Gramley, Stephan; P?tzold, Kurt-Michael. A Survey of Modern English

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have been linked to hard words. One of them is called folk etymology, in which the

foreign form is changed to resemble English words or morphemes, as in crayﬁsh for

crevisse or causeway for French chaussée.

Another way of dealing with hard words is to shorten them and make them into mono-

syllables, which are a characteristic feature of the English vocabulary: the most frequent

200 words in English consist overwhelmingly of one syllable; there are a few two-syllable

ones (40 in AmE, 24 in BrE), and a handful of trisyllabic forms (3 in AmE, 2 in BrE),

while only AmE has a single four-syllable item, the word American itself. Examples are

condo < condominium, pram < perambulator, pro < professional, and tec < detective.

These examples are exclusive to English while other clippings are shared with some

European languages which also have, for example, bus < omnibus. It is not unlikely that

some zero-derived forms, especially when they consist of one syllable, can also be

explained as a means of avoiding overly formal Latinisms, e.g. Petrarch’s climb in 1353

of Mount Ventoux, where climb is used instead of ascent.

Again, rather than employing polysyllabic Latinisms, English goes for the native form

but adds native elements to create new meanings. This has resulted in multi-word verbs,

or phrasal verbs, and the nouns derived from them, such as A war would clearly set back

the process of reform and the breakdown in talks represents a serious setback in the peace

process. Indeed, so strong is the pull of these phrasal formations that some simple verbs

have formed new phrasal counterparts, often apparently without much of a meaning differ-

ence, e.g. They met up again for a glass of wine in the hotel bar. Another aspect of this

preference, and also perhaps sometimes the result of the avoidance of hard words, are

lexicalized phrases such as do one’s hair, put someone on hold (= make them wait on

the phone), do sums, have a think, give something a try and give someone a ring (on the

phone). The last three examples show that English sometimes prefers these phrases even

where there is a synonymous simple verb (think, try, ring).

There is, moreover, the use of proper names for concrete nouns (eponyms, toponyms),

china (rather than porcelain), Kleenex (instead of tissue or paper handkerchief ), magnet,

stetson or bowie knife, all eponyms. A classic example is Hoover instead of vacuum

cleaner, but this usage is restricted mainly to the UK, while AmE uses the shortened form

vacuum. Examples of toponyms are cashmere, champagne, damask, denim (‘of Nîmes’

in France, and jeans (< Genoa).

A ﬁnal note on hard words: they are often without the root word in English or other

words that are derived from the same root (word family) that would deﬁne at least some

of their meaning features. As a result, they have been freer to develop than their coun-

terparts in other European languages where word families have often been preserved more

completely. The meanings of such common European words as actually, antic, mundane,

pathetic, premises and sensible differ famously between English and continental European

languages (these words are called false friends).

2.4.3 Present day loans

It would seem that most new loan words nowadays refer to new things for which the

foreign term has been taken over (so called cultural borrowings), while other factors are

of minor importance today. Loan words were imported in the past because the terms

arrived with new imports (e.g. Scandinavian ski, Russian vodka), or because of the

32 ENGLISH AS A LINGUISTIC SYSTEM

tendency to complete word families (the Scandinavian verb die complemented the Old

English adjective dead and the noun death). Borrowing also occurred, of course, out of

sheer laziness or love of a new term (which may have sounded better, more learned

or more fashionable). In more recent times, English has increased its range of donor

languages, the main contributors being French, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek,

German, African, Yiddish, Russian and Chinese. The share of Indo-European loans has

dropped in comparison with earlier times. The prominence of the Asian and African

languages is qualitatively new. Often, loans are changed in form, and particularly in

spelling. Finally, only the three major open word classes are represented, with nouns

dominating massively over the few adjectives and even fewer verbs (for more detail see

Cannon 1987).

