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The appearance of a great number of new words and the development
of new meanings in the words already available in the language may be
largely accounted for by the rapid flow of events, the progress of science
and technology and emergence of new concepts in different fields of hu-
man activity. The influx of new words has never been more rapid than in
the last few decades of this century. Estimates suggest that during the past
twenty-five years advances in technology and communications media have
produced a greater change in our language than in any similar period in
history. The specialised vocabularies of aviation, radio, television, medical
and atomic research, new vocabulary items created by recent development
in social history — all are part of this unusual influx. Thus war has brought
into English such vocabulary items as
blackout, fifth-columnist, para-
troops, A-bomb, V-Day,
etc.; the development of science gave such
words as
hydroponics, psycholinguistics, polystyrene, radar, cyclotron,
meson, positron; antibiotic,
etc.;
1
the conquest and research of cosmic
space by the Soviet people gave birth
to sputnik, lunnik, babymoon,
space-rocket, space-ship, space-suit, moonship, moon crawler, Lunok-
hod,
etc.
The growth of the vocabulary reflects not only the general progress
made by mankind but also the peculiarities of the way of life of the speech
community in which the new words appear, the way its science and culture
tend to develop. The peculiar developments of the American way of life
for example find expression in the vocabulary items like
taxi-dancer
— ,
‘a girl employed by a dance hall, cafe, cabaret to dance with patrons who
pay for each dance’;
to job-hunt
— ‘to search assiduously for a job’; the
political life of America of to-day gave items like
witchhunt
— ‘the
screening and subsequent persecution of political opponents’;
ghostwriter
— ‘a person engaged to write the speeches or articles of an eminent per-
sonality’;
brinkmanship
— ‘a political course of keeping the world on the
brink of war’;
sitdowner
— ‘a participant of a sit-down strike’;
to sit in
—
‘to remain sitting in available places in a cafe, unserved in protest of Jim
Crow Law’;
a sitter-in; a lie-in
or
a lie-down
— ‘a lying
1
The results of the analysis of the
New Word Section of Webster’s Collegiate Diction-
ary
covering a period of 14 years (from 1927 to 1941) and
A Dictionary of New English
by
С. Barnhart covering a period of 10 years (from 1963 to 1972) confirm the statement; out
of the 498 vocabulary items 100 (about 1/5 of the total number) are the result of techno-
logical development, about 80 items owe their appearance to the development of science,
among which 60 are new terms in the field of physics, chemistry, nuclear physics and bio-
chemistry. 42 words are connected with the sphere of social relations and only 28 with art,
literature, music, etc. See
P. С. Гинзбург.
О пополнении словарного состава. «Ино-
странные языки в школе», 1954, № 1
; Р. С. Гинзбург, Н. Г. Позднякова.
Словарь но-
вых слов Барнхарта и некоторые наблюдения над пополнением словарного состава
современного английского языка. «Иностранные языки в школе», 1975, № 3.
A similar result is obtained by a count conducted for seven letters of the Addenda to
The Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English
by A. S. Hornby, E. V. Gatenby,
H. Wakefield, 1956. According to these counts out of 122 new units 65 are due to the de-
velopment of science and technology, 21 to the development of social relations and only 31
to the general, non-specialised vocabulary. See
Э. М. Медникова, Т. Ю. Каравкина.
Со-
циолингвистический аспект продуктивного словообразования. «Вестник Московско-
го университета», 1964, № 5.
182
down of a group of people in a public place to disrupt traffic as a form of
protest or demonstration’;
to nuclearise — ‘
to equip conventional armies
with nuclear weapons’;
nuclearisation; nuclearism
— ‘emphasis on nu-
clear weapons as a deterrent to war or as a means of attaining political and
social goals’.
It must be mentioned as a noteworthy peculi-
arity that new vocabulary items in Modern
English belong only to the n o t i o n a l
p a r t s of s p e e c h , to be more exact, only to nouns, verbs and ad-
jectives; of these nouns are most numerous.
1
New vocabulary units are as a rule monosemantic and most of them
are marked by peculiar stylistic value — they primarily belong to the spe-
cialised vocabulary. Neutral words and phrases are comparatively few.
Terms used in various fields of science and technique make the greater
part of new words.
The analysis of the development of the vocabulary of Modern English
shows that there are two aspects of the growth of the language — the ap-
pearance of new lexical items which increase the vocabulary numerically
and the appearance of new meanings of old words.
New vocabulary units are mostly the result of the new combinations of
old elements. Entirely new lexical items make an insignificant section of
vocabulary.
Structurally new vocabulary items represent two types of lexical
u n i t s : w o r d s , e. g.
b l a c k o u t , mi c r o f i l m- r e a d e r , u n -
f r e e z e ,
a n d w o r d - g r o u p s , mostly phraseological units, e.g.
blood bank
— ‘a place where blood plasma are stored’;
atomic pile
—
‘reactor’, etc.
