various meanings.

A few examples will suffice to show that any definition is conditioned by the aims and interests of its author. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), one of the great English philosophers, revealed a materialistic approach to the problem of nomination. He wrote that words are not mere sounds but names of matter. Three centuries later the great Russian physiologist I.P. Pavlov (1849-1936) examined the word in connection with his studies of the second signal system, and defined it as a universal signal that can substitute any other signal from the environment in evoking a response in a human organism. One of the latest developments of science and engineering is machine translation. It also deals with words and requires a rigorous definition for them. It runs as follows: a word is a sequence of graphemes which can occur between spaces, or the representation of such a sequence on morphemic level.

Within the scope of linguistics the word has been defined syntactically, semantically, phonologically and by combining various approaches.

It has been syntactically defined for instance as “the minimum sentence” by H. Sweet and much later by L. Bloomfield as “a minimum free form”. E. Sapir takes into consideration the syntactic and semantic aspects when he calls the word “one of the smallest completely satisfying bits of isolated ‘meaning’, into which the sentence resolves itself”. The semantic-phonological approach may be illustrated by A. H. Gardiner’s definition: “A word is an articulate sound-symbol in its aspect of denoting something which is spoken about”.

A word is the smallest significant unit of a given language capable of functioning alone and characterised by positional mobility within a sentence, morphological uninterruptability and semantic integrity. All these criteria are necessary because they permit us to create a basis for the oppositions between the word and the phrase, the word and the phoneme, and the word and the morpheme.

Summing up our review of different definitions, we come to the conclusion that they are bound to be strongly dependent upon the line of approach, the aim the scholar has in view. For a comprehensive word theory, therefore, a description seems more appropriate than a definition. The word is the fundamental unit of language. It is a dialectical unity of form and content. The word may be described as the basic speech unit used for the purposes of human communication, materially representing a group of sounds, possessing a meaning, susceptible to grammatical employment and characterized by formal and semantic unity.

The word as well as any linguistic sign is a two-facet unit possessing both form and content or, to be more exact, soundform and meaning. Its content or meaning is not identical to notion, but it may reflect human notions, and in this sense may be considered as the form of their existence. Concepts fixed in the meaning of words are formed as generalised and approximately correct reflections of reality.

When used in actual speech the word undergoes certain modification and functions in one of its forms. The system showing a word in all its word-forms is called its paradigm. The lexical meaning оf а word is the same throughout the paradigm, i.e. all the word-forms of one and the same word are lexically identical. The grammatical meaning varies from one form to another (cf. to take, takes, took, taking or singer, singer’s, singers, singers’). There are two approaches to the paradigm: (a) as a system of forms of one word it reveals the differences and relationships between them; (b) in abstraction from concrete words it is treated as a pattern on which every word of one part of speech models its forms, thus serving to distinguish one part of speech from another. Cf. the noun paradigm – ( ), -’s, -s, -s’ as distinct from that of the regular verb – ( ) ,-s, -ed₁, -ed₂, -ing, etc.

MORPHOLOGICAL STRUSTURE OF ENGLISH WORDS

If viewed structurally, words appear to be divisible into smaller units which are called morphemes. A morpheme is also an association of a given meaning with a given sound pattern. They are not divisible into smaller meaningful units. That is why the morpheme may be defined as the minimum meaningful language unit.

The term morpheme is derived from Gr morphe ‘form’ + -eme. The Greek suffix -eme has been adopted by linguists to denote the smallest significant or distinctive unit (Cf. phoneme, sememe).

Morphemes may be classified: a) from the semantic point of view; b) from the structural point of view.

a) Semantically morphemes fall into two classes: root-morphemes and non-root or affixational morphemes. Roots and affixes make two distinct classes of morphemes due to the different roles they play in word-structure.

Roots and affixational morphemes are generally easily distinguished and the difference between them is clearly felt as, e.g., in the words helpless, handy, blackness, Londoner, refill, etc.: the root-morphemes help-, hand-, black-, London-, -fill are understood as the lexical centres of the words, as the basic constituent parts without which the words are inconceivable.

The root-morpheme is the lexical nucleus of a word. It has an individual lexical meaning shared by no other morpheme of the language. Mind that the part-of-speech meaning is not found in roots. The root-morpheme is isolated as the morpheme common to a set of words making up a word-cluster, for example the morpheme teach- in to teach, teacher, teaching, theor- in theory, theorist, theoretical, etc.

Non-root morphemes include inflectional morphemes or inflections and affixational morphemes or affixes. Inflections carry only grammatical meaning and are thus relevant only for the formation of word-forms, whereas affixes are relevant for building various types of stems. A stem is the part of a word that remains unchanged throughout its paradigm. Lexicology is concerned only with affixational morphemes.

Affixes are classified into prefixes and suffixes: a prefix precedes the root-morpheme, a suffix follows it. Affixes possess the part-of-speech meaning and a generalised lexical meaning.

The part of a word, which remains unchanged in all the forms of its paradigm is called a stem: darken in darkens, darkened, darkening. The stem expresses the lexical and the part of speech meaning. For the word hearty and for the paradigm heart (sing.) –hearts (pl.) the stem may be represented as heart- This stem is a single morpheme, it contains nothing but the root. Stems that coincide with roots are known as simple stems, e.g. trees, reads, etc.

Stems that contain one or more affixes are called derived stems, e.g. governments, teacher’s, etc. Binary stems comprising 2 simple or derived stems are called compound stems, e.g. ex-film-star, schoolboy, etc.

b) Structurally morphemes fall into three types: free morphemes, bound morphemes, semi-free (semi- bound) morphemes.

A free morpheme is defined as one that coincides with the stem or a word-form. A great many root-morphemes are free morphemes, for example, the root-morpheme friend — of the noun friendship is naturally qualified as a free morpheme because it coincides with one of the forms of the noun friend.

A bound morpheme occurs only as a constituent part of a word. Affixes are, naturally, bound morphemes, for they always make part of a word, e.g. the suffixes -ness, -ship, -ise (-ize), etc., the prefixes un-, dis-, de-, etc. (e.g. readiness, comradeship, to activise; unnatural, to displease, to decipher, etc.).

Bound morphemes can be further classified as derivational or inflectional. Derivationalmorphemes, when combined with a root, change either the semantic meaning orpart of speechof the affected word. For example, in the wordhappiness, the addition of the bound morpheme -ness to the root happy changes the word from an adjective (happy) to a noun(happiness). In the word unkind, un- functions as a derivational morpheme, for it inverts the meaning of the word formed by the root kind.

Many root-morphemes also belong to the class of bound morphemes which always occur in morphemic sequences, i.e. in combinations with roots or affixes. All unique roots and pseudo-roots are-bound morphemes. Such are the root-morphemes theor- in theory, theoretical, etc., barbar-in barbarism, barbarian, etc., -ceive in conceive, perceive, etc.

Semi-bound (semi-free) morphemes are morphemes that can function in a morphemic sequence both as an affix and as a free morpheme. For example, the morpheme well and half on the one hand occur as free morphemes that coincide with the stem and the word-form in utterances like sleep well, half an hour, on the other hand they occur as bound morphemes in words like well-known, half-eaten, half-done.

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

Exercise 1. Make the morphemic analysis of the following words.

post-impressionists, workmanship, outstay, eatable, illustrate, generations, cliff-hangers, courtroom, incredibly, lifelong, obsession, appreciated, in-depth, research, coastal, wonderful, heartstopper, back-of-the-neck, bedclothes, brilliant, descriptions, superbly, read-in-one-day, pedal-to-the-metal crowd-passer, one-sit thriller, hair-raiser, extremely, interesting, exciting, anyone, marvelous, contemporary, accurate.

Exercise 2. Classify the stems of the words given below into simple, derived, compound.

playwright, sunflower, shockproof, look, blue-eyed, cup, dusty, homeless, extremely, music, drumbeat, teenager, fantastic, table, hilarious, place, grown-up, read, sisterhood, outstanding, novel, booklist, standard, excellence, science-fiction, footstep, visionary, homelessness, bittersweet, everywhere, portrait, indelible, impression, reaffirming, nowadays, horror, convincingly, detailed, acronym, mile.

Exercise 3. Classify the morphemes from the structural point of view in the words given in bold type.

1. You and I know that soon Uncle Monty will be dead and the Baudelaires will be miserable. 2. They tried the gate themselves and found that it was unloked. 3. If you ever planning a vocation, you may find if useful to acquire a guidebook. 4. Klaus frowned at the hand-drown map that was attached to the note with another wad of gum. 5. Enclosed you will find a map of the Lucky Smells Lumbermill. 6. During the week that followed, however, the Baudelaires had a wonderful time in their new home. 7. The window drawnings somehow made the room even more pathetic, a wovd which here means “depressing and containing no windows”. 8. But in front of the house was what was truly unusual: a vast, well-kept lawn, dotted with long, thin shrubs in remarkable shapes. 9. Mr. Poe stepped up to the door and rang a doorbell that was one of the loudest the children had ever heard. 10. The dormitory is straight ahead, between the storage shed and the lumbermill itself. 11. And somebody has to slice an enormous length of rope into small, workable pices. 12. He was in charge of overseeing the orphans’ affairs, so it was he who decided that the children would be placed in the care of a unpleasantness with Count Olaf. 13. Full of drama, full of passion, full of intrigue and heroism. 14. I like it because it is full of suspense and rather adventureful. 15. Greatest little story of power, intrigue, ambition, disregard, corruption and horror.

