Word Formation Process

A Word Formation Rule is a Morphological Process that

• AKA: Word Formation, Word Formation Rule.
• Context:
  • It can be a Word Borrowing Process ⇒ Loan Word, such as:
    • Schadenfreude in German.
    • "çuçuarana" in Portuguese ⇒ French "couguar" ⇒ “cougar”. (see Etymon).
  • It can be a Word Coinage Process ⇒ Neologism (e.g. soccer mom).
  • … ⇒ Eponym (e.g. watt).
  • It can be a Word Blending Process ⇒ Blended Word.
    • e.g. smoke + fog ⇒ smog.
  • It can involve a Morphological Rule.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • “cougar”(a member of Puma concolor species) ⇒ “cougar”(a middle-aged woman who prowls bars for younger men) is a Word Sense (?? Word Sense Assignment Process??).
• See: Morphological Process, Word Formation Rule, Derived Word Generation Process, Etymon.

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References

• (Wikipedia, 2009) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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).
  • 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)

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