Of the English vocabulsry

The vocabulary of any living language is always changing, growing and decaying. The changes are due to the linguistic and non-linguistic causes but in most cases to the combination of both. Words may drop out altogether as a result of the disappearance of the actual objects they denote. For example, the Scandinavian take and die ousted the Old English niman and sweltan. Sometimes words do not drop out but become obsolete, sinking to the level of vocabulary units used in narrow, specialized fields of human intercourse making a group of archaisms. For example, billow = wave, steed = horse. They are practically never used except in poetry. Such words as halberd, visor, gauntlet are used only as historical terms.

Yet the number of new words that appear in the language is so much greater than those that drop out or become obsolete, that the development of vocabularies in any language may be described as a never-ending process of growth, development and replenishment.

There are two main ways of enriching the vocabulary. The first is vocabulary extension which includes borrowing from other languages, productive (patterned) word-formation (derivation, conversion and compounding) and non-patterned word-creation. The second is semantic extension – the appearance of new meanings of existing lexemes which may result in homonyms.

Productive word-formation is the most effective means of enriching the vocabulary. The most widely used means are affixation, conversion and composition. Yet non-patterned ways of word-formation are of great importance as they illustrate different abilities of lexical units.

Lexicalization is the process of loss of grammatical meaning of a flexion which leads to the isolation from the paradigm of the initial word and development of an entirely new meaning. For example, the grammatical inflexion –s meaning plural number has lost its grammatical meaning in such words as arms, customs, colours which have developed new meanings “weapons”, “import duties”, “banner, flag”. This led to a complete break of semantic links with the semantic structure of the words arm, custom, colour and thus to the appearance of new words with a different set of grammatical features.

Essentially the same phenomenon is observed in the transition of participles into adjectives which is known as adjectivization. It may be illustrated by a number of adjectives such as tired, devoted, interesting, amusing which are felt as homonymous to the participles of the corresponding verbs.

Lexicalization is a long, gradual historical process which synchronically results in the appearance of new vocabulary units.

One of the most active and productive minor types of word-formation is shortening. Shortenings are usually divided into graphical and lexical. Graphical abbreviations are restricted in use to written speech. In reading many of them are substituted by the words and phrases they represent, e.g. Dr. = doctor, Mr. = mister.

Lexical shortenings may be of different types. Substantivization consists in dropping of the final nominal member of a frequently used attributive word-group. For example, in the attributive phrase a documentary film the nominative member “film” was dropped and the remained attribute “documentary” took on the meaning and all the syntactic functions of the noun and thus developed into a new word changing its class membership and becoming homonymous to the existing adjective. The same process may be observed in such lexemes as an incendiary (an incendiary bomb), the finals (the final examinations), an editorial (an editorial article) and so on.

Acronyms and letter abbreviations are signs formed from the initial letters of a fixed phrase or title. Letter abbreviations are mere replacements of longer phrases including names of well-known organizations, names of agencies and institutions, political parties, famous people, names of official offices, for example, DOD (Department of Defence), SST (supersonic transport). Acronyms usually (but not always) coincide in sounding with already functioning word in the language. For example, SALT = Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, WASP = White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

Acronyms are formed in different ways. Some of them are built from initial letters and may be pronounced as regular words (UNESCO, laser – light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation); others are pronounced as a succession of the alphabetical readings of the constituent letters (BBC, SOS). Acronyms may be formed from the initial syllables of each word or phrase, e.g. Interpol (inter/national pol/ice) or by a combination of the abbreviation of the first element and unchanged form of the following elements, e.g. V-day, g-force.

Acronyms unlike letter-abbreviations perform the syntactical function of ordinary words taking the grammatical inflexions, for example, MP (singular) – MPs (plural) – MP’s (possessive case) – MPess (a woman-member of Parliament).

Blendings are the results of conscious creation of words by merging irregular fragments of several lexemes which are aptly called “splinters”. Splinters assume different shapes – they may be built from the source word at a morpheme boundary (transistor – from transfer and resistor), at a syllable boundary (medicare – from medical and care), or boundaries of both kinds as in brunch (from breakfast and lunch). Many blends show some degree of overlapping of vowels, consonants and syllables or echo the word or the lexemes fragment it replaces, for example, foolosopher (echoing philosopher).

Blends are coined not infrequently in scientific and technical language as a means of naming new things, as trade names in advertisements. Since they break the rules of morphology they result in original combinations which catch quickly. Most of the blends have colloquial flavour.

Clipping refers to the creation of new words by shortening a lexeme of two or more syllables without changing the class membership. Clipped words, though they often exist together with the longer original lexeme function as independent lexical units with a certain phonetic shape and lexical meaning of their own. The lexical meaning of the clipped word and its source lexeme do not as a rule coincide, for example, doc refers only to one who practices medicine. It does not denote a person who has received the higher degree given by a university such as Doctor of Law, Doctor of Philosophy.

Clipped words always differ from the non-clipped ones in the emotive charge and stylistic reference. Clipping indicate an attitude of familiarity towards the object or people denoted. Clipped words are characteristic of colloquial speech. But in the course of time many clippings find their way into the literary language losing some of their colloquial colouring, for example bus (from omnibus), bike (from bicycle).

As independent vocabulary units clipping serve as derivational bases for suffixal derivatives, for example, hanky (from handkerchief), nightie (from night-dress).

There are no definite rules according to which lexemes may be clipped. Apocope is clipping the end of the word (ad from advertisement, mike from microphone). Aphaeresis means clipping of a word at the beginning (phone from telephone, copter from helicopter). Syncope denotes the omission of the syllables or sounds in the middle (maths from mathematics, specs from spectacles). There are still cases when words are clipped both at the beginning and at the end (flu from influenza, tec from detective).

Back-formation is very close to shortening (clipping) as it occurs when a suffix (or a part of a lexeme that looks like a suffix) is removed from a word (to edit from an editor, to beg from a beggar). Words that were produced are morphologically simpler that the source lexeme. Nowadays back-formation is characteristic of verbs derived from compound nouns (to baby-sit from baby-sitter, to house-keep from housekeeper).

The names of people and places are often generalized to name the products or things they are connected with, for example, coffee from the name of Ethiopian province of Kaffa, hoover for vacuum cleaner (trade mark).

Creation of echoic words, or onomatopoeia, is believed to be originally the first means of word-formation in the language. In English is there are onomatopoeic words which constituent elements have a specific feature, for example, glace, glade, glamour, glance, glare, glass, gleam, glimpse involving something “eye-catching” because of emission, reflection, or passage of light.

Reduplication is repetition of roots or syllables in immediate succession. Reduplication is used to denote quantity, intensity or priority. Identical components in reduplicatives (bye-bye, hush-hush) are not very frequent, but there are more with slight changes in the vowels or consonants. There are rhyme-motivated reduplicated compounds, for example, walkie-talkie, nitwit and ablaut-motivated reduplicated compounds, for example, dilly-dally, flip-flop.

The process of analogical word-formation takes place when a certain element of a morphological structure of a lexeme (a root, a bound, unique or pseudo-morpheme) changes into a regular two-faceted unit, for example, hamburger – cheeseburger – fishburger.

Non-patterned ways of word-formation are differentiated by their productivity. Nowadays the most productive is abbreviation. Not infrequently shortening and analogical word-formation is used while onomatopoeia, reduplication, back-formation are more characteristic of earlier periods.