Words

English words fall into 4 main structural types:

– Simple words (or root words) have only a root morpheme in their structure. This type is widely represented by a great number of words belonging to the original English stock or to earlier borrowings (house, room, book, street, etc.) and in Modern English has been greatly enlarged by conversion (e.g. hand – to hand, pale – to pale, etc.).

– erivatives or derived words consist of a root and one or more affixes. They are produced by the word-building process known as affixation or derivation, e.g. joyful, retell, enlarge, etc. Derived words are extremely numerous in the English vocabulary.

– Compounds – in which two or more stems are combined into a lexical unit. Classroom, snow-white, forget-me-not. Derivational compound is a word formed by a simultaneous process of composition and derivation. The process of word-building in these seemingly similar words is different: mill-owner is coined by composition, honey-mooner — by derivation from the compound honeymoon. Honeymoon being a compound, honeymooner is a derivative. The ultimate constituents of derivational compounds are: noun stem+noun stem+ -er. The suffix -er is one of the productive suffixes in forming derivational compounds. Another frequent type of derivational compounds are compounds of the type kind-hearted: adjective stem+ noun stem+ -ed. The derivational compounds often become the basis of further derivation.

There are two characteristic features of English compounds:

a) Both components in an English compound are free stems, that is they can be used as words with a distinctive meaning of their own.

b) English compounds have a two-stem pattern, with the exception of compound words which have form-word stems in their structure.

Compound words in English can be formed not only by means of composition but also by means of :

a) reduplication, e.g. too-too, and also by means of reduplicating combined with sound interchange , e.g. rope-ripe;

b) conversion from word-groups, e.g. to micky-mouse, makeup;

c) back formation from compound nouns or word-groups, e.g. to fingerprint;

d) analogy, e.g. lie-in, phone-in ( on the analogy with sit-in).

According to their structure compounds are subdivided into:

a) compound words proper which consist of two stems, e.g. to job-hunt, train-sick;

b) derivational compounds, where besides the stems we have affixes, e.g. ear-minded, hydro-skimmer;

c) compound words consisting of three or more stems, e.g. eggshell-thin, singer-songwriter;

d) compound-shortened words, e.g. V-day, motocross.

– There are also some shortenings or contractions, which are produced by shortening (contraction), e.g. ad, lab, flu, M.P., etc.

There exists a more complicated classification of the structural types of words. It takes into account the varieties of root morphemes, the positions of affixes as regards the root.

1. Simple words.

1. R – stop, now, desk;

2. Rfr (root fragment) – lab (laboratory), pop (popular);

2. Derived words.

3. R + S (root + suffix) – realize, dancer;

4. Rfr + S – combo (combination);

5. P + R (prefix + root) – depart, subdivision;

6. P + R + S – misinterpretation, disagreeable;

3. Compound words/

7. R + R – time-table, schoolgirl;

8. Rfr + Rfr – smog (smoke + fog), brunch (breakfast + lunch);

9. R + I + R (root + interfix + root) – gasometer, statesman;

10. (R + S) + R – writing – table, safety-belt;

11. R + (R + S) – pen-holder, sky-jumping;

12. R + F + R (root + function word + root) – stay-at-home, true-to-life;

4. Derivational compounds.

13. (R + R) + S – snub-nosed, long-legged.

The four types (root words, derived words, compounds and shortening) represent the main structural types of Modern English words, and, conversion, derivation and composition the most productive ways of word-building process. By word-building are understood processes of producing new words from the resources of the language. Various types of word formation in modern English possess different degrees of productivity, some of them are highly productive such as affixation, compounding, shortening, conversion, forming phrasal words others are semi-productive, such ass back formation, reduplication, blending, sound imitation and non productive – sound interchange and change of stress.

Exercise 4. Comment on the structural types of the following words.

news-stand, cupboard, sun-bleached, true-to-life, long-legged, inhabit, speedometer, lip-read, sky, strong-willed, acceptable, hide-and-seek, combo, snow-white, disagreement, vote-catching, smog, fridge, gasometer, schoolboy, retell, pop, wedding-finger, misinterpretation, zoo, small, light-minded, price, mags, unputdownable, unindentified, person, majority, frightening, generation, neck, ads, gym, Anglo-American, exam.

Exercise 5. Comment on the structural types of the words given in bold type.

1. Exciting stuff... Brown certainly does have a knack for spinning a suspenseful yarn. 2. Reading this book is like a holiday – an interlude of pleasure... 3. Unbelievable! I read this book like a hungry cat! 4. Crichton’s sci-fi is convincingly detailed. 5. A madcap mixture of Nord, folk spunk and high elegance and definitely its own space. 6. Push aside the velvet curtain to give a glimpse of the glamorous yet barracuda-like world of fashion... 7. A strikingly accurate depiction of the slightly loony worlds of fashion and high-stakes glamour magazines. 8. I automatically began in-depth research about Garmouth and wartime coastal England. 9. If you like tough cop/police work/serial killer/courtroom drama, this is a good one. 10. Life-or-death cliff-hangers, thrilling cat-and-mouse maneuvers, romance, religion, science, murder, mysticism, architecture, and action.

Exercise 6. Comment on the structural types of the compounds given in bold type.

1. When I was a kid, my dad and I could drive from the historic district near the Cape Fear River to Wrightsville Beach in ten minutes, but so many stoplights and shopping centers have been added that it can now take an hour, especially on the weekends, when the tourists come flooding in.  2. He was most content while sitting in his den, studying a coin dealer newsletter nicknamed the Greysheet and trying to figure out the next coin he should add to his collection. 3. “But I am a little disappointed that you forgot,” she added, almost as an afterthought. 4. The shrimp shack is in downtown Wilmington, in the historic area that borders the Cape Fear River. 5) A broken rowboat sat near the door. 6) Most of the tables were filled, but I motioned toward one near the jukebox. 7. I set it up on the back porch and emptied out the charcoal dust before hosing off the cobwebs and letting it dry in the sun. 8. As we watched, the rain intensified into a steady downpour, falling diagonally from the sky. 9. Later I took her to see the battleship, but we didn’t stay long. 10. Though I wanted to open it immediately, I waited until we’d lifted off from the runway. 11) It doesn’t sound so far-fetched, right? 12. It wasn’t just her slightly gap-toothed smile, it was the casual way she swiped at a loose strand of hair, the easy way she held herself. 13. She met my gaze without a hint of self-consciousness. 14. Common or garden gold-digger. And she knew her stuff. She’d got her hooks into Jeff all right. 15. “People call her a scandalmonger”, said Mrs Bantry, “but she isn’t really”. 16. He and her wife occupy a self-contained flat in Yewtree Lodge, though they are moving into their own house at Baydon Heath very shortly. 17. Percival is a mealy-mouthed hypocrite. 18. Though, as I say, I do it with the utmost diffidence because I know I am very old and rather muddle-headed, and I dare say my idea is of no value at all. 19. The father was an old country doctor – terrifically pig-headed – the complete family tyrant. 20) You’ve no idea, Neele, how tired one gets of the inevitable weed-killer.

PART 3. WORD-FORMATION

Word-formation is the process of creating new words from the material available in the word-stock according to certain structural and semantic patterns specific for the given language. Word-formation is that branch of Lexicology which studies the derivative structure of existing words and the patterns on which a language, ‘in this case the English language, builds new words. It is self-evident that word-formation proper can deal only with words which are analysable both structurally and semantically. The study of the simple word as such has no place in it. Simple words however are very closely connected with word-formation because they serve as the foundation, the basic source of the parent units motivating all types of derived and compound words.

Some of the ways of forming words in present-day English can be resorted to for the creation of new words whenever the occasion demands – these are called prоduсtive ways of forming words, other ways of forming words cannot now produce new words, and these are commonly termed non-productive or unproductive. For instance, affixation has been a productive way of forming words ever since the Old English period; on the other hand, sound-interchange must have been at one time a word-building means but in Modern English its function is actually only to distinguish between different classes and forms of words.

It follows that productivity of word-building ways, individual derivational patterns and derivational affixes is understood as their ability of making new words which all who speak English find no difficulty in understanding, in particular their ability to create what are called occasional words. The term suggests that a speaker coins such words when he needs them; if on another occasion the same word is needed again, he coins it afresh. The following words may serve as illustration: (his) collarless (appearance), a lungful (of smoke), a Dickensish (office), to unlearn (the rules), etc.

Three degrees of productivity are distinguished for derivational patterns and individual derivational affixes: l) highly-productive, 2) productive or semi-productive and 3) non-productive. Productivity is characterised by the ability to make new words.

Most linguists consider as the chief processes of English word-formation affixation, conversion and compounding. Apart from these a number of minor ways of forming words such as back-formation, reduplication, sound interchange, distinctive stress, sound imitation, blending, clipping and acronymy are traditionally also referred to Word-Formation.

