Modern English Word-Formation
C H A P T E R I
The ways in which new words are formed, and the factors which govern their
acceptance into the language, are generally taken very much for granted by
the average speaker. To understand a word, it is not necessary to know how
it is constructed, whether it is simple or complex, that is, whether or not
it can be broken down into two or more constituents. We are able to use a
word which is new to us when we find out what object or notion it denotes.
Some words, of course, are more ‘transparent’ than others. For example, in
the words unfathomable and indescribable we recognize the familiar pattern
of negative prefix + transitive word + adjective-forming suffix on which
many words of similar form are constructed. Knowing the pattern, we can
easily guess their meanings – ‘cannot be fathomed’ and ‘cannot be
described’ – although we are not surprised to find other similar-looking
words, for instance unfashionable and unfavourable for which this analysis
will not work. We recognize as ‘transparent’ the adjectives unassuming and
unheard-of, which taking for granted the fact that we cannot use assuming
and heard-of. We accept as quite natural the fact that although we can use
the verbs to pipe, to drum and to trumpet, we cannot use the verbs to piano
and to violin.
But when we meet new coinages, like tape-code, freak-out, shutup-ness and
beautician, we may not readily be able to explain our reactions to them.
Innovations in vocabulary are capable of arousing quite strong feelings in
people who may otherwise not be in the habit of thinking very much about
language. Quirk[1] quotes some letter to the press of a familiar kind,
written to protest about ‘horrible jargon’, such as breakdown, ‘vile’ words
like transportation, and the ‘atrocity’ lay-by.
Many linguists agree over the fact that the subject of word-formation has
not until recently received very much attention from descriptive
grammarians of English, or from scholars working in the field of general
linguistics. As a collection of different processes (compounding,
affixation, conversion, backformation, etc.) about which, as a group, it is
difficult to make general statements, word-formation usually makes a brief
appearance in one or two chapters of a grammar. Valerie Adams emphasizes
two main reasons why the subject has not been attractive to linguists: its
connections with the non-linguistic world of things and ideas, for which
words provide the names, and its equivocal position as between descriptive
and historical studies. A few brief remarks, which necessarily present a
much over-simplified picture, on the course which linguistics has taken in
the last hundred years will make this easier.
The nineteenth century, the period of great advances in historical and
comparative language study, saw the first claims of linguistics to be a
science, comparable in its methods with the natural sciences which were
also enjoying a period of exciting discovery. These claims rested on the
detailed study, by comparative linguists, of formal correspondences in the
Indo-European languages, and their realization that such study depended on
the assumption of certain natural ‘laws’ of sound change. As Robins[2]
observes in his discussion of the linguistics of the latter part of the
nineteenth century:
The history of a language is traced through recorded variations in
the forms and meanings of its words, and languages are proved to be
related by reason of their possession of worlds bearing formal and
semantic correspondences to each other such as cannot be attributed
to mere chance or to recent borrowing. If sound change were not
regular, if word-forms were subject to random, inexplicable, and
unmotivated variation in the course of time, such arguments would
lose their validity and linguistic relations could only be
established historically by extralinguistic evidence such as is
provided in the Romance field of languages descended from Latin.
The rise and development in the twentieth century of synchronic descriptive
linguistics meant a shift of emphasis from historical studies, but not from
the idea of linguistics as a science based on detailed observation and the
rigorous exclusion of all explanations depended on extralinguistic factors.
As early as 1876, Henry Sweet had written:
Before history must come a knowledge of what exists. We must learn
to observe things as they are, without regard to their origin, just
as a zoologist must learn to describe accurately a horse or any
other animal. Nor would the mere statements that the modern horse is
a descendant of a three-toed marsh quadruped be accepted as an
exhausted description... Such however is the course being pursued by
most antiquarian philologists.[3]
The most influential scholar concerned with the new linguistics was
Ferdinand de Saussure, who emphasized the distinction between external
linguistics – the study of the effects on a language of the history and
culture of its speakers, and internal linguistics – the study of its system
and rules. Language, studied synchronically, as a system of elements
definable in relation to one another, must be seen as a fixed state of
affairs at a particular point of time. It was internal linguistics,
stimulated by de Saussure’s works, that was to be the main concern of the
twentieth-century scholars, and within it there could be no place for the
study of the formation of words, with its close connection with the
external world and its implications of constant change. Any discussion of
new formations as such means the abandonment of the strict distinction
between history and the present moment. As Harris expressed in his
influential Structural Linguistics[4]: ‘The methods of descriptive
linguistics cannot treat of the productivity of elements since that is a
measure of the difference between our corpus and some future corpus of the
language.’ Leonard Bloomfield, whose book Language[5] was the next work of
major influence after that of de Saussure, re-emphasized the necessity of a
scientific approach, and the consequent difficulties in the way of studying
‘meaning’, and until the middle of the nineteen-fifties, interest was
centered on the isolating of minimal segments of speech, the description of
their distribution relative to one another, and their organization into
larger units. The fundamental unit of grammar was not the word but a
smaller unit, the morpheme.
The next major change of emphasis in linguistics was marked by the
publication in 1957 of Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures[6]. As Chomsky
stated it, the aim of linguistics was now seen to be ‘to make grammatical
explanations parallel in achievement to the behavior of the speaker who, on
the basis of a finite and accidental experience with language can produce
and understand an indefinite number of new sentences’[7]. The idea of
productivity, or creativity, previously excluded from linguistics, or
discussed in terms of probabilities in the effort to maintain the view of
language as existing in a static state, was seen to be of central
importance. But still word-formation remained a topic neglected by
linguists, and for several good reasons. Chomsky made explicit the
distinction, fundamental to linguistics today (and comparable to that made
by de Saussure between langue, the system of a language, and parole, the
set of utterances of the language), between linguistic competence, ‘the
speaker-hearer’s knowledge of his language’ and performance, ‘the actual
use of language in concrete situations’[8]. Linked with this distinction
are the notions of ‘grammaticalness’ and ‘acceptability’; in Chomsky’s
words, ‘Acceptability is a concept that belongs to the study of
competence’[9]. A ‘grammatical’ utterance is one which may be generated and
interpreted by the rules of the grammar; an ‘acceptable’ utterance is one
which is ‘perfectly natural and immediately comprehensible... and in no way
bizarre or outlandish’[10]. It is easy to show, as Chomsky does, that a
grammatical sentence may not be acceptable. For instance, this is the
cheese the rat the cat caught stole appears ‘bizarre’ and unacceptable
because we have difficulty in working it out, not because it breaks any
grammatical rules. Generally, however, it is to be expected that
grammaticalness and acceptability will go hand in hand where sentences are
concerned.
The ability to make and understand new words is obviously as much a part of
our linguistic competence as the ability to make and understand new
sentences, and so, as Pennanen[11] points out, ‘it is an obvious gap in
transformational grammars not to have made provision for treating word-
formation.’ But, as we have already noticed, we may readily thing of words,
like to piano and to violin, against which we can invoke no rule, but which
are definitely ‘unacceptable’ for no obvious reason. The incongruence of
grammaticality and acceptability that is, is far greater where words are
concerned than where sentences are concerned. It is so great, in fact, that
the exercise of setting out the ‘rules’ for forming words has so far seemed
to many linguists to be out of questionable usefulness. The occasions on
which we would have to describe the output of such rules as ‘grammatical
but non-occurring’[12] are just too numerous. And there are further
