CHAPTER 1. AN INTRODUCTION TO LEXICOLOGY Main issues: 1. Lexicology: introduction and definition; terminological issues 2. Language units 3.

Lexicology as a system 4. Relationships with other linguistic sciences 1. Object of study and terminology Complementary to the grammar of any language, the vocabulary joins together all the words of a language and associates to each word all the information required by the rules of grammar. Words play a tremendous role in human existence in that they are the basic representation of the world on an abstract level, i.e., that of the human mind. They are the vital instrument which enables humans to express themselves, to make their life better in a monolingual and multilingual society. As such, they may be used or interpreted either discretely or in the most diverse combinations or associations based on a wide range of criteria. In addition to their being used in everyday communication, words may be the material for different kinds of scientific analyses and interpretations. In a wider perspective, the sum total of words in a language as well as their ability to express concepts, objects, feelings, attitudes which may be very simple and linear or perhaps, very complex, intricate or sophisticated, the vocabulary reflects its speakers level of progress at a certain time interval or through the centuries. Chitoran (1973:96), for example, mentions Saussures suggestions regarding the existence of a network of associative fields covering the entire vocabulary and its structuring by means of a series of possible associations among lexical items. The former of the suggestions later evolved into the semantic field theory1 and the latter into several chapters discussing such word relationships as synonymy, antonymy, meronymy, holonymy, hyponymy, etc. All these aspects make the object of a science whose name, lexicology, first appeared in the 1820s, although concerns in and studies of words had already existed before these decades. Lexicology (<Gr. lexis + Gr. logos = the study of words) may be defined simply as the study of words (Grzega and Schner 2007:7), or the language science which focuses on vocabulary. Richards, Platt, Platt (1993:212) provide a formal definition, describing lexicology to be that branch of linguistics which studies the vocabulary items of a language, including their meanings and relations, and changes in their form and meaning through time. Terminological issues Like numerous other language sciences, lexicology has some terms which are peculiar to this field only, or which are very frequently used within this field framework. Lexicology works with words. To find a definition for word applicable in several languages is a rather difficult endeavour. Some linguists agree that word denotes the basic unit of a given language resulting from the association of a particular meaning to a particular group of sounds capable of a particular grammatical employment (Levitchi 1970: 13). Some other have a different opinion when they state that whatever a word is, it is not the same thing in all languages: it may not be possible to provide, for this sense of word, a definition which is valid in all languages except word is what native speakers think a word is (Matthews, 1972:75). At the same time, lexicology works with concepts, relationships, meanings, language changes along the centuries as well as context-dependent language changes. Both vocabulary and lexicon are terms used to denote the system formed by the sum total of words a language possesses.

The former, vocabulary, is of Latin origin and it displays the following basic meanings (Webster Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language 1996: 2129): 1: a list or collection of words or of words and phrases usually alphabetically arranged and explained or defined: LEXICON 2 a: a sum or stock of words employed by a language, group, individual, or work or in a field of knowledge b: a list or collection of terms or codes available for use (as in an indexing system) 3: a supply of expressive techniques or devices The latter, lexicon, is borrowed from Greek and it also has three meanings: 1: a book containing an alphabetical arrangement of the words in a language and their definitions: DICTIONARY 2 a: the vocabulary of a language, of an individual speaker or of a group of speakers or of a subject b: the total stock of morphemes in a language 3: repertoire, inventory Thus, at their first and second levels, the two terms are synonyms and broadly used, they are interchangeable as lexical alternatives to name a special type of book, i.e., the dictionary or to refer to the lexical knowledge of individuals or groups of speakers. Language units. Basics The basic working unit in lexicology is the lexeme, but in traditional grammar it may still be analyzed into smaller units which have a grammatical function and a meaning of their own. These smallest units with their own meaning are called morphemes. For example swell, swelled, swollen, swelling, swells can be further separated into [swell] + [-ed], [-en], [-ing] and [-s] and these endings are frequent with many other words. Nevertheless, while swell appears as a word, the rest of the endings will never occur discretely and this is the reason why swell is a free morpheme and the rest of the examples are bound/dependent morphemes (they will always have to be attached to words). The distinction between free and bound morphemes is necessary in chapter 2 when other groups of letters or phonemes, the suffixes are divided into lexical and grammatical ones. Lyons (1985:145) divides lexemes into (1) word-lexemes which, structurally consist of one word and (2) phrasal lexemes, whose forms are phrases in the traditional sense of the term, e.g. put up with, red herring, pig in a poke. Less pretentious approaches call lexemes one word units and phrasal lexemes multi-word units. What Lyons leaves aside is the internal structure of words, which even if in one unit, the may have a rather complex structure: both home and unforgettable are one word units, but while home cannot be separated into free + dependent morphemes, unforgettable shows the following structure [un-] + [for-] + [get]+ [able]. Lexeme or word denotes the basic unit of a given language resulting from the association of a particular meaning to a particular group of sounds capable of a particular grammatical employment. Lexical formation is a syntagm used to denote diverse word combinations which have a meaning of their own, which is the case with compounds, idiomatic structures or even phrasal verbs. A word which is quite common in lexicology is base, which was introduced by Quirk et al (1972, 1985) who distinguish between base and stem as basic terms in dealing with the constituents in the word building processes. Base is a generic term used with reference to any lexical unit which accepts affixes, while stem represents that form of a word stripped of all affixes which are recognizable as such in English. For example, man, person, apply are accepted as stems, while a complex word like depolarization superficially looks like a simple linear string of items (Quirk, 1985: 1518)

The English lexicon is so vast and varied that it is impossible to classify it into neat categories (Crystal 1985: 170). By and large, John Lyons (1985:145) divides it into (1) wordlexemes which, structurally consist of one word and (2) phrasal lexemes, whose forms are phrases in the traditional sense of the term, e.g. put up with, red herring, pig in a poke. Phrasal lexemes, also known as word combinations, idiomatic expressions, set phrases or phrasemes have become the object of study for phraseology, wherein individual scholars apply different terms to the same category (or the same term to different categories) (Cowie 2001: 16). Phrasal lexemes include several categories of lexical associations out of which this selection includes idioms, collocations a.s.o (Melciuk in Cowie 2001: 30). Other linguists include under phrasal lexemes both clichs and proverbs (Savin 2010: 62). Nevertheless, words associations may preserve the same form, or they may change it depending on the text grammatical requirements: A set phrase is an association of words which never changes its form: (a) She used to work from dawn to dusk. (b) Paul is always in a bad mood. An idiom is, in its narrow meaning, an expression of a given language that is peculiar to itself grammatically or cannot be understood from the individual meanings of its elements, as in keep tabs on (informally) = to observe carefully. A collocation is a word or phrase which is often used with another word or phrase, in a way that sounds correct to people who have spoken the language all their lives. In the phrase 'a hard frost', 'hard' is a collocation of 'frost' and 'strong' would not sound natural. In its narrow meaning, collocation refers to: [C] the combination of words formed when two or more words are often used together in a way that sounds correct The phrase 'a hard frost' is a collocation. In its broad meaning, collocation refers to [U] the regular use of some words and phrases with others, especially in a way which is difficult to guess A clich is a trite or overused expression or idea. A clich is actually a fragment of language apparently dying, yet unable to die (Crystal 186) or a phrase which has become so hackneyed that scrupulous speakers and writers shrink from it because they feel that its use is an insult to the intelligence of their auditor or audience, reader or public (Partridge 1969: 73). Clichs emerge when expressions outlive their usefulness as conveyors of information. Some linguists say No to clich usage since they characterize speakers to be lazy thinkers, unimaginative minds unable to yield their own wording patterns. At the same time, if they use learned clichs they wish to impress or to show off. There also exists a category of clich supporters who admit these constructions to fill an awkward gap in conversation, and thus, they act as lexical life-jackets. They may be used speech situations of the most different kinds. Crystal (1985 : 186) enumerates - the passing remarks as people recognize each other in the street but with no time to stop - the self-conscious politeness of strangers on a train - forced interactions in mundane events (parties, conferences, etc) - the desperate platitudes which follow unhappy events (vigils, funerals) Defining clichs to be fragments of language apparently dying, yet unable to die, the linguist considers that a best label for them would be lexical zombies (Crystal, 1996). Clichs emerge when expressions outlive their usefulness as conveyors of information. They are dying not from underuse, as with the gradual disappearance of old-fashioned words, but from overuse. Such phrases as: at this moment in time, and every Tom, Dick and Harry have been used so frequently that they have lost their power to inform; they have become trite. Pilch (1993)

considers metaphors, with their conventional interpretations, to be clichs: to add insult to injury, much of muchness a blessing in disguise, dead as a doornail, from times immemorial At all periods in the history of a language a new word may suddenly appear as if from nowhere, or a new word may be deliberately created by one man who tells the world exactly what he is doing. (Potter, 1990) Longer chunks of language, the proverbs represent not only a repository of culture and tradition, or a symbol of national wisdom, but also the object of study of paremiology. In a comparative approach to English and Romanian proverbs, they may be similar in content or in structure or in both or they may be language-specific both in form and in content. Lexicology as a system The general interrelationship and interdependence of phenomena in nature and the society are analyzed and interpreted through the notion of system. Consequently, system denotes not merely the sum total of the English words to collect and explain them is the task of lexicography. Lexicology studies recurrent patterns of semantic relationships, and of any formal, phonological, morphological or contextual means by which they may be rendered. It aims at systematization. Linguistic relationships between words may be of two kinds: syntagmatic and paradigmatic. The syntagmatic relationships are based on the linear character of speech, i.e. on the influence of the context. Context is the minimum stretch of speech necessary and sufficient to determine which of the possible meanings of a polysemantic word is meant. In some cases the microcontext i.e., a sentence or a syntagm is not sufficient and the speaker requires a broader stretch of words to grasp the message. Paradigmatic linguistic relationships determining the system of the vocabulary are based on the interdependence of words within the vocabulary (classes, subclasses, and groups of words). Comparing words within the same word family, one can notice the difference in the arrangement of morphemes: house-dog and dog-house. In fact, any change in one word will cause changes in one or several other words. Good illustrations for this statement are the represented by the influence of loans upon native words Thus, in O.E. harvest originally meant both the gathering of grain and the season of reaping. Beginning with the end of the 14th century, after the Latin word autumnus was accepted in English, the second meaning of the native word was lost and it was replaced by the Latin word. Theoretical and practical importance of lexicology The theoretical value becomes obvious if we realize that it forms the study of one of the three main aspects of language, i.e., the vocabulary. It came into being to meet the needs of many different branches of applied linguistics, out of which it is worthwhile naming lexicography, second language acquisition, teaching foreign languages, the creation and development of the terminological data-bases. Lexicology provides for the systematic description of the present-day vocabulary, of the various tones in the usage of words, emphasizing the means which suggest the expressiveness of words as well as their stylistic value. Types/branches of lexicology Traditional lexicology, according to Chitoran (1973:97), deals with three types of lexical relationships, semantic, morph-semantic and syntagmatic. The semantic ties are based on the word signification and they result in synonymic and antonymic series of words. The morphosemantic ties characterize the lexical items derived from a common basic element and they result in what will be called word associations or word families, illustrated by derivationally related words friend, friendly, unfriendliness, friendship, etc. The synatgmatic ties are further