2.5 NEW WORDS

While great numbers of foreign words have been taken into English from other languages,

even more are formed by productive word formation processes from items that are already

in the language. The ﬁrst full length study of neologisms (Cannon 1987) presents the

results of detailed investigations into 13,683 new items while Ayto 1999 affords decade-

by-decade insights into what were the most important developments in the twentieth

century. While the typical lexical growth areas of the 1980s were the media, computers,

ﬁnance, money, environment, political correctness, youth culture and music, the 1990s

saw signiﬁcant lexical expansion in the areas of politics, the media and the Internet. In

the ﬁrst edition of this book we sketched some of the new environmental lexis; in this

edition we give a brief description of developments in the media and the Internet.

The digital revolution has progressed far beyond the PC (personal computer) and given

us the digital compact disk (CD) as well as the digital video disk (DVD). Information in

all walks of life is digitized (= put into digital form) and high-tech(nology) industries

have produced such things as smart bombs and weapons (that are ﬁred from aircraft and

guided by a computer), smart buses (equipped with all sorts of electronic devices to

improve service and security) that can use intelligent highways (that monitor trafﬁc ﬂow

and help drivers to avoid bottlenecks) and smart cards that will allow people to load their

mobile/cell phones (or mobiles/cellulars) with electronic cash (also e-cash). There are

concerns that while the West gets wired (= hooked up to the Internet), the poor countries

of this world are in danger of falling ever further behind – this is the so-called digital

divide. But as the cost of ICT (= information and communication technology) falls, poor

countries stand a good chance of catching up.

As the telecommunications market has opened up with private competition challenging

the old national monopoly carriers, the dream of merging telephones with computers and

the Internet seems to be growing nearer. This has usually resulted in a lowering of

costs and has led to the setting up of call centres which sell goods via the phone (tele-

marketing, telesales). The major growth sector in telecommunications is however that of

mobile telephony. In the not too distant past there were only ﬁxed or landline telephones,

which allowed people only to talk to each other while holding a receiver in their hand,

while the main part of a mobile phone is a handset. So common are mobiles now in many

countries that legislators have banned the use of hand-held phones while driving. To make

mobiles (cell[ular] phones or simply cells in the US) indispensable to customers, their

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function is being vastly extended: Soon smart new phones will allow people also to check

their e-mail, consult the Internet, shop (there is talk of m-commerce = mobile commerce),

plan their schedules (up to now the job of an electronic organizer or personal digital

assistant (PDA)), manage their bank accounts and load their phones with electronic cash

(and thus make ATMs or cash machines superﬂuous), and send text messages or text them.

To save time and money, the digerati (people who understand computers and high tech)

use various emoticons (graphic symbols that are added at the end of a message and

convey emotions), such as a smile [☺] (called a smiley). The same function is served by

a great number of new abbreviations used in e-mail as well as in SMS (short messaging

system): AFAIK = as far as I know; GIGO = garbage (= invalid data) in, garbage out;

ROTFL = rolling on the ﬂoor (laughing).

The Internet, informally referred to as the Net or the Web (short for World Wide Web)

has changed the way we live and learn, do business and keep informed. To make use of

it, you need to sign up to an access provider (or ISP = Internet Service Provider) that

will link (wire) your computer to the Net for a fee, and you also need specialized soft-

ware (a browser) to view the billions of web pages. To save time and frustration, many

people use search engines or meta-engines that allow classiﬁed searches by ﬁeld of

interest and come up with lists of web pages. More and more portals are set up that serve

as gateways to other sites. Modern browsers are more than just HTML (= Hypertext

markup language, used to produce pages that can be put on the Net) viewers; they are

multimedia tools in their own right: they can play music and videos, allow you to handle

e-mail, make safe connections to e-commerce (= electronic commerce) sites, download

(= transfer) information from the Web onto your own computer and much more.

Two common elements used to produce new words related to the Internet are {cyber-}

and {e-}: cyber- (cybercafé = a cafe that offers its customers computers with Internet

access; cyberfraud; cyberland; cyberterrorist = a criminal who uses the Internet to do

damage to computer systems; cyberwidow = the wife of a man who spends a lot of time

with his computer rather than his wife); e-, short for electronic, which is almost univer-

sally combinable, as in: e-hub (a central site for a particular ﬁeld); e-cash; e-currency

(money that can be used only on the Internet); e-money; e-signature (a code that identi-

ﬁes the author of a document); e-ticket; e-business; e-comm(erce); e-trade; e-tailer

(< electronic retailer); e-ﬁt (a computer-generated picture of a suspect); e-book (that is

not printed but can be read on a computer); e-publishing; and e-zine (< electronic maga-

zine, which can be read on the Internet).

