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For example, the noun green in golf (referring to a putting-green) is derived ultimately from the adjective green. Conversions from adjectives to nouns and vice versa are both very common and unnotable in English; much more remarked upon is the creation of a verb by converting a noun or other word (for example, the adjective clean becomes the ...
In linguistics, back-formation is the process of forming a new word by removing actual affixes, or parts of the word that is re-analyzed as an affix, from other words to create a base. [5] Examples include: the verb headhunt is a back-formation of headhunter; the verb edit is formed from the noun editor [5]
For example, the negating prefix un-is more productive in English than the alternative in-; both of them occur in established words (such as unusual and inaccessible), but faced with a new word which does not have an established negation, a native speaker is more likely to create a novel form with un-than with in-. The same thing happens with ...
Back-formation is either the process of creating a new lexeme (less precisely, a new "word") by removing actual or supposed affixes, or a neologism formed by such a process. Back-formations are shortened words created from longer words, thus back-formations may be viewed as a sub-type of clipping .
The boundary between functional shift and conversion (the derivation of a new word from an existing word of identical form) is not well-defined, but it could be construed that conversion changes the lexical meaning and functional shift changes the syntactic meaning. Shakespeare uses functional shift, for example using a noun to serve as a verb ...
Conversion (word formation): a transformation of a word of one word class into another word class; Dysphemism: intentionally using a word or phrase with a harsher tone over one with a more polite tone; Euphemism: intentionally using a word or phrase with a more polite tone over one with a harsher tone
Some troops leave the battlefield injured. Others return from war with mental wounds. Yet many of the 2 million Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffer from a condition the Defense Department refuses to acknowledge: Moral injury.
Nouns or adjectives can become verbs (see Conversion (word formation)). Adjectives like "separate" and "direct" thus became verbs, starting in the 16th century, and eventually it became standard practice to form verbs from Latin passive participles, even if the adjective didn't exist.