subdivided by the Romanian linguist into a) free syntagmatic ties, obtaining among lexical items such as sit and any of the following: chair, table, down, etc. in such utterances as sit on a chair, sit at the table, sit down, etc. (1973:98) and b) stereotype syntagmatic ties of the type established among lexical items which are part of set idioms and phrases. It is difficult enough to draw a clear-cut distinction between the two aspects of lexicology as they complement each other in that the description of the contemporary lexical system is based on the data supplied by historical studies, while the diachronic approach looks upon the contemporary lexical system as a starting point. General lexicology considers the general study of words and vocabulary, irrespective of the specific features of any particular language. Special lexicology deals with description of the characteristic peculiarities in the vocabulary of a language in focus. Every special lexicology is based on principles of general lexicology, which in turn, is part of general linguistics. The evolution of any vocabulary, as well as its single elements makes the object of interest of historical (diachronic) lexicology, which discusses the origin of various words and the change, development and investigates the linguistic and extralinguistic factors modifying their structure, meaning and usage. Descriptive (or synchronic) lexicology considers the vocabulary of a given language within the limits of a time interval in its evolution. It is difficult enough to draw a clear-cut distinction between the two aspects of lexicology as they complement each other in that the description of the contemporary lexical system is based on the data supplied by historical studies, while the diachronic approach looks upon the contemporary lexical system as a starting point. In point of methodology, lexicology consists of three subdivisions: Morphophonemics - studies the significant differences of pronunciation of a single morpheme, or in other words, the relationships between morphology and phonology. It involves the investigation of the phonological variations within morphemes usually marking different grammatical functions. That would be simply illustrated with distinctions as what follows: Nation national Half halves Lexical semantics/semasiology studies the meaning of the words, their significance and the dynamics of the meanings; semantic relations between words: synonymy, polysemy, hyponymy, antonymy, and eponymy. The techniques used in the analysis of meaning are the contextualization of meaning and the problem of linguistic ambiguity. Etymology pertains to lexical history. It studies the biography of words, that is, it records the history of a word from its contemporary existence down to its origins. Or, in other words, it investigates the origins of lexemes, the affinities they may have or they may have had with to each other, and how they have changed their meaning and form to to reach their present position. This last subdivision joins together morphophonemics and semasiology since along the centuries words may have undergone significant changes either in their form or in their meanings, or in both. The branch of linguistics dealing with causal relationships between the way language works and develops, on the one hand and the facts of social life on the other hand is known as sociolinguistics. Relationships with other linguistic sciences Due to its status of a branch of linguistics, lexicology is interrelated with some other branches of linguistics, namely phonetics and phonology, grammar (morphology, syntax and semantics), stylistics and lexicography. Lexicology, Phonetics and Phonology

Its connection with phonetics is more than obvious: on an acoustic level words are made up of phonemes and these participate in the signification of words. The formmeaning unit is conditioned by a number of phonological features: the importance of the phonemic sequence and arrangement may be revealed by a transposition of parts of words. Discrimination between words may also be made by means of stress, particularly in the case of those words which may play several roles at the sentence level, depending on the position they hold within the mentioned space. Consider the example of the word progress which behaves as a verb and as a noun, and where the difference in pronunciation is felt due to the word stress. My client will progress with her work. /prugres/ No progress has been recorded so far. /prugres/ Phonology provides information concerning the stress of the words, the behaviour of the words (in terms of grammar), the process of phonetic adaptation of neologisms, the phonetic oppositions which play a considerable role in the differentiation of sound groups. Phonological consequences of word formation include: - stress variation with consequent differences in vowel pronunciation - photograph /futgra:f/ - photographic /futgrfik/ - photography /ftogrfi/ - photographer /ftogrfr/ - vowel alteration while the stress is constant: - nation /nein/ - national /nenl/ - as a rule, affixes are unstressed, but: a) a few suffixes assume primary stress b) prefixes have secondary stress if: i) they are disyllabic (inter) ii) the base begins with an unstressed syllable iii) they are new uses of old items Lexicology and Stylistics Stylistics studies many items treated in lexicology. These are items of meaning, synonymy, differentiation of vocabulary according to the functional styles or registers, and some other issues. Hidden connotations involved by just few sounds which are frequently part of many words (see suffixes) will remain less suggestive to those speakers of English less familiar with lexicology. Lexicology and Grammar. There can be no discussion of one without the other: even isolated words, as they are presented into a dictionary entry, bear a definite relationship with the grammatical system of a language, for they belong to some part of speech and conform to some characteristics peculiar to the word class they may be assigned to. Words seldom occur in isolation. They are arranged into certain patterns conveying relationship messages between the things for which they stand; therefore alongside with the lexical meaning each word also circumscribes a certain percentage of grammatical meaning. The close ties between lexicology and grammar are obvious in the study of conversion, viewed as a productive word-building process. Grammar, by means of its two component chapters, morphology and syntax, makes use of lexemes; consequently, they become its instruments. Lexemes fall into several grammatical categories, which are traditionally labeled as parts of speech. These parts of speech are defined both lexically and grammatically since the lexical and grammatical meanings are closely interrelated. The enrichment of the vocabulary by means of conversion or change of the grammatical category also points to the connection existing between lexicology and grammar.

Lexicology and Lexicography Closely related to lexicology, in that it makes use of the discoveries of lexicologists, lexicography is that branch of applied linguistics which deals with the theory and practice of compiling dictionaries. Lexicography is that branch of linguistics which explains and defines the meanings of the words as well as their classifications and enlisting in glossaries, dictionaries, lexicons or encyclopedias. In spite of its apparent subordination to lexicology, lexicography is, in fact, some centuries older than the former, and even if without any basic theory, various lists of words, based on different criteria were produced many centuries before the birth of lexicology. Lexicology and Terminology Terminology is a field of growing interest among the other language sciences, first of all, as a consequence of the need of experts working with specialist knowledge which involves technical words for their professional communication purposes. By technical words we mean those particular words belonging to a well-defined field of activity. Practice shows that many of the common words reveal new meanings when they appear in professional texts or contexts. This new branch or relative of lexicology, terminology, is highly useful in the case of non-technically trained professional translators who have to perform technical translations, it is important in education and training; it is helpful in creating data bases, translation memories or even glossaries, lexicons or specialist dictionaries either for personal or for professional communities use. Word formation is that branch of the sciences of language which studies the patterns on which a language forms new lexical units, i.e., words. Word formation is a traditional label, but it does not generally cover all the possible ways creating everything that can be called a word. There has not been common acceptance as far as terminology with word formation is concerned. Thus, for a first example, back formation, back fusion and back derivation have been used to denote the same word building mechanism, elision and contraction mainly describe the same letter-losing process, and the way abbreviation has been given several interpretations, which are quite different from one another. In short, there are as many word building processes and as many meanings assigned to the terms used to denote the lexical processes as sources of documentation. Formation is a process word and an object word; it refers to the making of certain composite structures and to the structures themselves. (Pei, 1968: 163) Interest in word formation may have gone hand in hand with interesting language, in general and this is obvious from the commentaries which have been scattered throughout the centuries since Panini, who provided a detailed description of Sanskrit word formation and which come up to the present day. Many of the questions which have not found an answer yet, and which had been asked in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries show the little advance since Paninis work. An explanation could rely on the fact that linguistics received a boost only in the early years of the 20th century. Saussures distinction between diachrony and synchrony has exercise a profound effect upon linguistic studies since 1916 and effectively precluded the study of word formation where synchrony and diachrony are most fruitfully considered together (Adams 1973:5). This is the case of Jespersen (1942), who merged the synchronic and diachronic views in his approach to word formation, some linguists considered this domain either diachronically (Koziol 1937) or synchronically (Bloomfield 1935). Much has been written on word formation, and through different perspectives: A phonological point of view: Halle, 1973, Lighter, 1975 Syntactic point of view: Jackendoff, 1975, Roeper and Siegel, 1978;

 A semantic point of view: Leech, 1975, Lyons, 1977 Nevertheless, the year 1960 witnessed the publication of a monumental work in the specialist literature, i.e., Marchands The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-Formation, an encyclopedic work which has not been surpassed by any other even half a century after its first edition. A remarkable contribution to the field came out almost twenty years later, with Laurie Bauers English Word-Formation (Cambridge University Press, 1983). The need for exchanging ideas in a globalized society has had an impact on the development of lexicology and especially of lexicography since communicators demand more and more complex and well documented dictionaries to express themselves or for translational purposes. While lexicographers will have to make use of accurate instruments to describe words properly, it is the lexicologists task provide them. CONCLUSIONS Lexicology is a science about words, their internal organization, their constituent parts and their relationships. Remarkable among the other linguistic sciences for both its theoretical background and its practical implications in facilitating the language acquisition process, lexicology may be of great help to learners of foreign languages for its main object is to make general statements with a view to describing part of words, simple words and complex combinations of words. Lexicology is to be understood in close connection with phonetics, etymology, grammar and semantics since all these domains of language interpretation basically rely on words be they considered separately or as part of smaller or larger contexts. CHAPTER 3. BASE-REDUCING WORD BUILDING MECHANISMS Main issues: A. Abbreviation B. Clipping C. Ellipsis D. Contraction E. Back-formation Introduction The impulse to shorten words is an old one, and the many ways by which words may be reduced has resulted not only in a number of terms to denominate these words, but also in some degree of confusion with regard to the diversity and overlapping use of specialist terminology. Mainly, words may reduce their form by losing one or more front, medial or final position syllables. They may equally shrink, when initial letters in syntagms with well-defined meanings are joined together to create new words. The reduction to a couple or a string of letters has been known in the specialist literature as shortening, abbreviation, clipping, contraction, truncation or reduction. The term reduction will be used as a cover term for several mechanisms which act upon words to restrict them so as to be easily understood and to allow speakers to use them and save both their time and energy. Reductions include abbreviation, clipping, (lexical) ellipsis, contraction, elision and backformation. Irrespective of the mechanism underlying them, abbreviations have a high frequency of occurrence and this is reflected by the diversity of dictionaries of abbreviations. A. Abbreviation Abbreviation was a practice in use nearly 150 years ago. The term originates in the Latin verb abbreviare, abbreviate in its English version and it means to reduce to a shorter form. From a lexicological perspective, abbreviation is essentially a process of shortening either one

