Word formation

In linguistics, word formation is the creation of a new word. Word formation is sometimes contrasted with semantic change, which is a change in a single word's meaning. The line between word formation and semantic change is sometimes a bit blurry; what one person views as a new use of an old word, another person might view as a new word derived from an old one and identical to it in form; "see" Conversion (linguistics). Word formation can also be contrasted with the formation of idiomatic expressions, though sometimes words can form from multi-word phrases; "see" Compound (linguistics) and Incorporation (linguistics).

A similar concept is Derivation.

ee also

The following articles describe various mechanisms of word formation:

*Agglutination (the process of forming new words from existing ones by adding affixes to them, like "shame" + "less" + "ness" → "shamelessness")
*Back-formation (removing seeming affixes from existing words, like forming "edit" from "editor")
*Blending (a word formed by joining parts of two or more older words, like "smog", which comes from "smoke" and "fog")
**Acronym (a word formed from initial letters of the words in a phrase, like English "laser" from "light amplified by stimulated emission of radiation")
**Clipping (morphology) (taking part of an existing word, like forming "ad" from "advertisement")
*Compound (linguistics) (a word formed by stringing together older words, like "earthquake")
**Incorporation (linguistics) (a compound of a verb and an object or particle, like "intake")
*Conversion (linguistics) (forming a new word from an existing identical one, like forming the verb "green" from the existing adjective)
*Loanword (a word borrowed from another language, like "cliché", which comes from French)
** Calque (borrowing a word or phrase from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation; for example the English phrase "to lose face", which is a calque from Chinese)
**Phono-semantic matching (matching a foreign word with a phonetically and semantically similar pre-existent native word/root)
** Semantic loan (the extension of the meaning of a word to include new, foreign meanings)
*Neologism (a completely new word, like "quark")
** Onomatopoeia (the creation of words that imitate natural sounds, like the bird name "cuckoo")

Literature

* Hadumod Bussmann (1996), "Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics", London: Routledge.
* Joachim Grzega (2004), "Bezeichnungswandel: Wie, Warum, Wozu? Ein Beitrag zur englischen und allgemeinen Onomasiologie", Heidelberg: Winter.
*Peter Koch (2002), “Lexical Typology from a Cognitive and Linguistic Point of View”, in D. Alan Cruse et al. (eds), "Lexicology: An International Handbook on the Nature and Structure of Words and Vocabularies / Lexikologie: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Natur und Struktur von Wörtern und Wortschätzen", [Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft 21] , Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, vol. 1, pp. 1142-1178.
* Ghil'ad Zuckermann (2003). "Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew". Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. (Palgrave Studies in Language History and Language Change). ISBN 1-4039-1723-X.

External links

* [http://www.prefixsuffix.com/newwords.php Forming New Root Words: Company Name and Product Research]