W o r d s in their turn comprise various structural types:
2
a)
simple words, e.g.
jeep
— ‘a small, light motor vehicle esp. for mili-
tary use’;
zebra
— ’street crossing-place, marked by black and white
stripes’;
b)
derived words, such as
collaborationist
— ‘one who in occupied
territory works* helpfully with the enemy’;
centrism
— ‘a middle-of-the
road or a moderate position in polities’,
a preppie
— ‘a student or gradu-
ate of a preparatory school
(sl.)’;
c)
compounds, e.g.
corpsman
(mil.)
— ‘a member of a hospital squad
trained to administer first aid to wounded servicemen’,
script-show
— ‘a
serial program on radio and television’;
house-husband
—
U.S. ‘
a married
man who manages a household’, etc. The analysis of new words for their
derivational structure shows a marked predominance of derived and com-
pound words and a rather small number of simple words.
W o r d - g r o u p s comprise a considerable part of vocabulary ex-
tension. Structurally, the bulk of the word-groups belongs to the
1
The analysis mentioned above shows that out of the 498 new units under considera-
tion 373 (i.e. about 75%) are nouns and nominal word-groups, 61 (or about 12%) are adjec-
tives and only 1 (or 0,25%) adverbs. The counts conducted in recent years give an approxi-
mately the same ratio — out of 122 new units 82 (i. e. 67%) are nouns, 22 (or 18%) are
verbs, 18 (i. e. about 14%) are adjectives and only one (0,8%) adverb.
2
See ‘Word-Structure’, § 12, p. 104.
183
§ 7. Structural and Semantic
Peculiarities of New
Vocabulary Units
attributive-nominal type built on the
A +
N
and
N
+
N
formulas,
e.g. fre-
quency modulation, jet engine, total war, Common Marketeer, ma-
chine time,
etc.
Word-groups and different types of words are unequally distributed
among various lexical stylistic groups of the vocabulary, with a predomi-
nance of one or another type in every group. For example, new words in
the field of science are mostly of derived and compound structure but the
technical section of the vocabulary extension is characterised by simple
words. The greater part of word-groups is found among scientific and
technical terms; the political layer of vocabulary is rather poor
in
word-
groups. Besides this peculiar distribution of different types of words, every
type acquires its own specific peculiarity in different lexical stylistic
groups of the vocabulary, for example, although derived words are typical
both of scientific and technical terms, words formed by conversion are
found mostly among technical terms.
WAYS AND MEANS OF ENRICHING THE
VOCABULARY
There are two ways of enriching the vocabulary as has been mentioned
above: A. v o c a b u l a r y e x t e n s i o n — the appearance of new
lexical items. New vocabulary units appear mainly as a result of: 1. pro-
ductive or patterned ways of word-formation; 2. non-patterned ways of
word-creation; 3. borrowing from other languages. B . s e m a n t i c e x -
t e n s i o n — the appearance of new meanings of existing words which
may result in homonyms.
Productive
1
word-formation is the most ef-
fective means of enriching the vocabulary.
The most widely used means are affixation (prefixation mainly for verbs
and adjectives, suffixation for nouns and adjectives), conversion (giving
the greatest number of new words in verbs and nouns) and composition
(most productive in nouns and adjectives).
'New’ words that appear as a result of productive word-formation are
not entirely new as they are all made up of elements already available in
the language. The newness of these words resides in the particular combi-
nation of the items previously familiar to the language speaker. As has al-
ready been mentioned productivity of derivative devices that give rise to
novel vocabulary units is fundamentally relative and it follows that there
are no patterns which can be called ‘fully’ productive.
Productive patterns in each part of speech, with a set of individual
structural and semantic constraints, serve as a formal expression of the
regular semantic relationship between different classes or semantic group-
ings of words. Thus the types of new words that may appear in this or that
lexical-grammatical class of words can be predicted with a high degree of
probability. The regularity of expression of the underlying semantic rela-
tions, firmly rooted in the minds of the speakers, make
1
See ‘Word-Formation’, § 4, p. 112. 184
§ 8. Productive Word-Formation
the derivational patterns bidirectional rules, that is, the existence of one
class of words presupposes the possibility of appearance of the other
which stands in regular semantic relations with it. This can be clearly ob-
served in the high degree of productivity of conversion.
1
For instance the
existence and frequent use of the noun denoting an object presupposes the
possibility of the verb denoting an action connected with i t , e.g. the nouns
stream, sardine, hi-fi, timetable,
lead to the appearance of verbs
to
stream
— ‘to divide students into separate classes according to level of
intelligence’,
to sardine
— ‘to pack closely’;
to hi-fi
— ‘to listen to hi-fi
recordings’;
to timetable
— ‘to set a timetable’. Similarly a verb denoting
an action presupposes a noun denoting an act, result, or instance of this
action as in the new words, e.g.
a holdup, a breakdown, a layout,
etc.