We proceed from the understanding of Word-Formation and the classification of word-formation types as found in A. I. Smirnitsky’s book on English Lexicology. Word-Formation is the system of derivative types of words and the process of creating new words from the material available in the language after certain structural and semantic formulas and patterns. For instance, the noun driver is formed after the pattern v+-er, i.e. a verbal stem + the noun-forming suffix -er. The meaning of the derived noun driver is related to the meaning of the stem drive- ‘to direct the course of a vehicle’ and the suffix -er meaning ‘an active agent’: a driver is ‘one who drives’ (a carriage, motorcar, railway engine, etc.). Likewise compounds resulting from two or more stems joined together to form a new word are also built on quite definite structural and semantic patterns and formulas, for instance adjectives of the snow-white type are built according to the formula п+а, etc. It can easily be observed that the meaning of the whole compound is also related to the meanings of the component parts.

In conformity with structural types of words described above the following two types of word-formation may be distinguished, word-derivation and word-composition (or compounding). Words created by word-derivation have only one derivational base and one derivational affix, e.g. cleanness (from clean), to overestimate (from to estimate), chairmanship (from chairman), etc. Some derived words have no derivational affixes, because derivation is achieved through conversion, e.g. to paper (from paper), a fall (from to fall), etc. Words created by word-composition have at least two bases, e.g. lamp-shade, ice-cold, looking-glass, daydream, speedometer, etc.

Within the types, further distinction may be made between the ways of forming words. The basic ways of forming words in word-derivatiоn, for instance, are affixation and conversion

AFFIXATION

Affixation is one of the most productive ways of word-building throughout the history of English. It consists in adding an affix or affixes to the stem. Affixation is divided into suffixation and prefixation.

Suffixation is the most common type of affixation. In suffixation, the affix is added to the end of the base. For example, the suffix-ness is added to the adjective fond to produce the noun fondness; the suffix -s is added to the noun car to produce the plural of the noun – cars. In most languages, suffixation is the most widespread form of affixation. In languages such as Turkish and Finnish, it is the only type of affixation.

The main function of suffixes in Modern English is to form one part of speech from another; the secondary function is to change the lexical meaning of the same part of speech. (e.g. “educate” is a verb, “education” is a noun, and “music” is a noun, “musicdom” is also a noun).

There are different classifications of suffixes:

1. Part-of-speech classification. Suffixes derive a certain part of speech, hence one should distinguish noun-forming, adjective-forming, numeral-forming, verb-forming and adverb-forming suffixes.

Noun-forming suffixes:

-age (bondage, breakage, mileage, vicarage); -ance/-ence (assistance, reference); -ant/-ent (disinfectant, student); -dom (kingdom, freedom, officialdom); -ее (employee); -eer (profiteer); -er (writer, type-writer); -ess (actress, lioness); -hood (manhood); -ing (building, meaning, washing); -ion/-sion/-tion/-ation (rebellion, tension, creation, explanation); -ism/-icism (heroism, criticism); -ist (novelist, communist); -ment (government, nourishment); -ness (tenderness); -ship (friendship); -(i)ty (sonority).

Adjective-forming suffixes:

-able/-ible/-uble (unbearable, audible, soluble); -al (formal); -ic (poetic); -ical (ethical); -ant/-ent (repentant, dependent); -ary (revolutionary); -ate/-ete (accurate, complete); -ed/-d (wooded); -ful (delightful); -an/-ian (African, Australian); -ish (Irish, reddish, childish); -ive (active); -less (useless); -like (lifelike); -ly (manly); -ous/-ious (tremendous, curious); -some (tiresome); -y (cloudy, dressy).

Numeral-forming suffixes:

-fold (twofold); -teen (fourteen); -th (seventh); -ty (sixty).

Verb-forming suffixes:

-ate (facilitate); -er (glimmer); -en (shorten); -fy/-ify (terrify, speechify, solidify); -ise/-ize (equalise); -ish (establish).

Adverb-forming suffixes:

– ly (coldly); -ward/-wards (upward, northwards); -wise (likewise).

2. Origin of suffixes. From the etymological point of view suffixes are subdivided into two main classes: native borrowed. By native suffixes we shall mean those that existed in English in the Old English period or were formed from Old English words: -dom, -hood, -lock, -ful, -less, -like, -ship, -some, -teen, -th, -ward, -wise, -y, e. g. childhood, boyhood, freedom, wisdom, etc. The suffixes of foreign origin are classified according to their source into Latin (-able/-ible, -ant/-ent), French (-age, -ance/-ence, -ancy/-ency, -ard, -ate, -sy), Greek (-ist, -ism, -ite), etc. It should be noted that many of the borrowed suffixes are international and occur not only in English but in several other European languages as well.

3. Productivity. Suffixes are classified into productive (e.g. -er, -y, -ize, -ness, -less, etc.) and non-productive (e.g. -th, -hood, -en. -ous, etc.).

4. Semantic classification. Certain suffixes can charge stems with emotional force. They may be derogatory: -ard (drunkard), -ling (underling); -ster (gangster), -ton (simpleton). These seem to be more numerous in English than the suffixes of endearment. Emotionally coloured diminutive suffixes rendering also endearment differ from the derogatory suffixes. They are used to name not only persons but things as well. This point may be illustrated by the suffix -y/-ie/-ey (auntie, cabbie (cabman), daddy), but also: hanky (handkerchief), nightie (night-gown). Other suffixes that express smallness are -kin/-kins (mannikin); -let (booklet); -ock (hillock); -ette (kitchenette).

Prefixation is the formation of words by means of adding a prefix to the stem. In English it is characteristic for forming verbs. Prefixes can be classified according to the nature of words in which they are used: prefixes used in notional words and prefixes used in functional words. Prefixes used in notional words are proper prefixes which are bound morphemes, e.g. un-(unhappy). Prefixes used in functional words are semi-bound morphemes because they are met in the language as words, e.g. over- (overhead).

Prefixes can be classified according to different principles:

1. Semantic classification: a) prefixes of negative meaning, such as : in- (invaluable), non- (nonformals), un- (unfree), etc, b) prefixes denoting repetition or reversal actions, such as: de- (decolonize), re- (revegetation), dis- (disconnect), c) prefixes denoting time, space, degree relations, such as : inter- (interplanetary) , hyper- (hypertension), ex- (ex-student), pre- (pre-election), over- (overdrugging), etc.

2. Origin of prefixes: a) native (Germanic), such as: un-, over-, under-, etc. b) Romanic, such as: in-, de-, ex-, re-, etc. c) Greek, such as: sym-, hyper-, etc.

Exercise 1. Form words with the following affixes. State to what part of speech they belong.

un-, over-, under-,-tion, -ment, -ance, -th, -hood, -en, -ous, -er, re-, -y, -ize, -ness, -less, anti-, co-, ex-, extra-, ultra-, -ing, -ion, -pre-, sub-, mis-, -ful, -able, -ish, -like, -ly, -dom, -ee, -ism, -ist, -ed, -ate.

Exercise 2. Pick out the words with the affixes, analyse them.

1. Between 7.30 and 8.30 every morning except Sundays, Johnnie Butt made the round of the village of Chipping Cleghorn on his bicycle, whistling vociferously through his teeth. 2. He alights at each house or cottage to shove though the letter box such morning papers as had been ordered by the occupants of the house in question from Mr Totman, stationer, of the High Street. 3. When you turn on your wireless in the evening it will be the Idylls of the King you will hear and not interminable Trollope. 4. But was there a note of wariness – or did he imagine it? 5. Rather stupid really, you know, but full of cupidity and probably extremely credulous. 6. “No-no, I suppose not”, said Mrs Bantry doubtfully. 7. “I did not dream it”, said Mrs Bantry firmly. 8. So well ordered was her prim spinster’s life that unforeseen telephone calls were a source of vivid. 8. Her herbaceous borders are simply marvelous – they make me green with envy. 9. She went on hopefully. 10. Worn with pain, and weak from the prolonged hardship which I had undergone I was removed, with a great train of wounded sufferers, to the base hospital at Peshavan. 11. I was dispatched, accordingly, in the troopship “Orontes”, and landed a month later on Portsmouth jelly, with my health irretrievably ruined, but with permission from a paternal government to spend the next nine months in attempting to improve it. 12. There I stayed for some time at a private hotel in the Strand, leading a comfortless, meaningless existence, and spending such money as I had, considerably more freely than I ought. 13. I should prefer a man of studious and quiet habits. 14. I am not strong enough yet to stand much noise or excitement. 15. That’s why I want you to come and help me to find out who did it and unravel the mystery and all that. 16. Colonel Bantry was shooed back into the dining-room rather like a recalcitrant hen. 17. Slack he had never much taken to – an energetic man who belied his name and who accompanied his bustling manner with a good deal of disregard for the feelings of anyone he did not consider important. 18. She stopped, and made a slight insignificant gesture of helplessness. 19. This statement received more incredulity than any other. 20. “You wish, Aunt Letty, to disguise your intelligent anticipation?” – Patrick reassure her. 22. The only incongruous note was a small silver vase with dead violets in it on the table. 23. Phillipa Haymes was too wooden for Rosalind, her fairness and her impassivity were intensely English. 24. But that may be just prejudice on my part. 25. Worn with pain, and weak from the prolonged hardship which I had undergone I was removed, with a great train of wounded sufferers, to the base hospital at Peshavan. 26.I was dispatched, accordingly, in the troopship “Orontes”, and landed a month later on Portsmouth jelly, with my health irretrievably ruined, but with permission from a paternal government to spend the next nine months in attempting to improve it. 27. It is not easy to express the inexpressible, he answered with laugh. 28. “You are to be congratulated”, – I remarked. 29. Sometimes he spent his days at the laboratory, sometimes in the dissecting-rooms, and occasionally in long walks. 30. He was extraordinarily generous, spontaneous, rather Quixotish.

