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Back-formation is the process or result of creating a new word via morphology, typically by removing or substituting actual or supposed affixes from a lexical item, in a way that expands the number of lexemes associated with the corresponding root word. [1] James Murray coined the term back-formation in 1889. [2]
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 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]
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In back-formation, a new word is created by removing elements from an existing word that are interpreted as affixes. For example, Italian pronuncia ' pronunciation, accent ' is derived from the verb pronunciare ' to pronounce, to utter ' and English edit derives from editor. [13] Some cases of back-formation are based on folk etymology.
The classification of a word as "unpaired" can be problematic, as a word thought to be unattested might reappear in real-world usage or be created, for example, through humorous back-formation. In some cases a paired word does exist, but is quite rare or archaic (no longer in general use).
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Clipping is also different from back-formation, which proceeds by (pseudo-)morpheme rather than segment, and where the new word may differ in sense and word class from its source. [2] In English, clipping may extend to contraction , which mostly involves the elision of a vowel that is replaced by an apostrophe in writing.