Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
the word televise is a back-formation of television; The process is motivated by analogy: edit is to editor as act is to actor. This process leads to a lot of denominal verbs. The productivity of back-formation is limited, with the most productive forms of back-formation being hypocoristics. [5]
In linguistics, productivity is the degree to which speakers of a language use a particular grammatical process, especially in word formation. It compares grammatical processes that are in frequent use to less frequently used ones that tend towards lexicalization. Generally the test of productivity concerns identifying which grammatical forms ...
One of the most productive processes in English is conversion, [246] using a word with a different grammatical role, for example using a noun as a verb or a verb as a noun. Another productive word-formation process is nominal compounding, [243] [245] producing compound words such as babysitter or ice cream or homesick. [246]
Informally, word formation rules form "new" words (more accurately, new lexemes), and inflection rules yield variant forms of the "same" word (lexeme). The distinction between inflection and word formation is not at all clear-cut. There are many examples for which linguists fail to agree whether a given rule is inflection or word formation.
Spelling rules which maintain pronunciation apply to suffixing adjectives just as they do for similar treatment of regular past tense formation; these cover consonant doubling (as in bigger and biggest, from big) and the change of y to i after consonants (as in happier and happiest, from happy).
Inflection of the Scottish Gaelic lexeme for 'dog', which is cù for singular, chù for dual with the number dà ('two'), and coin for plural. In linguistic morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation [1] in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and ...
The word calque is a loanword, while the word loanword is a calque: calque comes from the French noun calque ("tracing; imitation; close copy"); [5] while the word loanword and the phrase loan translation are translated from German nouns Lehnwort [6] and Lehnübersetzung (German: [ˈleːnʔybɐˌzɛt͡sʊŋ] ⓘ). [7]
English Word-Formation begins with an introduction section and moves into its next chapter, which discusses some basic concepts. From there the chapters discuss productivity, phonological issues in word-formation, syntactic and semantic issues in word-formation, an outline of English word-formation, and theory and practice before coming to the ...