This fabulous new medium can also be a nuisance and is certainly open to abuse.

Screenagers (< screen and teenagers) spend too much time with their computers; vain

people go in for ego-surﬁng (checking how often their name or company is mentioned

on the Web). More serious are hackers and hacking; bugs (see also debug = remove

mistakes from a computer program); spyware (software concealed in other programs that

reports back to its programmers how they are used); and all sorts of viruses (software

that causes damage to computers). To combat these problems, one needs cybercops and

ﬁrewalls (that control access between the public Internet and private LANs = local area

networks). The Internet has of course various sites where you can ﬁnd out more about

Internet language, such as www.netlingo.com, a site that is regularly updated.

34 ENGLISH AS A LINGUISTIC SYSTEM

2.6 EUPHEMISMS AND POLITICALLY CORRECT

LANGUAGE

Euphemisms Euphemisms are the result, not of changes in the real world, but of

changes in the conscience of a society in areas where it feels guilt or is afraid to talk

about a taboo subject. These areas have traditionally been the human body, death, sex,

violence and money. But other ﬁelds are also involved – for example prisons, which have

become correctional centres or rehabilitative correctional facilities, or menial jobs, so

that servants can be referred to as domestic engineers, and refuse/garbage collectors as

disposal operatives (BrE) or sanitation engineers (AmE). These euphemisms soon lose

their force and new ones have to be created that are (as yet) free of the guilty or embar-

rassing association, and in this way euphemisms increase the word stock of English. Not

only are euphemisms the cause of increased lexical turnover, but they can also cause the

loss of a lexical unit. A recent case is that of gay, both noun and adjective, which is

currently used almost exclusively in the sense of ‘homosexual’ and has almost completely

lost its older sense of happy.

PC language While euphemisms are universal, politically correct (PC) language

(especially non-sexist; see 9.1) is employed to different degrees in English speaking coun-

tries. It was ﬁrst developed, and is most regularly and frequently used, in the United

States, particularly in ofﬁcial documents while Britain and other nations are less keen

to right past wrongs in the language they use. A well known case is the terminology for

people ‘of African heritage’ in the US. Some prefer to be called African-American, a

word which has (partially) replaced Afro-American, which (partially) replaced the term

Black, which (partially) replaced Negros, which in turn largely replaced Coloured, which

replaced earlier Black. For people with disabilities, new phrasal adjectives like hearing-

impaired, mentally/physically challenged and visually impaired/challenged have been

coined, which are, however, also used to make fun of PC language, e.g. residentially chal-

lenged (= homeless), vertically challenged (= short) or ﬁnancially challenged (= poor).

2.7 WORD FORMATION

Word formation processes account for almost 80 per cent of the new lexical items in

Cannon’s material (Cannon 1987: 279), as compared with new meanings (14.4 per cent)

and borrowings (7.5 per cent). In this section we will look at the most productive word

formation processes only, using the two operations of deletion and combination as the

basis of the present treatment (see Algeo 1978).

Cannon has found that composite forms, which consist of derivations and compounds,

take the lion’s share with 54.9 per cent, followed by shifts (19.6 per cent) and shorten-

ings (18 per cent), a ranking conﬁrmed by Algeo 1998. Compounds (4,040, of which

3,591 are nouns) are the oldest category, and while they are still the largest class overall,

as they have been throughout the history of the English language, Cannon thinks that

‘shortenings provide the newest and perhaps potentially the most productive categories

for the near future’ (ibid.: 246).

