Bruce,

 

I cover basically the same list in my freshman “linguistic-y” class, with one addition – what I call “pure neologism,” introduced to deal with cases where a speaker literally makes up a word from scratch. That’s very rare, of course, but does occur in children’s literature and science fiction/ fantasy literature (e.g. Heinlein’s introduction of the verb grok). I don’t, however, insist that they know the technical definitions by heart. Instead, I lump them into superordinate categories that are fairly basic:

 

(1)     Combining parts whose meanings you already know (prefixing, suffixing, and compounding).

(2)     Shortening words or phrases you already know (clipping, acronyms, backformation)

(3)     Using something you already know for a new purpose (conversion, eponymy, onomatopoeia)

(4)     Making up something new (pure neologism)

 

Blending I treat as a combination of 1 and 2. It’s a 100-level college course, for students who have never had any exposure to linguistics, and I find that using this approach helps them focus on what’s going on rather than on the potentially intimidating terminology. In our 300-level Intro to linguistics, I go into more detail (e.g., they’re supposed to come out of it being able to explain why clipping and backformation are considered different processes).

 

Bill Spruiell

Dept. of English

Central Michigan University

 

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bruce D. Despain
Sent: Tuesday, January 03, 2006 6:32 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: word formation and morphology

 

In my reply to Allison, I ventured an interpretation of "a whole nother" that on reflection now seems was not very thorough.  I would like to ask the list about how and to what extend word formation and morphology are included in their English curricula.  I have been working on a brief introduction to the subject and find it very difficult to be brief.  I want to divide the means of word formation into at least the 9 following types:

Prefixing & Suffixing

Compounding

Conversion (one part of speech or usage to another)

Combining forms (affixes in compounds)

Back-formation

Acronyms

Blending (at both the word and phrase level)

Eponymy

Onomatopoeia

 

Combinations of these often appear and sometimes they are lumped together as "portmanteau" phenomena.  In the case of "a whole nother" in Allison's example, "You have a whole 'nother year to work this out," we seem to have a portmanteau blending of "You have a whole year to work this out"  and "You have another year to work this out."

 

These two determiners, "whole" and "another," are normally mutually exclusive, so perhaps this device is allowing the formation of a new compound determiner "a whole nother" containing the meaning of both.

 

[italics not intended; sorry my editor doesn't work.]

 

Bruce

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