Exercise 3. Translate the following words into Ukrainian paying attention to the difference in their meaning.

Behave – misbehave, calculate – miscalculate, watery – waterish, inform – misinform, loving – lovely – lovable, lead – mislead, delightful – delighted, pronounce – mispronounce, pleasant – pleased, agree – disagree, appear – disappear, appoint – disappoint, colourful – coloured, tasty – tasteful, shortened – shortish, starry – starred, bored – boring.

Exercise 4. Compare the meanings added by the suffixes to the same stems.

centre: central, centralism, centralize, centralization, centring, centric, centrical, centricity, centricalness, centrically, centrally;

beauty: beautiful, beautifully, beautify, beautician, beauteous, beauteously, beauteousness, beautification, beautifier;

man: manful, manfully, manfulness, mandom, manhood, manlike, manly, mannish, mannishness, manned, manliness;

woman: womanly, womanfully, womanize, womanhood, womanish, womanishly, womanishness, womanlike, womanliness;

absorb: absorbed, absorbedly, absorbable, absorbency, absorbent, absorption, absorptive, absorptiveness, absorptivity, absorbingly, absorbing.

CONVERSION

Conversion is one of the most productive ways of modern English word-building. Conversion is sometimes referred to as an affixless way of word-building or zero-affixation. It consists in making a new word from some existing word by changing the category of a part of speech. The new word has a meaning which differs from that of the original one though it can more or less be easily associated with it. It has also a new paradigm peculiar to its new category as a part of speech.

Nurse, n	Nurse, v
-s, plural	-s, 3^rd person singular
-‘s, possessive case	-ed, past simple, past participle
-s’, possessive case, plural	-ing, present participle, gerund

As soon as a word has crossed the category borderline, the new word automatically acquires all the properties of the new category, so that if it has entered the verb category, it is used in all tense forms, it also develops the forms of the participle and the gerund. Modern English dictionaries present converted pairs as homonyms, as two words.

Not every case of noun and verb (or verb and adjective, or adjective and noun) is the result of conversion. There are numerous pairs of words, as drink – to drink, love – to love, work – to work which do not occur to conversion but coincide as a result of certain historical processes (dropping of ending, simplification of stems, etc.). The first cases of conversion, which were registered in the 14^th c, imitated such pairs as love-to love, for they were numerous in the vocabulary and were subconsciously accepted by native speakers as one of the typical language patterns.

The two categories of parts of speech affected by conversion are nouns and verbs: A hand – to hand, a face - to face. Nouns are frequently made of verbs, e.g. He has still plenty of go at his age (go-energy). Verbs can also be made from adjectives: to yellow, to green, to pale, to cool, etc.

The meanings of the converted word and of the word from which it was made can be associated. These associations can be classified:

1. The noun is the name of a tool, the verb denotes an action performed by this tool. To nail, to hammer, to pin, to comb, to pencil, to brush.

2. The noun is the name of an animal, the verb denotes an action or aspect of behavior, considered typical of this animal. To dog, to rat, to wolf, to monkey.

3. The noun – the name of a part of the human body, the verb – an action performed by it: to shoulder, to leg, to elbow, to hand.

4. The noun denotes the name of a profession or occupation, the verb – activity typical of it: to nurse, to cook, to maid.

5. The noun – the name of a place and the verb – the process of occupying the place or putting smth. or smb. in it: to room, to place, to cage.

6. The noun – the name of a container, verb –act of putting smth. within the container. To pocket, to can, to bottle.

7. The noun – the name of a meal, verb – the process of taking it. To lunch, to supper.

The suggested groups do not include all the great variety of verbs made from nouns by conversion.

The flexibility of the English vocabulary system makes a word formed by conversion capable of further derivation. For example, to view ‘to watch television’ gives viewable, viewer, viewing.

Conversion may be combined with other word-building processes, such as composition. Attributive phrases like black ball, black list, pin point, stone wall form the basis of such firmly established verbs as blackball, blacklist, pinpoint, stonewall. The same pattern is much used in nonce-words such as to my-dear, to my-love, to blue-pencil.

Exercise 5. Comment on the examples of converted words in the sentences below. State to what part of speech they belong.

1. If people only made prudent marriages, what a stop to population there would be! 2. She is more of a hindrance than a help. 3. We’ve had to slim down our holiday plans. 4. Mind you,’ he said, ‘I don't want to keep Negroes out of the hero business, but I'm damned it I want them to corner the market.’ 5. Blinded by the steam, he had to fish around for the soap in his bath. 6. The worst of all University snobs are those unfortunates who go to rack and ruin from their desire to ape their betters. 7. I have a good mind to nail down the facts, then hold a press conference of my own and blow the whistle on the CIA. 8. A search of the attic brought some valuable antiques to hand. 9. Your letter is to hand. 10. I paper my room every year. 11. Who will dust all this furniture? 12. We decided to week-end somewhere in the country. 13. Where is the stop here? 14. “If anybody oranges me again tonight, I’ll knock his face off”. 15. Mrs. Carmody backed her car. 16. He has nosed out a perfect place for our camping holiday. 17. There are people from around here who could make a pretty decent guess. 18. Instead of putting your dime right in, you get a dial tone and make your call. 19. He reached for her again and Ollie Weeks said sharply: “Bud! Cool it! 20. His achievements pale into insignificance by the side of her victory. 21. Ollie agreed, and dropped an empty into the beer cooler. 22. He bears the rough well. 23. The platforms swarmed with office workers, and Dave had to shoulder his way through the crowd. 24. Down the road, in twos and threes, more people were gathering in for the day of marketing. 25. My thoughts have been much occupied with the ups and downs, the fortunes and misfortunes of married life.

COMPOUNDING (COMPOSITION)

Word-composition is another type of word-building. That is when new words are produced by combining two or more stems. This type of word-building is one of the three most productive types in Modern English; the other two are conversion and affixation.

Composition is the type of word building in which new words are produced by combining two or more stems. There are at least 2 aspects of composition that present special interest. The first is the structural aspect. 3 types of compounds are distinguished here. Compounds are words produced by combining two or more stems which occur in the language as free forms. The classification of compounds according to the structure of their components includes the following groups:

1. Сompounds consisting of simple stems: bookshelf, snowwhite;

2. Compounds where at least one of the components is a derived stem: shoe-maker, chain-smoker;

3. Compounds where at least one of the components is a clipped stem: T-shirt, TV-set;

4. Compounds where at least one of the components is a compound stem: wastepaper-basket, newspaper-ownership.

The classification of compounds according to the means of joining the components together distinguishes between neutral, morphological and syntactic structural types:

1. In neutral (or juxtapositional) compounds the process of compounding is realized without any linking elements, by a mere juxtaposition of two stems, as in blackboard, sunflower, bedroom, shopwindow.

There are three subtypes of neutral compounds, depending on the structure of the constituent stems:

1. Simple neutral compounds consist of simple affixless stems. classroom, scholl-boy.

2. Derivational or derived compounds have affixes in their structure: music-lover, blue-eyed, film-goer.

3. Contracted compounds have a contracted or shortened stem in their structure: TV-set, V-day, H-bag (hand-bag).

Morphological compounds are few in number. This type is non-productive. Here two compounding stems are combined by a linking vowel or consonant: Anglo-Saxon, statesman, craftsman, handiwork.

In syntactic compounds we see segments of speech such as articles, prepositions adverbs: good-for-nothing, mother-in-law, sit-at-home.

Another interesting question is of correlations of the separate meanings of the constituent parts and the actual meaning of the compound. Here we distinguish three groups:

1. Non-idiomatic compounds. Here the meaning can be described as the sum of their constituent parts: dancing-room, bedroom, class-room.

2. Idiomatic compounds. Here one of the components or both has changed its meaning: ablackboard is not necessarily black, football is not a ball but a game, a chatterbox is not a box but a person, and a ladykiller kills no one but is a man who fascinates women.

3. Highly idiomatic compounds whose meaning do not correspond to the separate meanings of their parts. Here the process of deducing the meaning is impossible, we must know the translation of the word: ladybird is not a bird, but an insect, a tallboy is not a boy but a piece of furniture, a bluestocking is a person.

Exercise 6. Find compounds in the following sentences, define their structural type and state to what part of speech they belong.