Shifts and blends, as well as acronyms and back formations, are processes that few

native speakers are aware of. Not many people will know, for instance, that the verb beg

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is derived from beggar by back formation, or that the verb beggar (as in they had been

beggared by the war) is a shift which comes later in time than the noun, or that smog

combines smoke and fog. Speaking synchronically, we would analyse the beg–beggar

relationship like any other pair such as lie–liar or bake–baker and assume that the noun

is derived from the verb by adding a sufﬁx. The word form beggar (noun and verb), we

would say, shows multiple class membership, and smog is an unanalysable addition to

the lexicon. On the other hand, composition, derivation and shortening, at least where the

long form is retained, are more obvious as processes even to the lay person who only

knows the contemporary language.

The following discussion, which relies heavily on Cannon’s ﬁndings, does not always

adopt his categories. Furthermore, not all the examples in Cannon’s corpus or, for that

matter, in the following pages will become a permanent part of the English language.

They illustrate, however, certain trends and structural possibilities which are currently

found in the English language.

2.7.1 Shifts

Shifts, like blends, are typical of English and were made possible through the loss of

inﬂectional endings in the Middle English period (1100–1500). Shifts are lexemes that

have been assigned a new word class without change in the form of the underlying lexeme.

Various terms are used to refer to this process: functional shift, conversion, multiple

class membership as well as zero derivation. The last term has been coined in recog-

nition of the fact that this process can be seen as a kind of derivation without an

afﬁx: as humid (adj.) is to humidify (verb) (= make humid), so is wet (adj.) to wet (v.)

(= make wet, as in Wetting a paper towel, I wiped the blood off her arm). The new items

can share some (partial conversion) or all the features of the new word class (complete

conversion). In some cases it will be impossible to decide which word came ﬁrst

but in many others we can look the words up in the OED and compare the dates of the

ﬁrst examples. Also, the source word is usually part of the deﬁnition of the later, derived

item (to party = have a party; or a swallow = the amount that you can drink etc. in one

swallow) but not the other way round (party = a social occasion when people get together

to have a good time; to swallow = make drink go down your throat). Conversion most

often results in nouns, followed by verbs (most of which are shifted from nouns)

and adjectives.

36 ENGLISH AS A LINGUISTIC SYSTEM

Table 2.2 Word formation processes

process combination deletion example

shift – – (it’s a big) if

blend + + infomercial < information

commercial

shortening – + tech(nology)

composite forms + – swipe card, spammer

Nouns: the commute is too long (= way to work); healthy eats (= food); give me

a for-instance (= example); the replacements were a ragtag bunch of

has-beens and never-wases; let’s have an update on the trafﬁc situation

(= most recent information)

Verbs: the package had gone off to be ﬁngerprinted and DNA’d and I was still

being questioned; the audience do intake their breath when the women

kiss; my mom parented six kids in Queens; the cruise missiles were

heading for their targets, the aircraft smart-bombing from the skies;

could you video the show for me at 7 p.m.?

Adjectives: He was a can-do guy; it was a fun party

This is perhaps a good place to mention secondary shifts, in which word forms move

from one subclass to another within the same word class. Thus, press as in the American

press or meet the press is a mass (non-count) noun, but the word can also be used as a

count noun (how many press [= journalists] were there?). Okay has been in adjectival use

for a long time, usually in predicative position (e.g. don’t worry, she’s okay), but it is

now found in attributive position as well, i.e. before a noun, Don’t worry, Mom. I’m

having an OK time.

Two productive processes relate to verbs. First, the formation of new transitive verbs

from intransitive ones where the new verb has a causative meaning: I will drag on this

litigation forever (= make it go on); I grabbed him by the arm and hurried him along

(= got him to hurry up); a shudder chattered my teeth and shivered my shoulders.

Second, a large number of intransitive verbs are formed from transitive ones, with a

passive meaning. The best known example is perhaps the verb sell, as in the book sells

well, which is also found in a more complex structure like the novel has sold a million

copies (= a million copies of the novel have been sold). There are various labels for these

verbs, among them pseudo-intransitives, or notional or adverbial passives (see 5.4.4),

the latter because they often take an adverb of manner (I don’t anger/bruise/frighten

easily).