word or associations of words which have a long-established meaning and, in some instances, a well-defined context of usage. Thus, words, syntagms or set phrases may be reduced to their initial letter. Phonetically, this reduction divides them into those being read as combinations of the alphabet letters, and those being pronounced as simple words, which suggest no reduction whatsoever. 1. Initialization The groups of words which are uttered by the letters of the alphabet are known as initialisms or alphabetisms, and they are very frequent in everyday speech, in personal or in business correspondence as well as in the scientific and technical register. Readers come across them frequently in journalese, the language of the media, where time and space are crucial. Out of the rich set of initialisms, the following were selected, for obvious practical purposes: VIP = very important person CV = curriculum vitae WHO = World Health Organization PLO = Palestine Liberation Organization ANC = African National Congress UN = United Nations MP = Member of Parliament PM = Prime Minister AGM = an annual general meeting NBC = National Broadcasting Company HRH = Her/His Royal Highness NUM = National Union of Mineworkers NSPCC = National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children POW = Prisoner of War PR = public relations; pupil reaction (med.) ESP = English for Specific Purposes LSP = language for specific purposes AD = Anno Domini HR = Human Resources GI = Governmental Issue GP = general practitioner BC = before Christ CO = Cartographic operations or Colorado CNN = Cable News Network RSPCA = Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals BBA = bachelor of business administration Initialisms may be spelt in small letters, with considerable difference in meaning, as in the examples: esp = extrasensory perception vs ESP above km (kilometer) vs KM (Kansas Mapper). Nevertheless, there still exist spelling variants which involve no change in meaning, as in: kHz or KHz, in kW and KW . Initialisms may be spelt in small letters, as in the examples below: a.k.a. = also known as asap = as soon as possible uv = ultra violet

fp = freezing point pb = paperback hr = here or hour Initialisms also illustrate cases of facetious forms, as it is the case with TGIF which is the short for Thank God Its Friday. Some initialisms are a must in the correspondence practice, easily noticeable on a letter/fax/envelope: Reductions of proper names are not unusual in English: MM, BB; they nevertheless may create difficulties to a foreigner for such abbreviations are meaningful either to a small community who know the persons by their initials or only if the person whose name is abbreviated benefits from some kind of reputation. Initialisms are practically used in all branches of sciences whose terminologies rely on common or special technical abbreviations, symbols and signs. Thus, in point of usage, these reductions may be divided into: those shared by several scientific branches: A.C. (alternative current), D.C. (direct current); those peculiar to one science: - names of elements or compounds, in chemistry (P phosphorus, S sulphur, CO2 , H2O, etc.) - units of measure in physics (J joule, W for watt, Hz Hertz, etc.) - ready-made patterns which include personal names (FFT < fast Fourier transform, DFT < discrete Fourier transform, HBS < Harry Benjamins Syndrome, DHL < from the initials of the founders names, Adrian Dalsey, Larry Hillblom and Robert Lynn, KZK equation < R.V. Khokhlov, E.A. Zabolotskaya and V.P. Kuznetsov, SAM < scanning Auger microprobe etc.) Etymologically, abbreviations used in sciences originate in Latin, and they are pronounced in their Latin form, as in the table below; nevertheless, there also are words which are read only in English: Abbrev. Latin - full form English version ca - approximately c.f. - confer - compare e.g. - exempli gratia - for example et. al. - et alibi/alii/alis - and elsewhere/others etc. - et caetera - and so on id./ibid. ibidem - in the same place; in the same place or page quoted above i.e. - id est - that is MS manuscriptum - manuscript p.m. - post meridiem - in the afternoon a.m. - ante meridiem - in the morning op. cit. - opera citato - in the work cited sc - which means v - vide consult - see v.i. - vide infra - see/look below v.s. - vide supra - see earlier / look above on this page vs. - versus - turned against viz videlicet - namely sic. - Indicates a misspelling or error in a quoted source, in order to verify to the reader that the researcher did not create a typographical error, but instead exactly reproduces the way the word or statement appeared in the original material et pass - et passim /pa:sm/ here and there/ and in the folowing

Not all of the initialisms use the first letters of the constituent words; Ph.D., for example, uses the first two letters of the word philosophy. While GHQ (general headquarters) and TV (television) take a letter from the middle of the word to place it after the initial in the first element of the syntagm, in other cases the initial is followed by the last letter in a word. 2. Acronyms The transition from initialisms to acronyms can be ambiguous, as abbreviations may be reduced to their initials, which are uttered not as letters of the alphabet taken separately, but as one word, such as laser. This is the case of NATO, UNESCO, UNICEF, MASH, on the one hand, and radar as well as the already mentioned laser, on the other. Some acronyms (radar and laser) have become so well established that their acronymic origin is all but forgotten; their spelling as ordinary words, without any capital letter or punctuation is an index of their assimilation or adoption by daily practice and usage and then by dictionaries. Etymologically, acronym comes from Greek (acr- which means topmost; akro= extreme + -onyma, name) and it is used to refer to a word formed from the initial letters of other words and it was unrecorded before 1943. The term is used to denote a word that is pronounced syllabically, like an ordinary word rather than a sequence of the letters constituting it; but the distinction is not common in general use. In this narrower sense, acronyms were rare before 1930s. In the majority of the instances, initials have remained distinct and are still recognizable as such (Wood 1969:125). Wood gives an example which may have been unique at the time of its creation, but the pattern proved successful half a century later. The linguist mentions that during WWII, the pipeline laid beneath the English Channel to supply oil to the armies in France was known as Pluto (Pipe Line Under The Ocean). The distinction and recognizability of the initials included in set phrases is noticeable in numerous examples: BAFTA= British Academy of Film and Television Arts BOSS = Bureau of State Security E.U. = European Union M.A.S.H. = mobile army surgical hospital A.A.A. = Agricultural Adjustment Administration or American Automobile Association Most early acronyms arouse in beaurocracy and military use; this was the case with asdic and with flak or flack which was borrowed from German, Fl(ieger)a(bwehr)k(anone), and which literally meant: an aircraft defense gun. Many recent acronyms seem to have been created in reverse, with the creator aiming to create a suitable word and then to find an appropriate expanded form; this is particularly characteristic of the names of organizations ASH (Action on Smoking and Health), NOW (National Organization of Women) or CHIP (Childrens Health Insurance Program). The creation of facetious acronyms, mainly on the model of yuppie (< young urban professional + -ie), has been a popular recreation in recent years, but on a more serious level, acronyms have proliferated in technical use. Some abbreviations are only written forms; they are still pronounced as full words: Mr, Dr, St (Saint or Street).Very few examples of abbreviate terms are pronounced in a hybrid form, i.e., with some elements pronounced alphabetically and some others acronymically: UEFA /jueifa/, UNO/jun u/. As products of well established patterns, abbreviations not only show a high frequency of occurrence but a tendency to grow in number. That is why, dictionaries as well as other scientific volumes include a list of abbreviations used therein, this pointing to their being restricted to the respective books. The tendency to create abbreviations is noticeable not only in the case of authors of comprehensive works as is the case with dictionaries but with authors of studies or articles. In these latter cases, abbreviations are accounted for in the introductory part of the study/article (no matter whether this article/study pertains to the scientific or journalistic style).

B. Clipping This is another mechanism based on the shortening of the existing word, shortening which does not entail a change of meaning. Clipping, also known as shortening, curtailing, contraction is rather old, as its history starts in the Middle English period, as back as the 13th century. It has proved to be really productive all along the last two centuries. Abbreviation is similar to clipping in that they both may be understood to have both a broad and a restricted meaning, which is not to be confused for contracted, although the metalanguage seems to make no distinction between the two. To clip will be used to denote the process of cutting off elements of a word. The clipped words may be classified according to, at least, two principles (a) the semantic principle and (b) the formal principle. Based on semantics, the contracted words are subdivided into (1) synonymic variants of the lexeme which stand for the prototype and (2) semantically different variants of the lexeme they originate in. The synonymic variants of the prototype may be illustrated by examples as phone (< telephone), piano (< pianoforte) ad (< advertisment), mike (< microphone), flu (< influenza), maam (< madam), telly (< television), etc. The semantically different variants of their prototypes which have developed meanings of their own are exemplified by the term story (<history): in a former period of its use, this word meant (1) a historical narrative/anecdote, (2) a book of history and (3) historic writing/records, but they have all become obsolete. Nowadays the word has restricted its meaning so as to denote a narrative of real or fictitious events designated for the entertainment of the hearers or readers. Formally, words may lose their initial, or their central, or even their final part, which allows for their classification into four basic types of clipping: aphaeresis or fore-clipping: the initial part of the word is clipped: motor-car - car periwig - wig omnibus - bus acute - cute alligator - gator amend - mend cello - violoncello *Proper names: Elisabeth - Beth Antony - Tony syncope or medial clipping designates the loss of some phonemes the middle part of the word. fantasy - fancy madam - maam pacificist - pacifist spectacles - specs mathematics - maths ditto - do Special poetical forms: ever - eer, never - neer, whatever - whater, whichever - whicher *Proper names: Pip - Phillip Pipa - Phillipa apocope or back-clipping: the final part of the word is clipped. Unlike the preceding word forming mechanisms, this one is very productive:

doc - doctor ad - advertisment cinema - cinematograph taxi - taximeter-cabriolet curio - curiosity croc - crocodile piano - pianoforte rep - representative sec - second fad - fadaise navy - navigator (meaning canaldigger and later on railway labourer, in Woods 1969:120) The advertising industry largely uses such types of clippings, many trade names being contracted forms of well-known words: Lux -luxury Brillo -brilliant Fab -fabulous *Proper names: Ron -Ronald Cleo -Cleopatra Di -Diana Vic -Victor /Victoria Al -Alexander double clipping is the fourth category of clipped words which are doubly clipped, losing thus both the initial and the final part. They are quite few in the daily vocabulary and they may be exemplified both by common and by proper nouns: flu -influenza fridge -refrigerator tec -detective jam - pyjamas *Proper names: Liz -Elisabeth Liv-Olivia Gus -Augustus As the forms of clippings can be identical in spelling, clipping is one of the major sources of homonymy in English. For example, cab may stand for the following: (1) cabbage, (2) cabriolet, (3) cabin, (4) cabinet, and (5) cable. (Lexical) Ellipsis The term comes from the Greek lleipsis, which means omission. According to Quirk et al. (1985: 883-4), ellipsis may be more strictly described as 'grammatical omission', in contrast to other kinds of omission in language, which include the loss of phonological units (syllable), morphological units (morphemes) or grammatical units (words). The loss of the front syllable(s) or aphaeresis, is frequent in everyday speech, where 'cos is preferred to because. Grammatical ellipsis appears both in written literature, as in [1] or [2] below, and in conversations or written dialogues, as in [3] and [4]: [1] "Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something." (Plato)