1. The girl stared at him, dropping a slice of bread-and-butter in her emotions. 2. Then he shows his annoyance if he has not got a fresh handkerchief. 3. Love is only a temporary transient state, which is lost altogether when the man in love turns into a husband. All this is very the same as the spring love-singing with blackbirds. 4. We’ve some plain, blunt things to say and we expect the same kind of answers, not a lot of double-talk. 5. On the dining-room he found a note from his absent-minded wife: “I have gone out...”. 6. If I was a pure do- gooder, my ordinary acts would never be wrong. 7. In the next few days, every time I look at it, the old prayer-book words sprang into my mind. 8. I had planned a special day for Andrew, Jamie and Lisa, and my mother-in-law who was visiting us from England, as she did every day. 9. When they had fallen into a profound sleep, the good-for-nothing rose up, took the stone, came to the door, and, when he wished it to open, it began to creak out: “The guest has stolen the wishing-stone”. 10. It was an experience never-to-be-forgotten; it was a thrill to march in the funeral procession of our then president. 11. There are floor-to-ceiling bookshelves along one wall, pretty porcelain lamps grace two tables, skirted in pale green silk. 12. My father was good-looking, normal, healthy man, and when he was younger he must have sought out female company. 13. In other words, the states in each bloc do not present, in the eyes of the other bloc, that peace-loving character which, according to the Charter, 14 would qualify them for United Nations membership. 14. But he also made the world because he is a music-lover. 15. While staying in the house, I witnessed numerous times how badly she treated her mother-in-law. 16. Sheet metalworkers make, install, and maintain many sheet metal components of wind turbines. 17. Thus, the Father and the Son are here with this life-giving Spirit, who is the consummation of the Triune God and the totality of the Triune God. 18. “Life-or-death cliff-hangers, thrilling cat-and-mouse maneuvers, romance, religion, science, murder, mysticism, architecture, and action. 19. Entirely in its author’s image: direct, unpretentious, chatty, feet-on-the-ground. Sometimes is shockingly so. 20. Hoffman is one of the best pens nowadays following in the bestselling footsteps of Patricia Cornwell, Kathy Reichs and Karin Slaughter.

Exercise 7. Сomment on the meanings of the compounds. Discriminate between idiomatic and non-idiomatic compounds.

1. I’ve been made a laughing-stock. 2. You will find your shorts in the bottom drawer of the tallboy. 3. She was the greatest chatterbox in the group. 4. He mastered the big new-model tractor-trailers without difficulty. 5. A couple of city policemen chatted together by the entrance. They were ill-at-ease with their assignment. 6. He spoke as if he was all by himself, out in the woods, picking johnny-jump-ups... 7. She stopped shouting for a minute, and then the waterworks began. 8. He was coming back for the dress-rehearsal and the first-night. 10. Ted took a look into the leather shopping-bag on the dresser. 11. “Let’s have a nightcap at Benno’s”, he said. 12. Lady Veronica made a bee-line for her daughters to assure them of her maternal love. 13. A nail-biting, can’t-put-it-down read ... tightly constructed and thoroughly gripping. 14. A pulse-quickening, brain-teasing adventure. 15. A heart-racing thriller. 16. A pulse-pounding, edge-of-your-seat thriller... 17. The reader is assaulted by a rich, down-in-the-dirt, up-in-the skies prose full of portents, bold metaphors, great beauty. 18. His best thriller yet ... the action unfolds at an adrenaline-draining pace ... 19. A heart-thumping, stay-up-late novel... wild, unputdownable and outrageous... brilliant. 20. Utterly read-in-one-day, forget-where-you-are-on-the-tube gripping. 21. It’s a one-sit thriller. 22. It is a huge eye-opener, and will make the reader look at cancer in a whole new way. 23. A real back-of-the-neck hair-raiser. 24. Billie Letts has a fresh and engaging voice, and her remarkable heroine, Novalee Nation, leads the reader on a never-to-be-forgotten journey. 25. Chicago lawyer Turow’s first novel is a genuine, classy, four-star suspense novel.

SHORTENING

It should be noted that the understanding of word-formation excludes semantic word-building as well as shortening, sound- and stress-interchange which traditionally are referred, as has been mentioned above, to minor ways of word-formation.

The process of shortening consists in clipping a part of word; as a result we get a new lexical unit. The process оf shortening is not confined only to words; many word-groups also become shortened in the process of communication. Therefore, the term “shortening of words” is to be regarded as conventional, as it involves the shortening of both words and word-groups. Shortening are produced in two different ways: contraction (clipping) and abbreviation (initial shortening). The first is to make a new word from a syllable of the original word. Clipping is shortening or reducing long words. It is very common in English which can be seen on the following examples: information is clipped to info, advertisement to advert or ad, influenza to flu, telephone to phone. The classification of clipping:

1. Final clipping (apocope). The omitting of the final part of the word: doc (doctor), mag (magazine), Nick (Nickolas).

2. Initial clipping (apheresis). The omitting of the fore part of the word. plane (airplane), van (caravan), phone (telephone).

3. Medial clipping (syncope). The omitting of the middle part of the word: fancy (fantasy), specs (spectacles), maths (mathematics).

4. Mixed clipping, where the fore and the final parts of the words are clipped: flu (influenza), tec (detective), fridge (refrigerator).

The second way of shortenings is to make a new word from the initial letters of a word group. Abbreviations are subdivided into five groups:

1. Acronyms which are read in accordance within the reading rules as though they were ordinary words: NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), UNO (United Nations Organization).

2. Alphabetic abbreviations in which letters get their full alphabetic pronunciation and a full stress: USA, BBC, MP. Alphabetic abbreviation are sometimes used for famous people names: G.B.S. (George Bernard Shaw), B.B. (Brigitte Bardot).

3. Compound abbreviations in which the first constituent is a letter and the second part is a complete word: A-bomb (atomic-bomb), L-driver (learner - driver). In compound abbreviation also may be clipped one or both constituents: Interpol (international police).

4. Graphic abbreviations which are used in texts for economy of space. They are pronounced as the corresponding unabbreviated words: Mr., Mrs., m (mile), ltd (limited).

5. Latin abbreviations can be read as separate letters or be substituted by the English equivalents: e.g. (for example), cf. (compare), i.e. (that is).

Abbreviations are often used in Internet communication: AFAIK - As far as I know; AFK - away from keyboard; CU - see you; F2F - face to face (in person); IMO - in my opinion; PM - private message; POV - point of view, etc.

Distinction should be made between shortening of words in written speech and in the sphere of oral intercourse. Shortening of words in written speech results in graphical abbreviations which are, in fact, signs representing words and word-groups of high frequency of occurrence in various spheres of human activity.

Shortening doesn’t change the meaning. It produces words belonging to the same part of speech as original words. Mostly nouns are affected by shortening. In most cases a shortened word exists in the vocabulary together with the longer word from which it is derived and usually has the same lexical meaning differing only in emotive charge and stylistic reference.

In the process of communication words and word-groups can be shortened. The causes of shortening can be linguistic and extra-linguistic. By extra-linguistic causes changes in the life of people are meant. In Modern English many new abbreviations, acronyms, initials, blends are formed because the tempo of life is increasing and it becomes necessary to give more and more information in the shortest possible time.

Exercise 8. Comment on the formation of the clipped and abbreviated words.

1. My job where my boss got on my computer and fiddled with my DOS execute commands. 2. Walter Winterbottom had spent the last few years trying to warn the FA’s bigwigs that his team was falling behind. 3. Martin Peters became one of Ramsey’s most valuable mids. 4. What we’ll do is send Marla’s mom some choco and probably some fruitcakes. 5. It was a letter from my new g.f. from Ohio – just a simple letter. 6. The Intercontinental Cup was jointly organised with CONMEBOL between the Champions League and the Copa Libertadores winners. 7. Because everyone who intends to become a lawyer is usually required by a governing body such a governmental bar licensing agency to pass a bar exam. 8. She left Brindisi on Saturday at five p.m., so you can wait patiently. 9. Mr. Fogg had to furl his sails and use more steam-power, so as not to get out of his course. 10. He could easily decide whether England is going to win or not, but missed this chance – despite the fact that goalie could make nothing, ball kept his way right to a cross. 11. Killing Floor is the first book in the internationally popular series about Jack Reacher, hero of the new blockbuster movie starring Tom Cruise. 12. It presents Reacher for the first time, as the tough ex-military cop of no fixed abode: a righter of wrongs, the perfect action hero. 13. Jack Reacher jumps off a bus and walks fourteen miles down a country road into Margrave, Georgia. 14. Stevenson’s voice came over the intercom asking for Roscoe. 15. They emerged from St. Michael’s chester Square. 16. The stereo was still there, the TV was still there. 17. Her shoes were silly T-straps with four-inch heels. 18. Of Nicholas and Cara to the Zoo and the Costume Museum and suitable films by their grandmother. 19. I wrote to the MP about it, said who was going to get the place cleaned up, he said it was the responsibility of the County Council. 20. Marked with a manufacturer’s logo. 21. Then they’re trucking it north and west, up to the big cities, LA, Chicago, Detroit. 22. Next to the television was a stereo. 23. He could easily decide whether ham is going to win or not, but missed this chance – despite the fact that goalkeeper could make nothing, ball kept his way right to a cross! 24. Martin Peters became one of Ramsey’s most valuable players when Scholes caught flu.

REDUPLICATION

Reduplication is a morphological process that involves the repetition of all or part of a word. These parts of words are referred to as roots or stems. In full reduplication, the entire word is repeated without any phonetic changes, for example, ‘So I would say that he and Mr DeLay are friends, but not friends-friends, if you will’. This group of reduplicated compounds are called reduplicative compounds proper. Their constituents are identical in their form.