The clarity and stability of the structural and semantic relations under-
lying productive patterns allows of certain stretching of individual con-
straints on the structure and meaning of the derivational bases making the
pattern highly productive. Highly productive patterns of this type are not
many. The derivational affixes which are the ICs of these patterns such as
-ness, -er, mini-, over-
become unusually active and are felt according to
some scholars “productive as individual units” as compared to affixes
“productive in a certain pattern, but not in another.” The suffixal nominal
patterns with suffixes
-ness
and
-er
deserve special mention. The suffix
-
ness
is associated with names of abstract qualities and states. Though it is
regularly added to adjectival bases, practically the range of bases the suf-
fix can be collocated with is both structurally and semantically almost
unlimited, e.g.
otherness, alone-ness, thingness, oneness, well-to-
doness, out-of-the-placeness,
etc. The only exception is the verbal bases
and the sphere of the derivational
pattern
a + -ity -> N.
The nominal suffix
-er
denoting an active doer may serve as another
example. The suffix gives numerous suffixal and compound nouns and
though it is largely a deverbal suffix as in
brain-washer, a double-talker,
a sit-inner
new nouns are freely formed from bases of other parts of
speech, e.g.
a roomer, a YCLer, a one-winger, a ganger,
etc.
Yet the bulk of productive patterns giving rise to freely-formed and
easily predictable lexical classes of new words have a set of rigid struc-
tural and semantic constraints such as the lexical-grammatical class and
structural type of bases,
2
the semantic nature of the base, etc. The degree
of productivity is also connected with a certain power of analogy attached
to each pattern.
The following productive types giving the greatest number of new vo-
cabulary items may be mentioned: deverbal suffixal adjectives denoting
passive possibility of the action
(v
+
-able
->
A),
e.g.
attachable, accept-
able, livable-in, likeable,
etc.; prefixal negative adjectives formed after
two patterns: 1)
(un-
+
part I/II
-> A),
e.g.
unguarded, unheard-of, un-
binding,
etc.,
2)
(un-
+
a -> A),
e.g. unsound, uncool, especially
1
See ‘Word-Formation’, § 21, p. 138.
2
See
‘Word-Structure’, § 8, p. 97,
185
with deverbal adjectival bases as in
unthinkable, unquantifiable, un-
avoidable, unanswerable,
etc.; prefixal verbs of repetitive meaning
(re- +
+
v -> V),
e.g.
rearrange, re-train, remap,
etc.; prefixal verbs of reversa-
tive meaning
(un- + v -> V),
e.g.
uncap, unbundle, unhook, undock,
etc.; derivational compound adjectives denoting possession
[(a/n + n)
+ +
-ed -> A],
e.g.
flat-bottomed, long-handled, heavy-lidded,
etc. The
greater part of new compound nouns are formed after
n + n -> N
pattern,
e.g.
wave-length, sound-track,
etc.
The bidirectional nature of productive derivational patterns is
of
special
interest in connection with back-derivation as a source of new verbs. The
pattern of semantic relationship of the action and its active doer, the action
and the name of the process of this action are regularly represented in
Modern English by highly productive nominal patterns with suffixes
-er
and
-ing
(v
+ -er ->
N,
v
+
-ing -> N).
Hence the noun whose structure con-
tains this suffix or may be interpreted as having it is understood as a sec-
ondary unit motivated by a verb even if the verb does not actually exist.
This was the case with
editor, baby-sitter, housekeeping,
a new “sim-
pler” verb was formed to fill the gap. The noun was felt as derived and the
“corresponding” verb was formed by taking the suffix or the suffix-like
sound-cluster away. The following verbs, e.g.
to beg, to edit, to stage-
manage, to babysit, to dress-make
are the results of back-formation.
Back-derivation as a re-interpretation of the derivational structure is now
growing in productivity but it functions only within the framework of
highly productive patterns with regular and transparent derivative relations
associated formally with a certain suffix. Many new backderived verbs are
often stylistically marked as colloquial, e.g.
enthuse
from
enthusiasm,
playact
from
play-acting, tongue-tie
from
tongue-tied, sight-see
from
sight-seeing.
The correct appraisal of the role of productive word-formation and
its power to give analogic creations would be incomplete if one does
not take into account the so-called o c c a s i o n a l or p o t e n t i a l
w о r d s . Built on analogy with the most productive types of derived
and compound words, easily understood and never striking one as “un-
"usual” or “new” they are so numerous that it is virtually impossible to
make conversation to-day, to hear a speech or to read a newspaper with-
out coming across a number of words which are new to the language.
Occasional words are especially connected with the force of analogous
creations based on productive word-formation patterns. It often happens
that one or another word becomes, sometimes due to social and political
reasons, especially prominent and frequent. One of its components ac-
quires an additional derivative force and becomes the centre of a series
of lexical items. It can be best illustrated by new words formed on anal-
ogy with the compound noun
sit-in
which according to
A Dictionary
of New English
gave three sets of analogic units. The noun
sit-in
is
traced back to 1960 when it was formed from the verb
sit-in
introduced
by the Negro civil-rights movement. In the first series of analogic crea-
tions the
-in
was associated with a public protest demonstration and
gave rise
to sit-in
and
sit-inner, kneel-in, ride-in,
all motivated by the
underlying verbal units. The original meaning was soon extended
to
186