[2] "Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater." (William Hazlitt) [3] A: Is your daughter at home? B: Probably. [A -She is probably at home.] (Quirk et al. 1985: 848) [4] A: Who sent you? B : The manager. [S - The manager sent me.] (Quirk et al. 1985: 848) The same phenomenon of omission was proven active at the level of the English vocabulary. This particular application of omission known as lexical ellipsis is a special form of clipping consisting in the omission of a word which is usually part of a phrase: a private was originally a private soldier, a superior, a superior officer, finals, final examinations. The result of this procedure is the change of the grammatical category of the word, the newly formed thus being converted into something else. Adjectives as private, superior or final become nouns; they get a(n) in/definite article or they are used in the plural. Classical examples of ellipsis include: principals - the principal performers submarine - submarine vessel (boat) wireless - wireless telegraphy executive - an executive position in a firm Although formally they appear to be conversions, their transformation is accounted for by the omission of an element which is actually part of a collocation and not by functional shifts, which may occur at sentence level. Ellipsis can be accompanied by (a) the back-clipping of the first term: graduate student - grad medical student - med popular concert - pop preliminary examination(s) -prelim(s) public house - pub zoological garden - zoo (b) or by the back-clipping of the first term and its suffixation: grandmother - granny moving picture - movie Even if less productive, for the last hundred years lexical ellipsis has contributed to the enrichment of the English vocabulary. Contraction The term was acknowledged in English in 14th century. It originates in the Latin contraction, meaning a drawing together, and it was used in lexicology in relation to those shortenings which are often, but not in all of the cases, marked by an apostrophe, and which concern transformations or reductions applicable mainly in the case of grammatical forms. Therefore, the same noticeable observation relates ellipsis to contraction: they were proven to show a wider range of applications in grammar than in lexicology. Nevertheless, they do share a feature with applicability in the fields of lexicology and lexicography, i.e., they both produce new words. Within the framework of grammar, the following major types of contractions: - at the level of auxiliary verbs (Ill, Im, youre, youve) - at the level of modal verbs (you otta < you ought to, gotta < to have got to) - at the level of verb forms: negative and interrogative-negative (dont, wont, shant, arent, etc. ) - at the level of pronouns (lets) - at the level of operators, in if-clauses (If I hadda seen her, I woulda told her, in Quirk et al. 1985: 1012)2.

According to Quirk et al (1985: 129) all these three types of contractions are institutionalized are acknowledged as standard forms in English grammar, there have been recorded non-standard contractions as: - aint, peculiar to American English, which is a substitute for am not, is not, are not, has not and have not. - amnt, which is Scottish and Irish. Bryson (1980: 76), on the other hand, considers contraction at the level of (set) phrases: good bye - God be with you, and hello, which was in OE hal beo thu or whole be thou, blimey (Blind me! rather vulgar) Elision Some lexicologists consider and describe elision as a variety of contraction. Elision is a phenomenon of omission or slurring (eliding) of one or more vowels, consonants or syllables (McArthur 19: 319), which is manifest both in speech and writing. Omissions, like ellipsis, are manifest at a phonological level (see, for example the correct pronunciation of muscle, subtle, scenic, etc). Slurring may affect two or more words which ultimately fuse into one brand new lexical unit. These fusions disregard specificities, such as auxiliary verbs, negations, pronouns, etc. Noticeable examples of elision include contractions with or without an apostrophe: Guns n Roses, wanna see want to see, wannbe want to be, gimme give me or, finally leme let me, there is no sign of distinction peculiar to contraction, so there no case of contraction. Back-formation This word-creating mechanism has been used since the 14th century, and has become more active since the 19th century, even if under different names, such as back-derivation or regression. In the 1880s, the term back-formation denoted both the process and the result. Nowadays, this process is much used in the technical terminology to lase - laser, hydrotrope -hydrotropic. Synchronically considered, the back-derivation is the process of forming new words by clipping already existing words. Diachronically, new words are formed due to a misinterpretation of the structure of the word. This misinterpretation is either because of the analogy the speakers may resort to, in case they do not know too much about the word they use or because of their lack of word etymology knowledge. It accounts for the creation of one word from another by removing rather than adding an element, which is a real or supposed affix. According to Jespersen (1982: 164), back-derivations owe their origin to one part of a word being mistaken for some derivative suffix (or, very rarely, prefix). The adverbs sideling, groveling and darkling were originally formed by means of the adverbial ending ling, but in phrases as he walks sideling, he lies groveling they look exactly like participles in ing. The consequence of this resembling was that the verbs to sidle, to grovel and to darkle were derived from them by the subtraction of ing. The Banting cure was named after one Mr. Banting, and the occasional verb to bant is, accordingly, a back-derivation. Wood (1969: 126) also mentions the verb to maffick (to go wild with joy), which was in common use at the beginning of the 20th century originates in a geographical name. The meaning of this verb originates in the Mafeking. When the ending y is subtracted, adjectives may become nouns or verbs: Adjective - noun greedy - greed (1600) Adjective - verb lazy - to laze

cosy - to cose expletive - to explete jeopardy - to jeopardy frivolous - to frivol Noun - adjective difficulty -difficult puppy - pup petty - pet In modern English, the great majority of back-derivations are verbs: Noun - verb enthusiasm - to enthuse donation - to donate liaison - to liaise television - to televise resurrection - to resurrect electrocution - to electrocute accreditation- to accredit television - to televise housekeeping - to housekeep laser - to lase peddler - to peddle burglar - to burgle editor - to edit Several verbs come from nouns in er, -ar, -or which were not originally agent nouns; butcher is in French boucher < bouch a buck, a goat with no corresponding verb, but in English it has given rise to the rare verb to butch and to the noun butch-knife. The oldest examples of back-derivations come from the 14th century, and they include the verb to backbite; the 16th century brought the verbs to partake, to soothsay and cornycatch (Shakespeare). Although these creations have come down to present-day English since the 14th century, not all of them were easily accepted. The Longman Dictionary of the English Language (1991: 113) highlights words as donate (dating from 1785) and enthuse (from 1827) which have had a long struggle to gain acceptance, and more recent forms such as self-destruct and explete (to utter expletives) are quite often criticized. Nowadays, this process is much used in technical terminologies. CONCLUSIONS The reduction of words involves either the reduction of long syntagms or formations or the cutting off of ending, beginning, or middle syllables or both beginning and ending syllables. The reduction to initial letters of the longer strings of words results in three types of abbreviations: the words spelt in capital letters, the words spelt in small letters and the combinations of capital and small letters. Clippings not only become more and more numerous but they are more and more frequent in everyday speech. The less productive of the reducing mechanisms, back-formation differs from backclipping in that the suffixes which are cut off were taken for grammatical suffixes. CHAPTER 4. BASE-CREATING WORD BUILDING MECHANISMS Main issues

A. Coining B. Lexical isolates C. Eponymy D. Toponymy Introduction The English vocabulary is enriched not only by borrowing words from other languages or from the updating of older words. The creative force of the human mind has devised other procedures intended to create new words, which are generically called coining or inventing methods. Within these generic denominations, several word-creating methods will be described. They consider the ability of writers, translators and scientists to construct new words in the most imaginative way, simply by randomly choosing letters which joined together result in words. Words may be tailored as hybrids which weld foreign or native words with foreign or native affixes into new lexical structures. Since biblical times proper names were attributed to places or to tribes or groups of people, and this recycling of the personal name to refer to common nouns seems to become a word-creating solution. This chapter looks into the resourcefulness of word-creators and their word-creating mechanisms. A. Coining Definition The term coin was introduced in the English vocabulary in the 14th century, when it meant to make a coin especially by stamping or to convert (metal) into coins. Beginning with the 17th century, it was used in the sense to create, invent (a phrase). This term is used either to designate the process of linguistic inventing or the result of this inventing, the word or the phrase, respectively. Like loan and borrowing, the term coinage is based on an ancient analogy between language and money. The creation of words without the use of earlier words is rare, for ex. googol, the term for the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros or 10100 introduced by the American mathematician Edward Kasner, whose 9-year-old nephew coined it when asked to think up a name for a very big number. The creation of words out of nowhere has still been a widely used practice which some lexicographers did consider in their dictionary compiling projects. Nevertheless, according to Algeo (1993), successful coinages are the exception unsuccessful ones are the rule, because the human impulse to creative playfulness produces more words than a society can sustain. In his book, Our Mother Tongue. The English Language, Bill Bryson (1980: 69) says that words seemingly spring from nowhere. For centuries the word in English was hound (or hund), when suddenly in the late Middle Ages, dog, a word etymologically unrelated to any other known word, displaced it. No one has any idea why. Among words with unknown pedigree are: jaw, bad, jam, big, gloat, fun, crease, etc. From Brysons words, coinages seem to come from nowhere; this holds true for a certain number of words, but coinages may be the result of various linguistic contributions as well. Who were these contributors? Jespersen (1982: 147) answered this question as early as 1938, in his book Growth and Structure of the English Language, where he discussed the contribution of two categories of word-creators. The former was created from the need of tradespeople to designate new articles of merchandise. Very little regard is generally paid to correctness of formation, the only essential being a name that is good for advertising purposes. [] Many such names are very short lived, but some are there to stay and may even pass into common use outside the sphere for which they were originally invented. Professionals who come from diverse fields of

activity have contributed with lexical creations. They have used various means of making new words, as follows: (a) combinations of Latin/Greek words with Latin affixes: papilionaceous (<Latin papilion, crude form, of papilio, a butterfly) and aceous; correlate (<Latin cor-, together and relate); obstiction (obligation, < Latin obstrictus, pp of stringere = to bind, to fasten); (b) foreign word and Latin affix: interloper (an intruder, a runner between, from Latin inter-, between and Dutch looper, a runner < Dutch loopen, to run) (c) English prefix + foreign word: belabour (be- English prefix + labour) (d) associations of letters which are randomly arranged to produce words: golliwog (fanciful invented name for a black-faced doll, 19th century creation), kodak (arbitrary word invented by George Eastman as a trademark, patented in 1888), nylon (invented name of a strong plastic material used for yarn, etc. 20th century) (e) imitations of already existing words: see exemplify below; (f) use of already existing words/parts of words, with new meanings (doddered, 12th century, used after Dryden, of old oaks that have lost the top or branches; alt. form simulating a p.p. of doddard < dod: poll, top, of unknown origin); In terms of coiners, etymological dictionaries include in this category scientists and authors of literature. Since the main interest falls on lexemes, special emphasis will be laid on the result of the coining. Therefore, coinages may be simple words (nylon, Dada, potash), derivatives, hybrids (galumph, invented by Lewis Carroll, from gallop and triumphant) or combinations of words borrowed from the classical languages and words of English extraction. Our classification is based on the proponents of coinages and consists of two such groups of contributors: names of literary fame and names of scientific reputation. Words created by writers Not many of the English writers have acquired the fame of word creators, but of the few mention will be made of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Morus and Ben Johnson. Shakespeare is among the first writers who produced new words. The words Shakespeare fathered are described by Crystal(1999: 35), in a series of eight articles under the eponymous form of Williamisms a term the author confesses to have invented especially for the magazine Grounding-O, to mean a word which appears for the first time in English in one of Shakespeares plays, which is more specific than the general and rather vague Shakespearism, in use since the early ninetheenth-century to mean any form of expression peculiar to or imitated from Shakespeare in January 1997, when the linguist admitted embarking upon the exploration of the Shakespearean terminology and its creative aspects. According to apparently careful calculations, Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings, of which at least one tenth had never been used before. Shakespeare lived in an age when new words and ideas burst upon the world as never before or since. For a century and a half, from 1500 to 1650, English flowed with new words. Between 10,000 and 12,000 words were coined, of which about half still exist. Not until modern times would this number be exceeded, but even then, there is no comparison. Shakespeare alone gave gust, hint, hurry, lonely summit, pedant, obscene, barefaced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic, frugal, radiance, dwindle, countless, submerged, excellent, fretful. Jespersen notes that some 200 to 300 words are found in the early plays that are never repeated. Many of these were provincialisms that he later shed, but which independently made their way into the language later among them cranny, beautiful, homicide, aggravate and forefathers. It has also been observed by scholars that the new terms of his younger years appeal directly to senses (snow-white, fragrant, brittle), while the coinages of the later years are more concerned with psychological considerations. Many words did not last, but Shakespeares gloomy or brisky, made it.