The second type is called gradational or partial reduplication. Only a segment is duplicated in partial reduplication. Slang words such as super-duper and razzle-dazzle express extra meaning using partial reduplication. This is identified as partial because the -s from super becomes a -d, and the -r from razzle also becomes a -d, meaning that the whole segment is not copied. The segment that is duplicated may occur at either the beginning or the end of the word. Also we can come across a variation of the root vowel or consonant, e.g. This shilly-shallying with the question is absurd. This type of word building is greatly facilitated in modern English by the vast number of monosyllables: chit-chat, riff-raff, etc. Also one should distinguish rhyme compounds. Here the constituents are joined to rhyme, e.g. Ronaldinho beats holie-goalie and ball falls into the net behind Poland’s devastated goalkeeper. Morphological processes change the stem of a word in order to adjust its meaning for communicative purposes. Stylistically speaking, most words made by reduplication represent informal groups such as slang and colloquialisms. Some languages utilize the process extensively, some moderately, and some not at all.

Exercise 8. Pick out reduplicative compounds, comment on their constituent parts.

1. ‘Uh, no worries. I can handle the Oz Full Monty. I mean, not handle-candle, like ‘hands to flesh’ handle’. 2. The first rule of project Mayhem: Don’t ask questions about Project Mayhem. ‘Yeah-Yeah’, he nodded. 3. No, I mean... Do you like him or do you like-him-like-him? 4. Well, between witch work and work-work, I just don't have any time any more. 5. Is he like a businessman-businessman? Or is this like when I used to sell lemonade and call myself a businessman? 6. Although Luke did this awesome dive off the high board, which wasn’t really a dive-dive, it was more like Will Farrell falling out of a plane. 7. There’s a guy who collects fans. These are not sports fans but fans-fans. 8. “I didn’t mean go-somewhere-go-somewhere”, I said, remembering that he surely thought I made a mistake, and after all, last time the two of us had been alone we’d been all over each other. 9. Ronaldinho’s goal-goal falls into the net behind England’s devastated goalkeeper. 10. She either died or divorced you, so it was a fifty-fifty guess. 11. We kept chasing him, all the way to the end of the block, then into a sort of never-never land where there were a lot of railroad tracks. 12. Mr. Sloane murmured something close to her ear. 13. Burke launched into British social chitchat. 13. He didn’t like me calling him ‘sir’ – we were supposed to be buddy-buddies. 14. The other chair was occupied by a lovely creature, a really tip-top Ambrose McEvoy. 15. Already his name was whispered in connection with the All England ping-pong championship.

SOUND- AND STRESS- INTERCHANGE

Both sound- and stress-interchange may be regarded as ways of forming words only diachronically, because in Modern English not a single word can be coined by changing the root-vowel of a word or by shifting the place of the stress. Sound-interchange as well as stress-interchange in fact has turned into a means of distinguishing primarily between words of different parts of speech and as such is rather wide-spread in Modern English, e.g. to sing – song, to live – life, strong – strength, etc. It also distinguishes between different word-forms, e.g. man – men, wife – wives, to know – knew, to leave – left, etc.

Sound-interchange falls into two groups: vowel-interchange and consonant-interchange. By means of vowel-interchange we distinguish different parts of speech, e.g. full – to fill, food – to feed, blood – to bleed, etc. In some cases vowel-interchange is combined with affixation, e.g. long – length, strong – strength, etc. Intransitive verbs and the corresponding transitive ones with a causative meaning also display vowel-interchange, e. g. to rise – to raise, to sit – to set, to lie — to lay, to fall — to fell.

The type of consonant-interchange typical of Modern English is the interchange of a voiceless fricative consonant in a noun and the corresponding voiced consonant in the corresponding verb, e.g. use – to use, mouth – to mouth, house – to house, advice – to advise, etc.

There are some particular cases of consonant-interchange: [k] – [t∫]: to speak – speech, to break – breach; [s] – [d]: defence – to defend; offence – to offend; [s] – [t]: evidence – evident, importance – important, etc. Consonant-interchange may be combined with vowel-interchange, e.g. bath – to bathe, breath – to breathe, life – to live, etc.

Many English verbs of Latin-French origin are distinguished from the corresponding nouns by the position of stress. Here are some well-known examples of such pairs of words: ‘export n – to ex’port v; ‘import n – to im’port v; ‘conduct n – to con’duct v; ‘present n – to pre’sent v; ‘contrast n – to con’trast v; ‘increase n – to in’crease v, etc.

Exercise 9. Give pairs corresponding to the following nouns, verbs and adjectives.

Abide, absent, abstract, accent, advice, attribute, bathe, believe, bite, blood, breathe, breed, broad, calve, choose, clothe, conduct, contest, contrast, deep, devise, excuse, export, feed, fill, foot, frequent, gild, glaze, halve, increase, house, knit, live, loose, lose, practise, present, prove, record, relieve, serve, speak, strike, strong, use, wide, worthy, wreathe.

SOUND IMITATION (ONOMATOPOEIA)

It is the way of word building when imitating different sounds forms a word. Sound-imitation is formation of words made by imitating different kinds of sounds that may be produced by animals, birds, insects and other human beings or sounds that resemble those associated with the object or action to be named or that seem suggestive of its qualities.

It’s interesting that sounds produced by the same kind of animal are frequently represented by quite different sound groups in different languages.

For instance, English dogs bark: bow-wow; English cocks cry cock-a-doodle-doo; ducks quack and frogs croak. It is only English and Russian cats seem capable to mutual understanding when they meet.

Exercise 10. Pick out all sound-imitative words from the sentences given below.

1. My phone buzzed. I picked it up. 2. All about him black metal pots were boiling and bubbling on huge stoves, and kettles were hissing, and pans were sizzling, and strange iron machines were clanking and spluttering. 3. The car moved through the city, its motor humming in the warm afternoon. 4. The carriage was clapping along in Central Park, being whooshed at by passing cars. 5. Passenger liners tooted their basso horns. 6. Clap-clap came through the window. 7. Pons puffed reflectively on his pipe. 8. “Peewit,” said a peewit, very remote. 9. He could hear the cheap clock ticking on her mantelpiece. 10. The German machine-guns were tat-tat-tatting at them, and there was a ceaseless swish of bullets. 11. He tip-toed across the porch and gently opened the screen door, remembering that it screeched when yanked. 12. He said something and she giggled. 13. Should we clap our hands during worship? 14. A man had no business to giggle like that and gesticulate and make grimaces. Mopping and mowing,’ she said under her breath. 15. ‘...United Metal and Mill is nothing to sneeze at.’ ‘Going to be the toughest fight yet,’ Shewchuk said. 16. If we clap after someone is baptized, have we not put the focus on the one baptized instead of God? 17. Becky Thatcher had stopped coming to School. Tom had struggled with his pride a few days, and tried to “whistle her down the wind”, but failed. 18. Voltaire had rashly attacked the whole body of literary critics... This stirred up a hornets' nest and the hornets began to buzz. 19. So, as for Jem Wilson, she could whistle him down the wind. 20. Goldsborough girls were nothing to sneeze at. 21. Who keeps company with the wolf will learn to howl.

BLENDING

Blendings may be defined as formation that combine two words that include the letters or sounds they have in common as a connecting element.

A blend may be defined as a new lexeme built from two parts or two words (or possibly more words) in such a way that the constituent parts are usually easily identifiable, though in some instances, only one of the elements may be identifiable.

Depending upon the prototype phrases with which they can be correlated two types of blends can be distinguished. The first may be termed additive, the second – restrictive. Both involve the sliding together not only of sound but of meaning as well. The first, additive type, is transformable into a phrase consisting of the respective complete stems combined by the conjunction and, e. g. smog < smoke and fog; ‘a mixture of smoke and fog’. The elements may be synonymous, belong to the same semantic field or at least be members of the same lexico-grammatical class of words: French+English > Frenglish. Other examples are: brunch < breakfast and lunch, transceiver < transmitter and receiver, crunch <crush and munch.

The restrictive type is transformable into an attributive phrase where the first element serves as modifier of the second: cine (matographic pano) rama > Cinerama.

BACK-FORMATION

In etymology, back-formation is the process of creating a new lexeme, usually by removing actual or supposed affixes. The resulting neologism is called a back-formation, a term coined by James Murray in 1889. “Back-formation is a word actually formed from, but looking as if it were the base of another word.” Back-formation or reversion, by which we mean inferring of short word from a long one, is a source of short words in the past and an active derivative process at the present time. The examples are: to edit from editor, to beg from beggar, peddle from peddler.

It denotes the derivation of new words by subtracting a real or supposed affix from existing words through misinterpretation of their structure. The earliest examples of this type of word building are the verb to beg that was made from the French borrowing beggar, to burgle from burglar, to cobble from cobbler, to peddle from peddler. In all these cases the verb was made from the noun by subtracting what was mistakenly associated with the English suffix -er. Latest examples of back-formation are to butle from butler, to baby-sit from baby-sitter, to blood-transfuse from blood-transfusing.