2.7.2 Blends

Blends (also called telescope or portmanteau words) are the fusion of the forms and

meanings of two lexemes. The ﬁrst item usually loses something at the end, and the second

something at the beginning. Traditionally, blends have had at least one shared element

(e.g. motel < motor and hotel) but more recent formations show no common elements

(e.g. brunch < breakfast and lunch). They are characteristic of English, though they repre-

sent only a mere one per cent of new formations in Cannon’s corpus. Blends are very

popular in journalism, advertising and technical ﬁelds (especially names) and tend to

belong to a more informal stylistic level. The majority of portmanteau words are nouns,

with only ten adjectives and three verbs in Cannon’s corpus:

Verbs: gues(s)timate < guess, estimate

skyjack < sky, hijack

Adjectives: glitzy < glitter, ritzy

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Nouns: Chunnel < Channel, tunnel

edutainment < education, entertainment

stagﬂation < stagnation, inﬂation

three-peat < three, repeat (winning a competition three times)

2.7.3 Shortenings

Of the many processes which come under the heading of shortenings we will give

examples for back formations, initialisms, clippings or stump words and ellipses. The

smallest group is back formations which have lost what is mistakenly thought to be an

afﬁx or inﬂection, as in edit < editor and buttle < butler. Indeed, the major traditional

class change found in Cannon’s material is noun to verb; the remaining examples are

new nouns and adjectives. The major patterns in the corpus are loss of {-ion} (e.g. intuit

< intuition), {-er} or {-ing} in nouns, and loss of {-ic} in adjectives to form new nouns.

There are also a host of new formations. Most striking among these are perhaps the result

of the loss of {-y} (complicit, funk, glitz, laze, raunch, sleaze), the loss of a presumed

preﬁx as in ept (< inept) and ﬂappable (< unﬂappable), various additions after shortening

(especially {-e}: back-mutate, decapitate, enthuse), and the rare loss of a root in hyper

(< hyperactive). Native speakers get a lot of fun out of forming new back formations

which might one day make it into the dictionaries: ‘It had been a rough day, so when

I walked into the party, I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and

consolate. I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her . . . She

was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array’ (our italics; chalant is formed

from nonchalant, wieldy from unwieldy etc; Burridge and Mulder 1998: 120).

Initialisms are historically the most recent group; two types are usually distinguished,

acronyms and abbreviations. Though both consist of a number of ﬁrst letters, acronyms

are pronounced as words (they are also called syllable words) whereas abbreviations

are pronounced as a series of letters (letter words). Well established acronyms are laser

(< lightwave ampliﬁcation by stimulated emission of radar) and scuba (< self-contained

underwater breathing apparatus); more recent are AIDS (acquired immune deﬁciency

syndrome), dinky (< dual income, no kids + {-y}), NIMBY (< not in my backyard),

WYSIWYG (= what you see is what you get) and yuppy (< young urban professional

+ {-y}). Cannon counts 153 acronyms (all but four of them nouns) as opposed to 460

abbreviations. Of the latter, all but three are nouns, consist for the most part of three

letters, usually all capitals, and belong to ﬁelds like chemistry or health, transport, the

military, computers and education. Examples are AI (Amnesty International; artiﬁcial

intelligence); ATV (all-terrain vehicle in both AmE and BrE; Associated Television in

BrE); BP (beautiful people in AmE; British Petroleum in BrE); CAD (computer-aided

design); CR (consciousness raising).

There are two major types of clipping – front- and back-clipping. The second is the

more frequent, while medial and mixed shortenings, though not uncommon, are less

frequent.

Mixed: comp < accompany; van < advantage

Medial: vegan < vegetarian; veggies < vegetables

Front: ﬁche < microﬁche; foil < hydrofoil; ’tude < attitude

38 ENGLISH AS A LINGUISTIC SYSTEM

Back: autoland < automatic landing; detox < detoxiﬁcation; ﬂip < ﬂippant; glam <

glamorous; limo < limousine; lit(erary)-crit(icism); metro < metropolitan;

rehab < rehabilitation

In the case of ellipses, a new word has been formed by leaving out one of the two original

words with the remaining part taking on the meaning of the whole. This is an extremely

common process, typical of colloquial and informal English: Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s

<~ disease; a non-proﬁt <~ organization (US); anchor < anchorman or -woman; daily

<~ cleaning woman or newspaper; life <~ sentence, as in he got life; mobile <~ phone.