In the 17th century, macaronic (applied to burlesque verse in which vernacular words are mingled with Latin in a Latinized form) was popularized by Teofilo Folengo, who described his verses as a literary analogue of macaroni (a gross, rude and rustic mixture of flour, cheese, and butter). T.S.Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, introduced the form of a new verb, to intensify, in the text saying that the will itself by confining and intensifying the attention may arbitrarily give vividness or distinctness to any object whatsoever. He added a footnote to justify his coinage, asserting that the earlier use of intend in this sense had become confusingly ambiguous and that the periphrastic render intense would ruin the beautiful harmony of his sentence, although he admits that the new words sound uncouth to my own ear. The word was well established by the middle of the 19th century, and Coleridges other and more arguably uncouth coinage esemplastic has found a niche in the language. Yet, it was this same coiner, who in 1832 attacked talented as a vile and barbarous vocable apparently believing that it was not proper to form an adjective from a noun and the suffix d (although he is not known to have objected to skilled, bigoted, or any other adjective formed according to this pattern). The pattern verb + -ify was applied in the case of exemplify, too. Ben Jonson was not as prolific as Shakespeare, but, as a word creator, he is the author of the following terms: damp, defunct, clumsy, and strenuous. Sir Thomas Morus also contributed to the English lexicon with: absurdity, acceptance, exact, explain, and exaggerate. Sir Thomas Elyots contribution is illustrated by the literature of speciality with animate, exhaust, and modesty. The final examples come from Thomas Carlyle who coined decadent and environment and from G.B. Shaw whom few know as the author of the very frequently used term superman. Words created by scientists (biologists, mathematicians, physicists, etc.) Although etymological dictionaries describe an impressive number of creations put forward by men of science, in what follows very few cases have been selected in support of this idea. Sometimes words are made up for a specific purpose, and their authors are not known. The curious nautical terminology for its various features hatch, turret, hull, deck arises from the fact that it was developed by the British Admiralty rather than the Army. Thus, Pierre Gassendi, in 1621, suggested the syntagm aurora borealis to name the luminous atmospheric phenomenon near the poles. The Belgian chemist Van Helmont (died A.D. 1644) invented two terms gas and blas; the latter did not come into use. He seems to have been thinking of the Dutch sheest, spirit, volatile fluid (English ghost) and of the Dutch blazen, to blow. The English mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton introduced the terms centrifugal, centripetal in the specialist terminology, while Sir Humphrey Davy, the English chemist, (1807) coined the name potassium monoxide to designate the metallic element which is the basis of potash. Jeremy Bentham (an early 18th century English jurist and philosopher) authored the term international. In 1869, Thomas Henry Huxley, the English biologist who felt the need of a label for his own philosophical viewpoint, created the word agnostic (one who holds the view that any ultimate reality is unknown and probably unworkable; broadly -one who doubts the existence of God (<Greek agnostos unknown/unknowable). Some years later he wrote It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the gnostic of church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant. To my great satisfaction, the term took (Longman, 1991: 31). Alfred Nobel launched, in the 19th century, the term dynamite a chemical substance (<Gr. dunamis force) + -ite. During the same 19th century, in 1865, C.F.Zincken created

Kainite (from the Greek kains, new and the suffix ite), to name hydros chlorosulphate of magnesium and potassium. The South African statesman Jan Christiaan Smuts proposed holism (a view of the universe, especially living nature, as composed of interacting wholes that are more than the mere sum of their parts; broadly any view that emphasizes the organic or functional relation between members of a larger whole) which he introduced it in his book Holism and Evolution (1926) Both matter and life consist, in the atom and cell, of unit structures whose ordered grouping produces the natural wholes which e call bodies or organisms. This character or feature of wholeness points to something fundamental in the universe Holism is the term here coined to designate this fundamental factor operative towards the making or creation of wholes in the universe(Longman, 1991: 753). According to Otto Jespersen (1982: 148), the Great War (1914-1918) left its mark on language go west was used as an euphemism for die, be lost .The war even produced a new numeral, i.e., umpteen, used to disguise the number of a brigade, later in the sense of a considerable number. The new words of today represent an explosion of technology words or syntagms like lunar module, moonlanding, mydocardial infarction rather than of poetry and feeling. B. Lexical isolates David Crystal (2000: 219) discusses a large category of invented words under the distinction lexical isolates which actually includes hapax legomena, nonce-formations and a certain type of neologisms, the bonceformations. These are items spontaneously created by a speaker or writer to meet the immediate needs of a particular communicative situation, and therefore, they have a transient and pragmatic character, obvious in their OED describing them to be used for the time being, temporarily. a) The first group of coinages, the hapax legomena, (<Greek, thing that is said only once) refers to the items recorded only once in an authors work, a literary genre, or even a literature as a whole. Crystal (2000: 219) mentions that because of the limited insight into the historical contemporary linguistic norms, it is usually unclear whether a hapax found in a corpus is (a) a regular part of the lexicon (which just happened never to have been recorded elsewhere), or (b) an error (where there was no intention on the authors part of using it again elsewhere, or where there was no intention on the authors part of using it in the first place). b) Nonce-formations (or nonce-words) are items spontaneously coined by a speaker or writer to meet the immediate needs of a particular communicative situation (Crystal 2000: 218). They may be grouped into: i) facetious puns (such as chopaholic, i.e., one who likes lamb chops) ii) momentary lexical gap-fillers (for example, cyberphobic) iii) rhetorical anomalies (unsad to be contrasted with sad) Although these examples were created for a special communicative situation, many other words built on the same pattern which first occurred as nonce words were gradually assimilated by the English speaking community (for example, workaholic and chocoholic). Unlike hapax legomena, nonceformations are deliberately-coined words made on the spur of the moment with no intention on their creators part to have them included in the native language lexicon. c) Bonce-formations (< bonce = head, in Brit. Slang) are those lexical items newly proposed for technical status within a specialized domain. This is a borderline category of coinages which are nonce-like because they are being used for the first time to solve an immediate problem of communication within a single writing event. On the other hand, they are neologistic because they are being proposed with future standardized status in mind (Crystal 2000: 218). They are typical of academic writing, but not restricted only to it.

Lexical isolates, as practice has shown, may have remained recorded as nonce- or bonceformations or they may have been accepted as an integral part of the contemporary English lexicon. C. Eponymy Definition Eponymy is the means by which new words are created from names of persons. The proper name acting as the reference source is the base-eponym, and the resulting proper/common noun is the eponymous term or eponym. Since eponymy tends to expand its lexical contribution by the day, in what follows only few examples will be selected from the wealth of possibilities provided by over forty dictionaries of eponyms which have been published up to now. Classification of eponyms The criterion of this classification is the extraction or the background from which the person giving the name comes, or the contribution of the person to the world knowledge and practice. The following groups of eponyms have been identified: 1. Base-eponyms related to religion: 1.1. Biblical names Jezebel, the infamous wife of Ahab, king of Israel, which was applied to shameless women, and Magdalene, which has acquired two different meanings (1) a reformed prostitute and (2) a house of refuge or reformatory for prostitutes (Websters New Collegiate Dictionary 1972:507). 1.2. Names of saints and monks were rather productive to denote membership to a certain religious order. Thus, the Athanasians were the followers of Athanasius, the 4th century archbishop of Alexandria, while the term Benedictine designates a member of the monk order founded at Monte Casino by Saint Benedict. 2. Base-eponyms as mythological names of Greek, Latin and Germanic origin: Hector, the leader and champion of the Trojans in the war against the Greeks came to mean braggard, while the verb to hector means to intimidate by blustering or scolding. Ceres the Roman goddess of grain and agriculture, there has been produced the adjective cereal of edible grain which originated in the Latin cerealis relating to the cultivation of grain. 3. Base-eponyms as names of kings famous for different features, situations or events: Croesus, an exceedingly rich king of Lydia is used in connection with any very rich person sometimes being part of the set phrase as rich as Croesus, while Gentius - the Illyrian king, gave his name to any of several plants having white, blue, yellow or red flowers. A king name is also used in medicine to describe the Caesarean cut, operation or section, namely Caesarotomy, practice due to which Caesar , the Roman Emperor is believed to have been born. Spelt not with a capital letter, the term is used to designate any powerful ruler (Websters New Collegiate Dictionary 1972:116). 4. Base-eponyms as names from literature further divide eponyms to originate into: 4.1. Names of authors. They may be found in types of poems (a type of bacchanalian poem is the anacreontic stemming in the name of the Greek poet Anacreon, alcaics odes are the odes written in a special meter used by Alcaeus), or in abstract nouns which describe a personal imprint of an author (e. g. Ibsenism is a term used in advocacy of Ibsens style and social ideas). 4.2. Names of literary heroes. A good example in case is that of Fagin, Dickenss hero, who describes an adult who instructs others (for example, children) in crime and especially theft or who receives stolen goods, especially from children (Longman 1991: 523). Lothario, the seducer in Nicholas Rowes play The Fair Penitent stands for a man whose chief interest