Back-formation is different from clipping – back-formation may change the part of speech or the word’s meaning, whereas clipping creates shortened words from longer words, but does not change the part of speech or the meaning of the word. For example, the noun resurrection was borrowed from Latin, and the verb resurrect was then backformed hundreds of years later from it by removing the ion suffix. This segmentation of resurrection into resurrect + ion was possible because English had examples of Latinate words in the form of verb and verb+-ion pairs, such as opine/opinion. These became the pattern for many more such pairs, where a verb derived from a Latin supine stem and a noun ending in ion entered the language together, such as insert/insertion, project/projection, etc.

Back-formation may be similar to the reanalyses of folk etymologies when it rests on an erroneous understanding of the morphology of the longer word. For example, the singular noun asset is a back-formation from the plural assets. However, assets is originally not a plural; it is a loan-word from Anglo-Norman asetz (modern French assez). The -s was reanalyzed as a plural suffix.

The most productive type of back-formation is derivation of verbs from compounds that have either -er or -ing as their last element. Some examples of back-formations from compounds are the verbs beach-comb, house-break, red-bait, tape-record.

Exercise 11. Comment on the origin and structure of the words formed through back-formation and blending.

1. He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled, so I tactfully changed the subject. 2. “Mamma might wake and miss me. What are you going to burgle first?” “You’d better go upstairs”, he said, rather sulkily. 3. Boy! Don’t beg here! Don’t you known this is not allowed here. 4. Who follow up the sales of painting and burgle the houses of those who buy. 5. When Emily and Alice accept their first babysitting job, they must learn how to care for their unusual charge, a bulldog jealous of the new human baby in its household. 6. I want to talk like them, dress like them, handwrite like them, and think like them. 7. Why do you so lazy? I ask you to hard-boil some eggs. 8. The room was to air-condition, I had left the curtains open to the night sky, moonlight cast a silvery sheen over everything, bathed the room in a soft radiance. 9. This paper says how to edit technical documents. 10. Otherwise it was usual for vets to euthanase animals with a lethal injection. 11. Private practitioners may euthanize one or two animals a day at most, and some days none at all. 12. When the next one appeared I slewed out, over-steered, spun the wheel back frantically, dived over the sastruga, then over-steered again. 13. You must become familiar with the parts of the syringe and needle and proficient in handling them. 14. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way. 15. While we’re at it, and to save each other mail, let’s look at the humorous use of couth and kempt, wordplay on uncouth and ill-kempt. 16. Give me twenty minutes, Harry, and we’ll have brunch. 17. The company badly needed radiotrician. 18. Inside his office intercom buzzed and he pressed the talk button.

PHRASAL VERBS

A phrasal verb is a verb followed by a preposition or an adverb; the combination creates a meaning different from the original verb alone, e.g.:

To get = to obtain: I need to get a new battery for my camera.

To get together = to meet: Why don’t we all get together for lunch one day?

Phrasal verbs are part of a large group of verbs called “multi-part” or “multi-word” verbs. The preposition or adverb that follows the verb is sometimes called a particle. Phrasal verbs are an important part of the English language. However, they are mainly used in spoken English and informal texts. They should be avoided in academic writing where it is preferable to use a formal verb such as “to postpone” rather than “to put off”.

Phrasal verbs can be transitive and intransitive. Transitive phrasal verbs always have an object, e.g.: I made up an excuse. (‘Excuse’ is the object of the verb.) Intransitive phrasal verbs do not have an object, e.g.: My car broke down.

We can distinguish separable or inseparable phrasal verbs. We can put the object between the verb and the preposition, when we deal with separable phrasal verbs, e.g. I looked the word up in the dictionary. The object is placed after the preposition in inseparable ones, e.g.: I will look into the matter as soon as possible.

Some transitive phrasal verbs can take an object in both places, compare: I picked up the book. I picked the book up.

However, if the object is a pronoun, it must be placed between the verb and the preposition, e.g.: I picked it up.

Phrasal verbs may be either non-idiomatic or idiomatic. Non-idiomatic phrasal verbs retain their primary local meaning, while in idiomatic phrasal verbs meanings cannot be derived from their constituent parts.

Exercise 12. Set off idiomatic and non-idiomatic phrasal verbs. Give their Ukrainian equivalents

1. How can you account for your absence at the meeting? 2. He was accused of murder. 3. He acted on the tip received from an insider and made a lot of money. 4. These figures don’t add up. 5. They agree about everything. 6. They don’t always agree on the way children should be raised. 7. He applied for the position of tour guide. 8. He arrived at the airport two hours before the flight. 9. Here I rallied, and had already improved so far as to be able to walk about the wards, and even to bask a little upon the verandah, when I was struck down by enteric fever, that curse of our Indian possessions. 10. For month my life was despaired of, and when at last I came to myself and become convalescent, I was so weak and emaciated that a medical board determined that not a day should be lost in sending me back to England. 11. I asked him to lunch with me at the Holborn, and we started off together in a hansom. 12. You mustn’t blame me if you don’t get on with him. 13. She reluctantly decided that to go on was the only thing to be done. 14. “Go on,” she cried. “You’re daft. I can never make you out.” 15. I’m thinking of giving up the shop soon. 16. Elliott called me up one morning. 16. I must be getting along. 17. I peeped out – he was putting on his hat with a hasty and uneasy air. 18. They took their seats in the plane and set off.

PART 4. ETYMOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF MODERN ENGLISH VOCABULARY

The modern English vocabulary falls into two main sets: native words and borrowings. Native words belong to the original English word-stock and are known from the earliest Old English manuscripts. It is customary to subdivide native words into those of the Indo-European stock and those of the common Germanic origin. The former have cognates in the vocabulary of all or most Indo-European languages, whereas the latter have cognates only in Germanic languages. Up to 70% of the English vocabulary are borrowings from various foreign languages.

BORROWINGS

Language contact over time can result in an important source of new words – borrowing. Borrowing is a word or phrase which has been borrowed by one language from another. Partially the words are borrowed because of the historical circumstances which stimulate the borrowing process. Each time two nations come into close contact, certain borrowings are a natural consequence. The nature of the contact may be different. It may be wars, invasions or trade and international cultural and sports relations.

In its 15 century long history recorded in written manuscripts the English language happened to come in long and close contact with several other languages, mainly Latin, French and Old Norse (or Scandinavian). The great influx of borrowings from these sources can be accounted for by a number of historical causes. Due to the great influence of the Roman civilisation Latin was for a long time used in England as the language of learning and religion. Old Norse was the language of the conquerors who were on the same level of social and cultural development and who merged rather easily with the local population in the 9th, 10th and the first half of the 11th century. French (to be more exact its Norman dialect) was the language of the other conquerors who brought with them a lot of new notions of a higher social system – developed feudalism, it was the language of upper classes, of official documents and school instruction from the middle of the 11th century to the end of the 14th century.

In the study of the borrowed element in English the main emphasis is as a rule placed on the Middle English period. Borrowings of later periods became the object of investigation only in recent years. These investigations have shown that the flow of borrowings has been steady and uninterrupted. The greatest number has come from French. They refer to various fields of social-political, scientific and cultural life. A large portion of borrowings (41%) is scientific and technical terms.

The number and character of borrowed words tell us of the relations between the peoples, the level of their culture, etc. It is for this reason that borrowings have often been called the milestones of history. Thus if we go through the lists of borrowings in English and arrange them in groups according to their meaning, we shall be able to obtain much valuable information with regard to England’s contacts with many nations. Some borrowings, however, cannot be explained by the direct influence of certain historical conditions, they do not come along with any new objects or ideas. Such were for instance the words air, place, brave, gay borrowed from French.

The number and character of borrowings do not only depend on the historical conditions, on the nature and length of the contacts, but also on the degree of the genetic and structural proximity of languages concerned. The closer the languages, the deeper and more versatile is the influence. This largely accounts for the well-marked contrast between the French and the Scandinavian influence on the English language. Thus under the influence of the Scandinavian languages, which were closely related to Old English, some classes of words were borrowed that could not have been adopted from non-related or distantly related languages (the pronouns they, their, them, for instance); a number of Scandinavian borrowings were felt as derived from native words (they were of the same root and the connection between them was easily seen), e.g. drop (AS.) – drip (Scand.), true (AS.)-tryst (Scand.); the Scandinavian influence even accelerated to a certain degree the development of the grammatical structure of English.

Borrowings enter the language in two ways: through oral speech (by immediate contact between the peoples) and through written speech (by indirect contact through books, etc.). Oral borrowing took place chiefly in the early periods of history, whereas in recent times written borrowing gained importance. Words borrowed orally (e.g. L. inch, mill, street) are usually short and they undergo considerable changes in the act of adoption. Written borrowings (e.g. Fr. communiqué, belles-lettres, naïveté) preserve their spelling and some peculiarities of their sound-form, their assimilation is a long process.

Though borrowed words undergo changes in the adopting language they preserve some of their former peculiarities for a comparatively long period. This makes it possible to work out some criteria for determining whether the word belongs to the borrowed element.

