This MedLibrary.org supplementary page on Word formation is provided directly from the open source Wikipedia as a service to our readers. Please see the note below on authorship of this content, as well as the Wikipedia usage guidelines. To search for other content from our encyclopedia supplement, please use the form below:
Related Sponsors
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.
See 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 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
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 12 November 2008, at 08:11.
Wikipedia Authorship and Review
Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.
Wikipedia Usage Guidelines
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Word formation".
The URL for this specific entry is:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.