is seducing women (Longman 1991: 942) and Scaramouch, the French comedy hero has come to be synonym with the compound neer-do-well. 5. Base-eponyms as names of personalities honoured for the services they brought to the community they were part of: 5.1. National heroes as Simon Bolivar, worshipped by the people he had liberated, gave his country not only its independence but its name as well. 5.2. To fully account for the name given to the two continents, North and South America, Marghidovici (1959: 218) wrote a whole chapter, whose conclusion was that the unanimously admitted name of Americo Vespucci represented a moment of human injustice. 5.3. Politicians, statesmen or even noblemen who set a fashion in their time The Roman orator and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero was so famous for his eloquence and knowledge that he typifies the two notions. His last name is nowadays used as a common noun, to denote a person who acts as a guide to sightseers and who wants to point out items of local interest to the visitors he is guiding. Earl Spencer (dead in 1845) used to wear the spencer, a short overjacket, or of James Thomas Brudenell, the seventh Earl of Cardigan, British cavalryman of Crimean War fame, dead in 1868 (> cardigan - a knitted woolen sweater or jacket, collarless and open in the front), the English field marshal Fitzroy James Henry Somerset Raglan who used to wear a loose overcoat, the raglan, whose sleeves had a special cutting. The gallery of famous persons includes the name of the general surveyor of India and geographer, Sir George Everest who had his name attributed to the highest peak in the Himalayas, in honour of his having been the first to have reached on top of the world. 6. Base-eponyms as names of scientists represent, by far, the most productive group of base-eponyms. 6.1. (inventors) Thus, the U.S. artist and inventor Samuel Finley Breese Morse who devised the worldwide known and accepted Morse code, and Louis Braille, the French teacher of the blind who invented the braille system of writing or printing for the blind are just two examples. 6.2. (physicists) Among inventive scientists who provided simple eponyms, there should be included the names of Ampere (French physicist > ampere - a unit of electric current), Ohm (German physicist > ohm - unit of resistance), Langley (19th century American astronomer, whence the common noun to designate a unit of solar radiation), Watt (Scottish engineer and inventor > watt - the unit of power), next to many other mentioned by Hellweg (1995: 105). 6.3. (chemists) Names of chemical compounds include dolomite (< the name of the French geologist D. de Dolomieu, d. 1801), langbeinite (< the 19th century German chemist A. Langbein). 6.4. (medicine) Medical practices applied by famous physicians as the Austrian Friedrich Anton Mesmer, who used to create a hypnotic state in a person described lexically as mesmerism, is the result of the action expressed by the verb to mesmerize. A French physician who urged the use of a special device linked his name to it: J.J.Guillotin > the guillotine. 6.5. (botanists or admirers of plants) Passionate observers of the world they lived in, naturalists, botanists, gardeners and even diplomats named the plants they discovered with names related to their own. This is the case of the French patron of botany Michel Begon, who inspired another French botanist to name one flower (> begonia), or of Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the French navigator whose name was given to a flower (>bougainvillaea), or even that of the Swedish botanist Andreas Dahl (>dahlia), as well as that of Pierre Magnol, the professor of botany, who by his name denominate a large family of plants (>magnolia). The name of the German physician Heinrich Theodor Freese (d.1876) is the source of freesia, the ornamental sweet-scented South-African plants of the iris family, grown for their yellow, pink or white flowers. Another German botanist and physician Leonhard Fuchs (1501-66) author of

a book on medicinal plants, De historia stirpium, was widely known for his research. As a sign of admiration and respect, the French monk and botanist Charles Plumier named a genus of ornamental shrubs and herbs native to Central and South America and which have showy drooping deep red, purple, pink or white flowers, Fuchsia. 7. (famous craftsmen) The vocabulary has also adopted the inventions of persons devoting their energy to other fields than that of exclusive science 7.1. (printers) The Italian publisher Aldo Manuzio and his family, famous both for the editions of Greek and Latin classics and for the aldine writing. 7.2. (carpenters) The English cabinet-maker and furniture designer Thomas Chippendale (1718-79) set up a furniture factory in London in 1749, and later on he became famous both in England and America through his furniture style, Chippendale. 7.3. (cooks) Madeleine Paulmier, a 19th century (French) pastry-cook, enriched the French gastronomy with a small rich cake the madeleine, the steward of Louis XIV, Louis de Bchamel invented a white cream sauce - bchamel, and the cook of the French Csar de Choiseul, comte de Plessis- Praslin invented a confection made by browning nuts, the praline. 7.4. (hatters) The Bowlers, a nineteenth-century family of London hatters, are supposed, according to some sources, to have produced the stiff felt hat which has a rounded crown and a narrow brim, the bowler. 7.5. ( weaponry inventors and producers) People also produced weapons as the gatling, the colt, and the winchester names derived from the American machine-gun or pistol inventors and/or manufacturers R.J. Gatling, Samuel Colt and Oliver Fisher Winchester, respectively. D. Toponymy To extend the investigation on proper names and by analogy with the assignment of new values to old words, as was the case with eponym, toponym may be interpreted to have three possible interpretations; thus they will be read so as to mean (a) a place-name, (b) the geographical place itself and (c) a new word so derived. Although very few verbs result from geographical names, an old practice was expressed by to shanghai (<Shanghai, town in China famous for the formerly widespread use of this method to secure sailors for voyages to the Orient): (a) to compel to join a ships crew by stupefying with drink and drugs; (b) to put in an awkward and unpleasant position by trickery. The noun and adjective Welsh is used as a verb to express two meanings, i.e., 1. to avoid payment and 2. to break ones word, not to keep ones promise. Nouns are richer and they include terms connected with sports, food (cheeses, biscuits), drinks, fabrics, breeds of animals and birds. From an extensive classification, the following were selected to outline an image about the creativity of geographical names: - Terms connected to sports: rugby, derby, - Names of foods: cheddar, Brie, sardine, hamburger, frankfurter, - Names of drinks: gin, cognac, champagne, Bordeaux, Porto, Madeira, Malaga, tequila, bourbon - Names of fabrics and clothing: jersey, damask, nankeen, Holland, ulster, bikini, paramatta, cravat. - Names of chemical elements: polonium, hafnium, berkelium, californium, americium, europium, etc. Toponyms represent a source for new words which has not been fully explored from the lexicological point of view. CONCLUSIONS This chapter described instances of linguistic creativity, based on pure inventiveness or on established patterns.

The former group of words includes coinages, a term generically used to denote any type of lexical invention, purposefully produced to cover a lexical gap and nonce words. Nonce words are ephemeral lexical productions which sometimes happen to be adopted by the daily practice of language usage and become part of the lexicon. Among those words which are invented through combinations of letters/sounds to cover a speakers lexical gap Dada, was included here, since it is familiar to Romanians as a creation of a Romanian writer. English writers and scientists also crated words, and in most of the cases, their coinages were based on derivations with suffixes or prefixes. Such hybridizations of English or foreign words and English or Latin/Greek affixes include intensify and agnostic. There are also some coinages which are the result of random association of letters, such as nylon. The second half of the chapter deals with terms derived from proper nouns, which divide into names of persons and geographical names. Eponymy, which, sooner or later, will be considered as a resourceful means of creating new words, when the starting point is the name of a person, was envisaged from the perspective of the persons contributing to the lexical heritage. Without being an exhaustive presentation, the section on eponyms was intended only to outline a mapping of the contributors to the English vocabulary. Toponymy, has hardly been explored from the point of view of its resourcefulness. Although very few examples were given in our presentation, geographical names have produced quite a number of nouns or adjectives and an extremely small number of verbs. CHAPTER 5. BASE-PRESERVING WORD BUILDING MECHANISMS The faculty of using one and the same word with different values, while the context shows unmistakably what part of speech is meant, is one of the most characteristic traits of English. Otto Jespersen Main issues: A. Conversion B. Stress shift C. Semantic shifts D. Transfer of meaning Introduction The need for new meanings and the incapacity of the English vocabulary to accurately express new real things, situations and abstractions determined specialists and wordsmiths to find solutions to what they felt to be lexical gaps. Linguists admitted this lack to be a phenomenon characteristic both for the general stock and for scientific terminologies and they called it underlexicalization or they discussed about lexical gaps. Long before the wording of underlexicalization, the phenomenon still existed and one of the practices resorted to was the recycling of old words which were assigned new meanings. The reactivation of archaisms which were assigned new meanings was particularly a matter of poetics and poem writing, but the idea launched, it served as a source of inspiration to all those involved in linguistic matters. The adding of new meanings, as it is described in this section, involved only qualitative changes: words preserved their written form unchanged but they gradually came to involve either more or less meanings, or to convey either positive or negative attitudes. These new shades of meaning are tackled in what follows, a chapter which focuses on the strict protection of the word form and on its continual change(s) of meaning. A. CONVERSION (FUNCTIONAL SHIFT)

The general term to denote this word building process is conversion, functional/grammatical shift or zero derivation. A definition with a certain degree of generality would characterize conversion to be the word building process by means of which lexemes can change their word class without the addition of an affix. Nouns, adjectives and verbs are the main word classes which can exemplify conversion. For many centuries conversion has been one of the chief ways in which the vocabulary of English has expanded. The word converting directions are various. The process of conversion is presented to affect not only most of the lexical classes in English, but even larger word associations such as collocations, idioms and sayings, as in what follows: - verb to produce noun: a swim / cheat / hit / bore / drive-in/ walk/ pay/ paint/ release/ laugh/ scratch / show off - adjective to produce noun: a bitter /final/natural/ monthly / regular commercial, elder, final, bottleneck, bitter, natural; - noun to produce verb: to bottle/catalogue/oil/ break/ referee/ bicycle/ corner/ bottle/ elbow/ garage/ nurse/ gossip/ launder/ paper/ tiptoe - adjective to produce verb: to dirty/empty/ dry/ calm down/sober up/ empty/ dry/ narrow / lower - noun to produce adjective: its cotton, brick, reproduction - grammatical word to produce noun: too many its and buts, thats a must - adjective to produce noun: ins and outs, ups and downs, pros and cons. - affix to produce noun : ologies and isms - phrases to produce noun: a has-been, a free-for-all, a might-have-been, a once-in-alifetime-event - grammatical word to produce verb: to down tools/ to up and do it - idiom to produce determiner: a red herring attitude - saying to produce determiner: scratch my back principle Despite the antiquity and usefulness of the process, new conversions tend to be resisted by conservative users of the language. A classic case is the verb to contact: it appeared as a verb in technical writing in the 19th century, with the meaning to come/bring into contact. Its common meaning to get in communication with appears to have originated in Am.E. in the mid-1920s and has been a focal point of criticism by the people who almost automatically object to words which are formed by functional shift. Linguists consider that one of the consequences of the falling away of inflectional endings in English was a marked growth in the process of grammatical conversions - the use of one word class with the function of another, and this became particularly noticeable during the later Renaissance period, especially in dramatic writing. Shakespeare made copious use of it, and was especially fond of making verbs for nouns: I am proverbed with a grandsire phrase; Destruction straight shall dog them at the heels There have been recorded situations when one word may belong to several lexical classes. For example, intent behaves as a noun (John admitted lying to her with intent) and as an adjective (Sarah used to be very intent on her work). Of the many new conversions appearing each year in contemporary English, many are creative nonce-words, such as the recent use as verbs of pompous and tantrum, and others, such as the noun must and the adjective fun retain a somewhat informal quality. B. STRESS SHIFT Stress plays an important role in the correct pronunciation of English words; it written English this aspect is of no relevance. The phenomenon of stress transfer from the first to the

