Lecture №4

How English words are made. Word-building.

Words are divided into smaller units which are called morphemes. Morphemes do not occur as free forms but only as constituents (составляющая) of words. All morphemes are subdivided into two large classes: roots (or radicals) and affixes. In their turn, affixes fall into prefixes which precede the root in the structure of the word (mis-pronounce, re-read, un-well) and suffixes which follow the root (teach-er, dict-ate, cur-able).

Words which consist of a root and an affix or several affixes are called derived words or derivatives (производное слово). They are produced by the process of word-building known as affixation or derivation (деривация, словопроизводство). Derived words are extremely numerous in the English vocabulary.

The so-called root word which has only a root morpheme in its structure is competing with derived words. This type is widely represented by a great number of words belonging to the original English stock or to earlier borrowings (house, room, book, work, port, street, table), and, in Modern English, has been enlarged by the type of word-building called conversion (to hand, v. formed from the noun hand; to can, v. from the noun can).

Another wide-spread word-structure is a compound word consisting of two or more stems (stem is a part of word consisting of root and affix; in English words stem and root often coincide) (dining-room, mother-in-law, bluebell). Words of this structural type are produced by the word-building process called composition (словосложение).

Words like flu, lab, pram (детская коляска) are called shortenings, contractions or curtailed words and are produced by the way of word-building called shortening (contraction - сокращение).

The four types (root words, derived words, compounds (сложное слово), shortenings) represent the main structural types of Modern English words, and conversion, derivation and composition the most productive ways of word-building.

Affixation

The process of affixation consists in creating a new word by adding an affix or several affixes to some root morpheme. The role of the affix in this procedure is very important and therefore it is necessary to consider certain facts about the main types of affixes.

From the etymological point of view affixes can be classified into the same two large groups as words: native and borrowed.

Some Native Suffixes

Noun-forming	-er	Worker, miner, teacher, painter
	-ness	Coldness, loveliness, loneliness
	-dom	Freedom, wisdom, kingdom
	-hood	Childhood, manhood, motherhood
	-ship	Friendship, mastership, companionship
	- th	Length, health, truth
	-ing	Feeling, meaning, singing, reading
Adjective-forming	-ful	Careful, joyful, wonderful, skilful
	-less	Careless, cloudless, senseless
	-y	Cozy, tidy, merry, snowy, showy
	-ish	English, Spanish, reddish, childish
	-ly	Lonely, lovely, ugly, likely
	-en	Wooden, woolen, silken, golden
	-some	Handsome, quarrelsome, tiresome
Verb-forming	-en	Widen, redden, darken, sadden
Adverb-forming	-ly	Warmly, hardly, simply, carefully, coldly

Affixes can be also classified into productive and non-productive types. Productive affixes are affixes which take part in deriving new words in this peculiar period of language development. The best way to identify productive affixes is to look for them among neologisms which are usually formed on the level of living speech and reflect the most productive and progressive patterns in word-building.

Some Productive Affixes

Noun-forming suffixes	-er, - ing, -ness, -ism (materialism), -ist (impressionist), -ance
Adjective-forming suffixes	-y, - ish, - ed (learned), -able, -less
Adverb-forming suffix	-ly
Verb-forming suffixes	-ize/ise (realize), -ate
Prefixes	un- (unhappy), re- (reconstruct), dis- (disappoint)

Some Non-Productive Affixes

Noun-forming suffixes	-th, -hood
Adjective-forming suffixes	-ly, -some, -en, -ous
Verb-forming suffix	-en

Semantics of Affixes

The morpheme, and therefore affix, which is a type of morpheme, is generally defined as the smallest indivisible component of the word possessing its own meaning. Meanings of affixes are specific and considerably differ from those of root morphemes. Affixes have widely generalized meanings and refer to the concept conveyed/carried by the whole word to a certain category, which is vast (обширный, громадный) and all-embracing (всеобъемлющий).

So, the noun-forming suffix -er could be defined as designating persons from the object of their occupation or labour (painter – the one who paints) or from their place of origin or abode (местожительство) (southerner – the one living in the South).

The meaning of a derived word is always a sum of the meanings of its morphemes: un/eat/able = “not fit to eat” where not stands for un- and fit for -able. There are numerous derived words whose meanings can be easily deduced from the meanings of their constituent parts. But the constituent morphemes within derivatives do not always preserve their current meanings and are open to complicated semantic shifts.