2.7.4 Composite forms

These can be roughly divided into compounds and derivations. Compounds consist of

two or more free morphemes, which can be either simple (as are the morphemes in book

token) or complex (childhood sweetheart). Derivations are made up of one or more free

morphemes and at least one bound morpheme, e.g. handy < {hand} + {-y}. Bound

morphemes in word formation are called afﬁxes, of which preﬁxes come before, and

sufﬁxes after the free form. There are no bound inﬁxes in English (afﬁxes that are inserted

into word forms), but highly informal English does know a few cases of insertion of free

morphemes. Examples are usually of an objectionable (vulgar, obscene) nature:

Up at three-goddamn-thirty in the morning, so I can drive to the Air-god-Force-

damn-Academy to spoon-feed and clean up after these little dweebs; the world is

full of lunatics and madmen and I’ve got to go see Miss Saifuckinggon.

There is also another type of bound form, called combining form(s). These differ from

afﬁxes in that they tend to be of a technical nature (they are usually derived from Latin

and Greek), are more recent and also can combine with other combining forms (as in

Afrophile, Anglophone, hologram, speleology and telethon).

Compounds Compounds are usually classiﬁed in semantic and syntactic terms. There

are two types of semantic compounds, one where the compound as a whole is equivalent

to (at least) one of its parts and the other where this is not the case. Thus, goldﬁsh is a

kind of ﬁsh, and house party is a kind of party. These compounds are called endocentric

as opposed to the other type, called exocentric, where the compound meaning is

‘idiomatic’, i.e. where it is not equivalent to any of the constituent free forms. This is the

case, for example, with redcoats, which are neither pieces of clothing nor colours, but

English soldiers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Cannon has counted 3,579

new endocentric compounds as against 461 exocentric ones.

Syntactic compounds come in three types. Noun compounds constitute the over-

whelmingly most frequent group (3,591), followed by adjectives (290) and verbs (135).

Within noun compounds, the structure noun + noun is more than twice as common as

that of adjective + noun. Also frequent are those beginning or ending with a particle

(hookup, standoff). The frequency of compound nouns depends on the text type: in AmE

for instance there are far fewer in conversation than in news reports.

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Another frequent type is the phrasal verb, i.e. a simple verb plus a particle (churn

out). In the 44 million word Lancaster Corpus of twentieth century English, these verbs

are most common in ﬁction and conversation, as is to be expected from their colloquial

nature and their use in directives such as imperatives, but are rare in newspapers and

scholarly writing. The most frequently recurring phrasal verbs are formed by the lexical

verbs take, get and put, in combination with the particles up, out and on.

Most compounds consist of two free forms but some items have three or more free

forms. New developments in Cannon’s view are exocentric structures of two words and

endocentric structures consisting of more than three words.

New exocentric compounds:

Nouns: an around the world (trip); dog and pony show (‘elaborate sales or

publicity campaign’); freeze-frame

Adjectives: before-tax (income), hatchback (car), on-the-job (training); off off

Broadway (production; = experimental, avant-garde); larger-than-life

(leader; = very impressive)

Verbs: car-top (= carry on top of a car), blind side (= attack critically), nickel-

and-dime (= to ruin ﬁnancially little by little)

New longer endocentric structures:

Four morphemes: combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT); sudden infant death

syndrome; three-way catalytic converter

Five: smaller European elm bark beetle; Washington-based public-

policy group

Six: experimental coal-ﬁred combined-cycle plant

Seven: National Abortion Rights Action League holiday sticker

Derivations There are almost as many derivations as compounds. Of these, deriva-

tions with preﬁxes (initial afﬁxations) are more frequent than those with sufﬁxes

(terminal afﬁxations). The main types of bound forms used in technical terms are

combining forms, which are especially common in scientiﬁc/technical terms. Preﬁxes,

sufﬁxes and inﬂections, on the other hand, occur in less technical items. With regard to

their word class effect, it can be said that as a rule sufﬁxes produce word class change

({abnormal}+ {-ity}) while preﬁxes do not ({pre-} + {install}). It has been found for

twentieth century English in general that academic writing has the most derived nouns,

followed by news reporting and ﬁction, while spontaneous conversation has hardly any

as it prefers simple nouns.