second syllable within a word may result in the creation of new words, verbs and nouns, most frequently. Noun Verb refuse to refuse comment to comment object to ob ject subject to sub ject process to process import to import export to export decrease/increase to decrease/ to increase This process is hardly productive nowadays. As practice has shown, probably due to their speech speed many of the English natives ignore this particular case of shift, and utter nouns and verbs with no stress distinction. C. SEMANTIC SHIFTS Words preserve their form and frequently their grammatical function while undergoing a marked change in their lexical value. The principle of frequency prevails in the kind of process in focus. The most general or frequent meaning is the first described in a dictionary entry. Within one or more centuries words can change their meaning to express more or less meanings than when they were first in use. The changes which occur in the meaning of lexemes concern their acquisition of new meanings, the reduction of their number of senses, etc. Causes leading to semantic changes have both linguistic and extralinguistic explanations. Extralinguistic changes are determined by modifications of the material culture and appearance of new notions. The evolution of culture, names denoting institutions included, is another important extralinguistic factor. Extralinguistic causes go hand in hand with linguistic ones: social causes alone could not determine semantic changes; closely connected with linguistic phenomena. Semantic shifts may affect the meaning of a word in four different directions, showing it to: - acquire new meanings (positive or negative values) - lose some of its meanings positive or negative values) - change its meanings for the better (adding positive values) - change its meanings for the worse (adding positive values). It is highly subjective to divide into better or worse for there is nothing to determine the absolute good or bad. Whether you view the homosexual meaning of gay as a semantic change for the better (amelioration) or worse (deterioration) depends on factors that have more to do with personal taste and morality than with language. Because of this the phenomenon of lexical change can often be controversial. (Crystal, 1985: 138) C. 1. Extension/generalization of meaning is the change of meaning through the intermediary of which the sense of a word is enlarged, enriched, augmented. Consider the examples below which illustrate cases of extension/generalization of meaning: Journal originally meant a daily record of transactions and events extension any periodical publication containing news in any particular sphere. Avocation (1) a subordinate interest pursued in addition to ones vocation, esp. for enjoyment ; a hobby; (2)customary employment; (3)(archaic) a diversion, distraction. This word was borrowed from Latin in the 17th century, in the sense of diversion or distraction and soon acquired the additional sense subordinate interest in contrast to vocation. In the 18 th century,

however, some users turned the meaning round possibly under the etymological misconception that the prefix a- represented the Latin ad translated by the English preposition to, rather than the Latin ab rendered by the English form from. Avocation and vocation consequently became synonyms, but in modern use, avocation sounds somewhat pompous as a synonym of vocation and is dangerously ambiguous that it is probably wise top avoid it. Intrigue (1)to bring or accomplish by intrigue [to intrigue oneself into office]; (2)to arouse the interest or curiosity of [intrigued by the tale]; (3)to captivate or to fascinate [her beauty intrigues me];(4)to carry on an intrigue, to plot, to scheme. Senses 2 and 3 entered the English language in the late 19th century, almost certain as borrowings of the similar senses which had developed in French. Although they are still occasionally criticized as corruptions of the words original meaning, they are frequently and reputably and cause little significant ambiguity. Mock 1. the act of ridiculing or mimicking; the person or thing ridiculed, imitated. 2. Didactics. a mock exam is usually done for the purpose of studying in order to see how you would do on the real exam. It should give you a better idea about what to study 3. Naval Archit. a hard pattern representing the surface of a plate with a warped form, upon which the plate is beaten to shape after furnacing Bridge 1. a structure spanning and providing passage over a river, chasm, road, or the like. 2. Naut. a raised transverse platform from which a power vessel is navigated and that often includes a pilot house. b. any of various other raised platforms from which the navigation or docking of a vessel is supervised. c. a bridge-house or bridge superstructure. d. a raised walkway running fore-and-aft. 3. Anat. the ridge or upper line of the nose. 4. Dent. an artificial replacement, fixed or removable, of a missing tooth or teeth, supported by adjacent natural teeth or roots. 5. Ophthalm. the part of a pair of eyeglasses that joins the two lenses and spans the nose. 6. Elect. a. any of various instruments for measuring or comparing the characteristics, such as impedance or inductance, of a conductor. b. an electrical shunt. 7. Chem. a valence bond illustrating the connection of two parts of a molecule. 8. R.Rd. a gantry over a track or tracks for supporting water spouts, signals, etc. 9. Metall. any layer of partially fused or densely compacted material preventing the proper gravitational movement of molten material or the proper compacting of metal powder in a mould. 10. Comp. Technol. a device which forwards traffic between network segments based on data link layer information. C. 2. Narrowing/specialization/reduction of meaning is the change of meaning through the intermediary of which a term becomes more specialized. Few examples will nevertheless, include the word engine which was formerly used as a general term to mean mechanical contrivance (especially of war and torture), but since the Industrial Revolution it has come to mean mechanical source of power; Meat originally meant food and drink in general, at meat, after meat, meat for thought. Hospital is a term which originally denoted a charitable institution for the housing of the needy, infirm or aged; later it has come to be used as an institution for the care of the sick and wounded.

C. 3. Amelioration/elevation of meaning: a lexeme develops a positive sense of approval; that is to say that the new meaning f a word acquires provides it with a higher status as compared to the initial one Revolutionary was once associated with an undesirable overthrowing of the status quo, is now widely used by advertisers as a signal of desirable novelty. Lean no longer brings to mind emanciation but athleticism and good looks. Although the earlier uses of meticulous were derogatory, it now usually indicates approval as obvious from the quotations the most meticulous and observant seventeenth century traveller taken from Collin Thubron, and superbly methodical, persistent, regular and meticulous from R.M. Pirsig. Its original sense as recorded in the 17th century, was fearful, timid, but this sense has been long obsolete. In the 19th century it came to mean overconcerned with details, fussy. The meaning of this word continued to evolve and in the 20th century it has been used to signify commendably precise, some writers on usage have criticized this as an improper use, but to most people the word no longer bears negative connotations. Anxious was introduced into English in the early 17th century with its main sense worried, uneasy. The sense eager, desirous has been in use since the mid 18th century, and is so established that it is pedantic to object to it except in a few cases, such as I am anxious to stop worrying where it so obviously clashes with the main sense that it is inappropriate. C. 4. Pejoration/deterioration/degradation of meaning: a lexeme develops a negative sense of disapproval. Middle English villein neutrally described a serf, whereas Modern English villain is by no means neutral. Similarly, junta has acquired a sinister dictatorial sense, and lewd (originally of the laity) has developed a sense of sexual impropriety. Originally the word cowboy developed quite possible connotations with its romantic association of the Wild West. To these a number of distinctly negative overtones have now been added in certain regional varieties. Thus, in British English it denotes an incompetent or irresponsible workman or business, as in the sintagms cowboy plumbers or cowboy double glazing firm. The American variant of the English language uses the term cowboy also means an automobile driver who does not follow the rules of the road or a factory worker who does more than the piece work norms set by his union or fellow-workers. (Crystal, 1985: 138) Mew (1) stables, usually with living quarters, built round an open court; (2)living quarters adapted from such stables. The change of meaning from cage for hawks to stables can be traced to a specific historical event. A building for housing the kings hawks was erected in 1377 at Charing Cross in London (on the site now occupied by Trafalgar Square) and became known simply as The Mews. In 1537 this building was demolished, and the royal stables were built on the site; but the name The Mews was still applied to the building, and by the 17th century the word mews was generally used for stables built round a country yard. In the early 19th century it acquired its usual modern meaning of a dwelling converted from stables. C. 5. Radiation of meaning is the semantic process through which new meanings of a word are derived from its basic meaning in a straight, direct way, not unlike rays from one center. Harbour, in its late O. E. form harebeorg meant army protection; 1st change of meaning turned it into shelter; 2nd change of meaning reduced its value to a place of shelter for ships. C. 6. Concatenation is rather a semantic process than a lexicological one, wherein a series of semantic shifts which are linked together as time passes by; it actually implies the addition of new meanings to the first by successive changes. Gold precious metal (basic meaning); 2. gold coin; 3. money; 4. richness

Bus - 1. a large, long-bodied motor vehicle equipped with seating for passengers, usually operating as part of a scheduled service. 2. Elect. a rigid conductor in an electric circuit, used to connect three or more circuits, often in the shape of a bar. 3. Comp. Technol. a parallel circuit that connects the major components of a computer, allowing the transfer of electric impulses from one connected component to any other. Although not acknowledged by traditional lexicology, the last two changes of meaning do reflect relations between words through the diachronic perspective or reveal the resourcefulness of the English language with regard to the creation of scientific terminologies. D.TRANSFER OF MEANING Language practice has shown that words may be used in their proper meaning, literally or denotatively or they may be used with a figurative meaning or connotatively. D. 1. Metaphor Although the term pertains to stylistics as it is used to denote a specific figure of speech, some lexicologists look upon it as a source of vocabulary enrichment. In the field of lexicology metaphor is defined to be an implicit comparison where a word is used to denote something different from its original meaning. This phenomenon of transfer of literal meaning is accounted for by associations of the similarity type: a) Similarity of shape: ball-point-pen, the head of a pin b) Similarity of position: headstone, headword, c) Similarity of colour: red-admiral (a sort of butterfly), bluebeard (a man who marries and kills one wife after another), blue-water (the open sea), red herring (something that distracts attention from the real issue) d) Space and duration in time: long-run, short circuit, shortcoming, short-dated e) Physical sensations: cold war, velvet revolution, sweet dreams f) Calendar units: night owl, nightcap ( a usually alcoholic drink taken at the end of the day) In point of their life duration, metaphors fall into live, degraded (fading) and dead metaphors. Live metaphors are always felt as fresh and new, even if already standardized or non-standardized. Degraded metaphors still convey to readers and listeners some of their initial freshness, although they have become trite. To sift the evidence still preserves the semantic connection with its concrete meaning, while the ship of the desert has not lost its initial graphicalness altogether. Degraded metaphors are generally long-lived, and most of them are represented by zoosemy. Dead metaphors have now lost every metaphorical connotation, though special etymological studies may reveal it; daisy was in Old English daeges eage or the days eye, while window stood for wides eage (the winds eye). The foot of the mountain is the result of analogy between the image of any mans foot (the lowest part on which something rests) Numerous standardized metaphors belong to the slangy vocabulary. D.2. Metonymy Is based on the association of the contiguity type, consisting in the use of the name of one thing for something else with which it is usually associated. Metonymies are grouped into: a) The symbol for the thing symbolized b) The material an object is made of for the object itself the more women look in their glass, the less they look in their house.

