Conversion as a peculiar way of Eng.word-formation

Native words & their role in Eng & Ukr.

Ethymologicaly language vocabulary can be comprised of 3 layers:native, borrowed, hybrids (comprised of elements reffering to different languages. F.ex.: policeman (police=french, man=native)

A native word is a word which belongs to the original word-stock as known from the earliest available manuscripts of the Old language period.

N.W. are subdivided by diachronic linguistics into 2:

For English- 1.Indo-European Stock, 2. Common Germanic Origin

Words having cognates in the vocabularies of different Indo-Europ.languages form the oldest layer->it has been noticed that they readily fall into definite semantic groups: kinship(father, mother, son, daughter, brother); Important objects&phenomena of nature (Sun, Moon, star, wind, water, wood, hill, stone, tree); animals&birds (bull,cat,crow,goose,wolf); parts of human body (arm, ear, eye, foot, heart?)+ Some of the most frequent verbs (bear, come, sit, stand?) ;Adj.denoting concrete physical properties (hard, quick, slow, red, white) + most numerals.

For Ukrainian: 1.indoeuropean (commonly typical for eng & ukr. (son-???, goose-?????); 2.slavic (for Ukr.only)

Native words are very important because they are most frequently used, they are highly polysemantic, they have great derivational potential. F.ex.: water ? 150 words can be created, hand ? 270, air ? 300 words. They have wide rate of combinability.

Conversion as a peculiar way of Eng.word-formation

Word-formation ? the process of creating new words from the material available in the word-stock according to certain structural & semantic patterns specific for the given language. ? is a branch of science of the language, which studies the patterns on which a lang.forms new lexical items. ? is a process of forming words by combining root+affixal morphemes,according to certain patterns specific for the lang. or without any outward means(conversion).

2 major groups of word-formation: 1)words, formed as grammatical syntgmas, combinations of full linguistic signs(compounding, prefixation, suffixation, conversion, back-derivation;2) words, which are not made up of full linguistic signs(blending, clipping, rhyme&others). Common for both groups is that a new word is based on synchronic relationship between morphemes.

3 levels of word-formation in Eng:1.Highly-productive, 2.semi-prod., 3. Non-prod. Conversion ? (zero-derivation) a special type of affixless derivation where a newly-formed word aquires a paradigm&syntactic functions different from those of the original word. the grammatical meaning is not saved, though some semantic relation is being kept- for ex. N-tool ->V- action performed by it.

A certan stem is used for the formation of a categorically different word without a derivative element being added Bag-to bag, back-to back, bottle-to bottle. Is h-productive in Eng. Popular types: N->V head-to head, V->N to look-look, A->V clean-to clean. C. can be total: work-to work, or partial: the then president(Adv.->Adj in this particulat context). In English all parts of speech can be drawn into the word-building process of conver-sion to a certain extent.

Date: 2016-06-12; view: 365