In initial afﬁxations, there are six times more new items containing combining forms

than preﬁxes. There is a strong word class link between combining forms and nouns on

the one hand, and preﬁxes and the other open word classes on the other. Never before

have so many combining forms in initial position been used in English. The most frequent

of them are {micro-}, {bio-}, {immuno-}, e.g.:

{micro-}: chip, code, ﬂoppy, mesh, surgery, wave

{bio-}: degradable, diversity, engineering

{immuno-}: assay, chemistry, deﬁciency, suppression

40 ENGLISH AS A LINGUISTIC SYSTEM

The few remaining native preﬁxes, {un-} and {mis-}, show low productivity. Most have

been ousted by afﬁxes of Latin and French origin, of which the most frequent are {anti-},

{non-}, {de-}, {pre-}, {super-}, {sub-}:

{anti-}: convulsant, depressant, hero, nuclear

{non-}: art, Black, degree, event, hero, sexist, starter

{de-}: regulate, selection, toxiﬁcation

Recent derivations with initial combining forms are more frequent than those formed with

preﬁxes by almost three to two.

In terminal afﬁxations the ratio between combining forms (407) and sufﬁxes (906)

is reversed. All but one of the 407 new formations involving combining forms belong to

the sciences. The most frequent ones in Cannon’s corpus are {-ology/-ologist}, {-in} (as

in sit-in), {-genic}, {-meter}, {-emia}. However, some other combining forms are simi-

larly productive and often more common, e.g.:

{-gate} (‘major political scandal’, from the second element of Watergate): Irangate,

Koreagate

{-scape} (from the second element of landscape), as in moonscape, seascape, street-

scape, mindscape, dreamscape and sound-scape

{-speak} (‘language of ’, used in a slightly derogatory way, e.g. Orwell’s newspeak):

artspeak, computerspeak and winespeak

There are more than twice as many different sufﬁxes (98) as preﬁxes (42), but they are

less productive (only 31 occur as many as 7 times vs 25 preﬁxes with at least 8 occur-

rences). Most productive is native {-er}, followed by {-ist}, {-ism}, {-ize}, {-ic}, {-in(e)},

and native {-y}. There is only partial overlap with the ﬁndings of Biber et al. 1999, who

offer this list of relatively productive sufﬁxes (again in decreasing order of frequency):

{-ition}, {-ity}, {-er}, {-ness}, {-ism} and {-ment}. Examples are:

{-er}: backpacker, butterﬂyer (‘a swimmer who specializes in the butterﬂy’), car

pooler, ﬂasher

{-ist}: dartist, kineticist

{-ism}: ableism (‘discrimination against handicapped people’), ghettoism, middle-of-

the-roadism

Native sufﬁxes such as {-ster}, {-ly}, {-ship}, {-dom}, {-ish} and {-hood} are hardly

productive any more and have been supplanted by sufﬁxes from Latin and French.

There are a few examples of multiple afﬁxation, with preﬁxes plus sufﬁxes (antifeedant,

antifoulant, unﬂappable). In other cases afﬁxation takes place together with compounding:

wheeler-dealer. This shows again that there is no absolute dividing line between the two

types and that the term composite form used in this book serves a useful purpose. Other

difﬁculties in deﬁnition are encountered with the distinction between compounds and

derivations in items like householder: is this {household} + {-er} or {house} + {holder}?

Composite forms of more than two elements often combine both processes, as in baby

boomer, gas-guzzler or ungentlemanly.

1111

1011

4111

20111

5111

30111

40111

47111

VOCABULARY 41