In some cases the pronunciation of the word (strange sounds, sound combinations, position of stress, etc.), its spelling and the correlation between sounds and letters are an indication of the foreign origin of the word. This is the case with waltz (G.), psychology (Gr.), soufflé (Fr.), etc. The initial position of the sounds [v], [dз], [з] or of the letters x, j, z is a sure sign that the word has been borrowed, e.g. volcano (It.), vase (Fr.), jungle (Hindi), gesture (L.), giant (OFr.), zeal (L.), zero (Fr.), zinc (G.), etc.

The morphological structure of the word and its grammatical forms may also bear witness to the word being adopted from another language. Thus the suffixes in the words neurosis (Gr.) and violoncello (It.) betray the foreign origin of the words. The same is true of the irregular plural forms papyra (from papyrus, Gr.), pastorali (from pastorale, It.), beaux (from beau, Fr.), bacteria, (from bacterium, L.) and the like.

But some early borrowings have become so thoroughly assimilated that they are unrecognisable without a historical analysis, e.g. chalk, mile (L.), ill, ugly (Scand.), enemy, car (Fr.), etc.

It is essential to analyse the changes that borrowings have undergone in the English language and how they have adapted themselves to its peculiarities.

All the changes that borrowed elements undergo may be divided into two large groups. On the one hand there are changes specific of borrowed words only. These changes aim at adapting words of foreign origin to the norms of the borrowing language, e.g. the consonant combinations [pn], [ps], [pt] in the words pneumatics, psychology, Ptolemy of Greek origin were simplified into [n], [s], [t]. The initial [ks] was changed into [z] (as in Gr. xylophone).

By analogy with the great majority of nouns that form their plural in -s, borrowings, even very recent ones, have assumed this inflection instead of their original plural endings. The forms Soviets, bolsheviks, kolkhozes, sputniks illustrate the process.

When speakers imitate a word from a foreign language and, at least partly, adapt it in sound or grammar to their native language, the process is called borrowing, and the word thus borrowed is called a loanword or borrowing. More than two thirds of the English vocabulary are borrowings. Mostly they are words of Romanic, French, Italian, Spanish origin. Borrowings can be classified according to different criteria: according to the aspect which is borrowed, according to the degree of assimilation, according to the language from which the word was borrowed.

Degree of assimilation depends on the time of the borrowing. The general principle is: the older the borrowing, the more thoroughly it tends to follow normal English habits of accentuation, pronunciation, etc. It is but natural that the majority of early borrowings have acquired full English citizenship and that most English speaking people are astonished on first hearing, that such everyday words as window, chair, dish and so on have not always belonged to their language. Late borrowings often retain their foreign peculiarities.

Exercise 1. Explain the etymology of the words in bold type.

1. His anger poured over me like lava. 2. I finished my chops, leaned back in my chair, and lit a cigarette. 3. He took out a long cigar and placed it in his mouth. 4. The robot looked at him impassively out of its faceted eye. 5. On the tray there was a pot of coffee and two cups. 6. “Here’s Len Minogue, he’ll play a polka for us,” he roared, dragging a little man with an accordion, over to the piano. 7. She was dressed in a heavy silk kimono of authentic manufacture. 8. She went into the kitchen and filled a glass with equal portions of vodka and orange juice. 9. I’ve been taking karate lessons, and I gave him a sample. 10. A horde of mosquitoes gathered immediately in the lee of the car. 11. Then they dined at a tiny seafood restaurant. 12. Everyone had to get used to handling dog teams and building igloo shelters. 13. She had left the flat to buy some sandwiches at a delicatessen near Sloane Square. 14. Myra had potato chips and a dish of tiny pieces of herring and some tomatoes.

Assimilation of the borrowed words

Most of the borrowed words adjust themselves to their new environment and get adapted to the norms of the recipient language. They undergo certain changes which gradually erase their proper features and finally they are assimilated. Borrowed words are adjusted in three main areas of the new language system: the phonetic, the grammatical and the semantic.

The nature of phonetic adaptation is best shown by comparing Norman French borrowings. The Norman borrowings have for a long time been fully adapted to the phonetic system of the English language. Such words as table, plate, courage bear no phonetic traces of their French origin. Some of the later borrowings sound surprisingly French: matinee, ballet, cafe. In these cases phonetic adaptation is not completed.

Grammatical adaptation consists in a complete change of the former paradigm of the borrowed word. Yet, this is also a lasting process. For example, words phenomenon (pl. phenomena), criterion (pl. criteria) are not fully adopted. Other borrowings have two plural forms – the native and the foreign, e.g. vacuum (L.) – vacua, vacuums, virtuoso (It.) – virtuosi, virtuosos.

By semantic adaptation is meant adjustment to the system of meanings of the vocabulary. When a word is taken over into another language, its semantic structure as a rule undergoes great changes. Polysemantic words are usually adopted only in one or two of their meanings. Thus the word timbre that had a number of meanings in French was borrowed into English as a musical term only. The words cargo and cask, highly polysemantic in Spanish, were adopted only in one of their meanings – ‘the goods carried in a ship’, ‘a barrel for holding liquids’ respectively.

In the process of its historical development a borrowing sometimes acquired new meanings that were not to be found in its former semantic structure. For instance, the verb move in Modern English has developed the meanings of ‘propose’, ‘change one’s flat’, ‘mix with people’ and others that the French mouvoir does not possess. As a rule the development of new meanings takes place 50 – 100 years after the word is borrowed.

The semantic structure of borrowings changes in other ways as well. Some meanings become more general, others more specialised, etc. For instance, the word umbrella, borrowed in the meaning of a ’sunshade’ or ‘parasol’ (from It. ombrella <ombra – ’shade^’) came to denote similar protection from the rain as well.

Loan words or borrowed words according to the degree of assimilation fall into three groups:

а) completely assimilated loan words,

b) partially assimilated loan words,

c) unassimilated loan words or barbarisms.

Completely assimilated borrowings are found in all layers of older borrowings. They are also called denizens. They follow all morphological, phonetic and orthographic standards e.g. husband, table, street, take. Being very frequent and stylistically neutral, they may occur as dominant words in synonymic groups. They take an active part in word -formation.

The second group containing partially assimilated borrowings can be subdivided into 4 groups. Such words are also called aliens.

1. Borrowings that are not assimilated semantically, because they denote objects and notions peculiar to the country from which they come: sherbet, toreador

2. Borrowings that are not assimilated grammatically, for example nouns borrowed from Latin and Greek which keep their original plural forms crisis – crises, phenomenon-phenomena.

3. Borrowings that are not assimilated phonetically. For example, some of the French words borrowed after 1650 keep the accent on the final syllable. Some words contain sounds or combinations of sounds that are not standard for the English language: boulevard, foyer.

4. Borrowings that are not assimilated graphically. This group is very large. As a rule such words are from the French origin. In these words the final consonant is not pronounced and they keep a diacritic mark. Some of them have variant spelling: Cliché, naïve.

The third group is unassimilated borrowed words. They are also called barbarisms. They are words from other languages used by English people in conversation or in writing but not assimilated in any way, and for which there are corresponding English equivalents: e.g. coup d’etat [kudei’ta:] – державний переворот, eureka, persona grata, etc.

Exercise 2. Classify the borrowings in bold type according to the degree of their assimilation. State from what languages they are borrowed.

1. The walls had been panelled (at cost price) by a good decorator and on them hung engravings of theatrical pictures by Zoffany and de Wilde. 2. That rate literary phenomenon, a Southern novel with no mildew on its magnolia leaves. Funny, happy, and written with unspectacular precision. 3. When Mike Noonan's wife dies unexpectedly, the bestselling author suffers from writer's block. Until he is drawn to his summer home, the beautiful lakeside retreat called Sara Laughs. 4. The pair are the epitome of chic, living a glamorous lifestyle and entertaining friends at their house. 5. Henry VIII's invasion of France has gone badly wrong, and a massive French fleet is preparing to sail across the Channel. 6. In the hot and dusty main street the cars were parked nose to the kerb. 7. The breath of an inquisitive dog blew warm and nervous on her neck; she could feel her skin broiling a little in the heat and hear the small exhausted wa-waa of the expiring waves. 8. Stradlater was a goddamn genius next to Ackley. 9. When its finally gets too much, she can always simply die. 10. This innocent passion for the persons whose photographs appear in the illustrated papers made him seem incredibly naïve, and she looked at him with tender eyes. 11. She’s a dancer. А ballet and all. She used to practice about two hours every day, right in the middle of the hottest weather and all. 12. If she went into the café on her own, she had to give way to any white person who walked in and let them be served first. 13. I left a message on her answering machine. 14. He was a big, hulking Indian clad in approved white-man style, with an Eldorado king’s sombrero on his head. 15. She had bought “Le Temps” and “The Saturday Evening Post” for her mother, and as she drank her citronade she opened the latter at the memoirs of a Russian princess, finding the dim conventions of the nineties realer and nearer than the headlines of the French paper. 16. He still had at fifty-two a very good figure. 17. He kept saying they were too new and bourgeois. 18. It was dark as hell in the foyer, naturally, and naturally I couldn't turn on any lights. 19. “Who are you?” “Battle police,” another officer said. 20. He woke when he heard me in the room and sat up. “Ciao!” –, he said. 21. I arranged with the concierge to make my coffee in the morning. 22. The modest, well-bred, etcetera, English gentleman. 23. “How many corridas you had this year?” Renata asked.