Chapter 12.4: Other Methods of Word Formation

In addition to adding derivational morphemes to a root morpheme, there are other
ways of joining morphemes together to create new words. Here is a brief discussion
of the most common.

Compounding

Words can be created by taking two or more free morphemes and joining them together
into compounds. There are different ways of classifying compounds.
The simplest way is to categorize them by the different parts of speech that are
joined together. Thus we have the following types:

Noun-Noun: bedroom, eyeball, peanut butter, airplane, fireplace, waterbed.
In each of these, the first element modifies the second element, which is
called the head. The head is the part which contains the basic
semantic meaning of the compound (note that in some languages, the head comes
before the modifier). Also note that our orthographic conventions regarding
spacing do not have an effect on whether or not a word is a compound. Thus,
peanut butter is a single compound, where butter is the head
and is modified by peanut; peanut butter sandwich is also a
compound, where sandwich is the head and peanut butter is
the compound noun modifier. It makes no difference that we use spaces in
writing these compounds but we don’t in bedroom.
Adjective-noun: blackbird, redhead, blueblood. These can be
differentiated from standard adjective + noun phrases primarily through
stress (prosody). Thus, the phrase black bird (as in “That is a
black bird”) is accentuated on both syllables: bláck bírd. The
compound, describing a species of bird, such as
Turdus merula,
is accentuated only on the first syllable: bláckbird. As with noun-noun
compounds, the head is the right-hand element while the first element is the
modifier.
Verb-noun: killjoy, cutthroat, breakfast. These are usually analyzed
as a person or thing that X’s Y, where X is the verb and Y is the noun.
Thus a killjoy is someone that kills joy. A breakfast
is a meal that breaks one’s fast, and so on. These are relatively
rare in English.

For less common categories of compounds, such as verb+verb (freeze-dry), adjective+adjective (blue-green),
or verb-adjective (spendthrift) you can review the wikipedia page
on English compounds.

Another way of classifying compounds is into endocentric and
exocentric groups. Most of the examples above are endocentric
compounds, that is, they contain the head within the compound itself. Thus, a
bedroom contains the word room in it, and describes a room
that has a bed in it. On the other hand, the term redneck does not describe a
neck that is red. This is an exocentric compound,
because the “head” of the compound is a person, who (figuratively) happens to
have a red neck. Compounds like this are more commonly called bahuvrihi
compounds, after a Sanskrit word that means “much rice,” meaning a rich person (i.e.,
someone who possesses much rice). Other examples in English are blueblood,
redhead, blockhead, white-collar.

Finally, there are obscured compounds, compounds whose elements
were at one time free morphemes, but which are no longer identifiable as such due to changes
in the language. Thus, we have the following words in Modern English, which were
originally compounds in Old English: orchard (plant-yard), lady
(bread-kneader), lord (bread-guardian), nostril (nose-hole),
window (wind-eye), hussy (house-wife), warlock(oath-breaker),
gospel (good-story), garlic (spear-leak), and so on. Today,
each of these words would be considered simplexes rather than compounds.

Portmanteau words and blends

A portmanteau is a word that blends two morphemes
into a single morpheme. Common examples are brunch (breakfast+lunch),
ginormous (giant+enormous), and motel
(motor+hotel). Newer examples are manscaping, mansplaining,
spork, jeggings, brony, Brangelina, sexting,
etc. Sometimes these are also called blends, and some linguists distinguish between
blends and portmanteaux.

Some people consider the following morphemes under the category of portmanteaux
rather than suffixing: –thon, -gate, -lympics, -mageddon. This may be
partially correct, but they may be on their way to becoming suffixes. With portmanteau
words there is a blending of phonemes from each word into a single morpheme.
Consider the word marathon, originally a place name, but introduced into
English in 1896 to describe a long race. We can add the end of this word to the
beginning of a word such as television to get telethon, describing
an especially long television program. But many words to which –thon can
be added are not truncated: consider
walkathon or Toyotathon. In these examples, -(a)thon acts
more like a suffix than a blend. In fact, the word walkathon was first
used in 1931, 18 years before telethon was first used. Similarly,
–gate does not indicate any connection with the Watergate hotel, but simply
means “political scandal,” and is usually added to complete rather than shortened morphemes.

The morpheme –lympics also seems to act midway between a portmaneau and
a suffix, since the primary use is in the word paralympics, a clear blend
of paraplegic and olympics. We also have the
Laff-A-Lympics and something
called the E-lympics,
both of which are based on Olympic-style contests. Its use in these
newly-created words suggests a productive quality that is not usually found in other
portmanteau words (i.e., we have the word brunch, but we don’t find *brinner
or *brupper, let alone *bridnight-snack).

Reduplication

English does not currently use reduplication, but it used to. Reduplication was
a primary method of creating the past tense of verbs, as you might know if you
happen to have studied Greek, Sanskrit, Latin or an early Germanic language like Gothic. In
Gothic the verb slepan “to sleep” formed its past tense sai-slep,
by reduplicating the initial s- into a new syllable at the front of a word. There
are a few words in Old English that preserve traces of reduplication, but it had
largely disappeared even by then. There is only one word
in (sort of) modern English which preserves a trace of reduplication:
the very old-fashioned word hight, meaning “to be named,” which occurs in
Chaucer, Spenser, and some particularly archaic-sounding 19th-century poetry.
The “gh” in the middle of the word was originally the beginning of the word and
the initial hi– was the reduplicating syllable.

Morpheme Internal Change (also called apophony)

Although most English nouns and verbs add inflectional suffixes to the end of the
root morpheme to signify different grammatical functions, there are many that make
internal changes to the morpheme instead. There are two types of morpheme internal
change in English.

1. Umlaut or mutation: Words affected by a front
mutation of the vowel. For example, while most nouns make their plurals by adding the
inflectional morpheme –s, others change the vowel within the base morpheme:
foot/feet, tooth/teeth, goose/geese; mouse/mice, louse/lice; and man/men, woman/women.
2. Ablaut or Gradation: While most verbs make
the past tense by adding an –ed morpheme, there are a large number that make vowel
changes to form tenses: drive/drove/driven, bite/bit/bitten, ring/rang/rung,
steal/stole/stolen, etc.

Suppletion

Suppletion is not so much the creation of a new morpheme as the substituting of
one morpheme for another. Suppletion is found throughout the language. For example,
while most adjectives make comparative and superlative
forms by adding the inflectional morphemes –er and –est, such as
tall, tall-er, tall-est, others simply use an entirely
different, originally unrelated morpheme. The comparative and superlative forms of
good are not *gooder and *goodest but better
and best, both formed from an archaic adjective bet that we no
longer use. Some verbs do this too. The past tense of go is went,
originally the past tense of the somewhat obsolete verb wend.
The verb to be uses three originally different verbs in its formation:
the beforms, the am/is forms and the was/were forms.
One tends to find suppletion in only the most common of words.