c) The holder for the content, e.g. bottle, kettle, glass, cup, or village, town, town, city, etc. to denote their inhabitants. d) The makers name for the product: a Ford, a Jaguar, etc. e) The place names where the object originates in, for the product: china, Virginia, champagne f) The part for the whole and the whole for the part sail for ship, roof for house and army for soldier g) The abstract for the concrete and the concrete for the abstract: the bar for tribunal and the flesh for pleasure. D.3. Euphemisms Unlike metaphors and metonymy, which are described in lexicographic products, euphemisms and dysphemisms are closely related to the attitudes of the speaker(s) in the process of communication. Euphemisms represent a sort of understatement and it consists in the substitution of an agreeable phrase or expression for one that is hard, indelicate or taboo. Euphemisms are interrelated with taboo words in that the former were created as a solution for the substitution of taboo, impolite or rough words. Euphemisms are richer in the case of notions expressing madness, stupidity, drunkenness, certain physiological processes, crimes, death, etc. Rough wording - Euphemism lunatic asylum - mental home womens prison - interprovincial home for women to die - to pass away, to be no more, to be gone naked - in natures grab, in natures buff, in ones birthday suit pregnant - expecting, carrying, in the family way, in the straw drunk - intoxicated, under influence, merry, flushed, happy, exhilarated salary - cuts adjustments dead and wounded - casualties second-hand - pre-owned annexation - rectification of frontiers a disease which is sure to terminate in the patients death - terminal disease Euphemism [] is also deliberately made use of, for example, in manipulation or dissimulation for political, commercial or other purposes. The lexical items thus replaced include words which refer to something unpleasant or unfavourable or to something affecting people negatively, or words which have a negative connotation or are apt to evoke negative associations or responses or other unwanted attitudes or reactions on the side of the listeners or readers towards the things communicated. (Brendt, 1982) D. 4. Dysphemisms The term dysphemism was created in the late 19th century (< dys- , after euphemism) and it is used to refer to 1. a deliberate substitution of disagreeable, offensive, or disparaging word for an otherwise inoffensive term, as pig for policeman. or 2. an instance of such substitution. Linguists consider that Speakers resort to dysphemism to talk about people and things that frustrate and annoy them, that they disapprove of and wish to disparage, humiliate and degrade. Curses, name-calling and any sort of derogatory comment directed towards others in order to insult or to wound them are all examples of dysphemism. Exclamatory swear words that release frustration or anger are dysphemisms. A dysphemism interacts with style and has the potential to produce stylistic discord; if someone at a formal dinner party were to publicly announce I'm off for a piss, rather than saying Excuse me for a moment, the effect would be dysphemistic." (Keith Allan and Kate Burridge, Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006)

As a phenomenon opposite to euphemisms, the use of dysphemisms occurs to replace a relatively neutral word with a harsher, more offensive one. This would be the case of Such as calling a cemetery a 'boneyard.' Referring to electrocution as 'taking the hot seat' would be another. . . . Even more dysphemistic would be 'to fry.'" (Interview with J. E. Lighter, American Heritage, Oct. 2003) CONCLUSIONS This chapter describes the possibilities of the English language to enrich its vocabulary by the reinterpretation of the already-existing meanings of words. Practice imposes the new readings, which are due to the high frequency of occurrence of certain words. These base-preserving processes describe situations which have a neutral character or situations which generally reflect attitudes. These processes refer to words which: - undergo no change in pronunciation (conversion/functional shift) - change the position of stress (stress shift) - change the number of meanings assigned to a term (extension and narrowing of meaning) - change the value of the word (in terms of positive/negative meanings (amelioration and pejoration of meaning) New meanings are assigned to words either quantitatively (i.e, acquire new shades of meaning) or qualitatively (i.e., acquire positive or negative values in addition to what the word is known to have initially meant), when the base is unaltered, as follows: - conversion (functional shift) - stress shift - extension - narrowing - amelioration - deterioration - radiation - concatenation To study a word separate from the context would not be of help in the analysis and the illustration of semantic changes, particularly in the case of stress and functional shift. CHAPTER 6. BASE-ALTERING WORD BUILDING MECHANISMS Main Issues A. Deflection B. Folk etymology C. False analogy D. Metanalysis E. Metathesis Introduction This chapter is intended to simplify things in another terminologically controversial field of English lexicology, that of new words resulting from various phonetic modifications. Nowadays, alteration is not only a fashionable term but it is also involves a rather general and neutral approach to word modifications; so it used herein to denote modifications of sounds, affecting either vowels or consonants or both vowels and consonants at the word or phrase level. To refer to word or phrase alterations, lexicologists seem to have either used a set of confusing denominations or focused on some particular wordproducing mechanisms,

disregarding some others, or to have even included some more into this set of word transformations. Thus, Levitchi discusses deflection, folk etymology and corruption, Hulban considers deflection and folk etymology, while Marchand and Valerie Adams include blending among base-altering processes. By the end of the 19th century, Skeat had accepted these phenomena to be generally understood as corruptions. Against the background of lexicology, the term corruption, [the phenomenon] which simply distorts an already existing word without connecting it with another (Levitchi 1970: 67), is assigned two meanings; it is used to denote both a mechanism and its lexical result. Corruption deals with phenomena or rather with lexical products resulting from various modifications which occurred within single-word or multi-word lexemes. The literature of lexicology and lexicography has collected several terms of the linguistic metalanguage which may account for such alterations as corruption, folk or popular etymology, false analogy, deflection, etc. Terminologically, corruption was a word in fashion before the 20th century; it was a cover term used to refer to any kind of transformation within the form of a word, irrespective of its type of modification or of its reason underlying the respective modification. Nearly one century later, the same words were etymologically described by English and American monolingual general or encyclopedic dictionaries as the result of alteration. The reason for this linguistic phenomenon is, according to Woods (1969: 127), the native speakers lack of foreign language knowledge or of education, on the one hand and their openmindedness and willingness to adopt foreign words and to adapt them to their native language particulars, thus bringing new words in their mother language. The sources underlying alterations divide the results of this phenomenon into those which come from: a) everyday life - those who had been in India picked up the native word tea (cha) and corrupted it to char; such corruptions are accounted for by folk etymology. b) literature most of us will recall the Dickensian character who persisted in speaking of Bully Ruffian (Belle Rophon), or the motto of Mrs. Micawbers paper experientia does it (actually the Latin experientia docet, i.e. experience teaches); these modifications are the result of false analogy, which approaches those word modifications authored and presented by writers or literary heroes. B. Deflection This word forming process is approached with varying consistency in the literature of speciality, probably because of the scarcity of documentation, and certainly because this pattern has ceased to be productive nowadays. In the 1970s, deflection was defined simply as an alliteration based on vowel change in the root of a word (Levitchi 1970: 66). Lexicological studies carried out in the last decades have revealed some other possibilities of enlarging the meaning of this term involving a more complicated mechanism, when the mutations within a base/root were grouped on the basis of the affected sound. Deflection/deviation provides the justifying instrument for the analysis of sound transformations revealed by the present-day the English language. Due to sounds undergoing transformations, this word-producing mechanism is also known as morphophonemic alternation, sound interchange or root derivation (Hulban 2001: 108). The German loan terms Ablaut, and umlaut are accepted as circumscribed to the generic term of deflection, and they will be interpreted from two perspectives, considering both their restricted and broader meanings. Since illustrations of the three types of deflection include irregular plural forms of the English nouns or forms of irregular verbs, this would allow us to state that deflection must have had its interval of activity as early as Old English times. The three types of deflection discuss transformations of vowels, of consonants or of vowels and consonants within one and the same base.

(a) Vowel deflection or ablaut In the Germanic linguistic literature vowel deflection is more frequently referred to as ablaut. The term ablaut (coined in 1819 by Jakob Grimm, from the German ab meaning off and Laut which means sound) is used to denote both vowel shifts and vowel gradations (McArthur 1996: 6). Broadly, ablaut involves three phenomena: vowel gradation, vowel alteration and consonant alteration (Hulban 2001: 108-109). The phenomenon of vowel gradation is described to have been active in Indo-European languages, and, according to McArthur (1996:6), it accounts for the formation of some irregular plural nouns, and some irregular verbs. Restrictedly, Katamba (101-102) uses the term ablaut to refer to the change in a root vowel to indicate a change in grammatical function such as the distinction present tense past tense. Vowel changes distinguish: I. grammatical forms of noun plurals: a) /u:/ - /i:/ tooth teeth goose geese foot feet b) /au/ - /ai/ mouse mice louse - lice II. grammatical forms of irregular verbs: sing sang sung swim swam swum III. open vowels evolved into close vowels: /e:/ - /i:/ in reed /re:d/ -/ri:d/ IV. close vowels became diphthongs: /i:/ - /ai/ in five /fi:v/ - /faiv/ * A special case of close vowels becoming diphthongs may be considered in the case of several words which are homographs and which are pronounced differently, depending on the role they play at sentence level: /i/ - /ei/ estimate estimate precipitate precipitate candidate candidate V. pairs of words consisting of verbs and nouns which show: to bleed - blood to feed - food to gild gold to lose loss to heat hot to sing song Peculiar to the Germanic languages, umlaut (< German um around signifying making a change + and the above-mentioned Laut), or vowel mutation denotes a partial assimilation of a vowel to a succeeding sound. Ttaru (2002: 94) states that the i or j sounds which generated umlaut were lost or altered; still, the forms which they brought about in the language do exist nowadays. Katamba (102 -103) defines umlaut as the fronting of a vowel if the next syllable contains a front vowel, therefore an alteration which is conditioned by phonological factors. To

support his statement, Katamba illustrates umlaut taking into consideration the Great Vowel Shift. (b) Consonant deflection. The transformation of consonants mirrors the change of only a few such sounds from voiceless to voiced: I. /s/ -/z/ advice to advise device to devise use to use II. /f/- /v/ proof to prove belief to believe relief to relieve (<O.F. relever to relieve) III. /t/ - /d/ intent intend extent extend (c) Vowel + consonant deflection In very few instances, deflection reveals a double alteration, involving both the vowels and consonants within the same word: I. vowel /a/ - diphthong /ei/+ voiceless dental// - voiced dental//: bath to bathe II. vowel /o/ - diphthong /u/+ voiceless dental //- voiced dental //: cloth to clothe Even if the pair glass to glaze cannot be assigned to the previously described transformations, it still shows a case of double phonetic change. C. Folk etymology Similar to deflection, folk etymology is rather an outcome of etymon misinterpretations than a word forming pattern; there is no particular rule to account for its sustainability in the creation proper of new lexemes. Folk etymology is comprehensively defined as 1. a modification of a linguistic form according either to a falsely assumed etymology, as in Welsh rarebit from Welsh rabbit, or to a historically irrelevant analogy, as in bridegroom from bridegome. 2. a popular but false notion of the origin of a word (WEUD 1996: 744). The label more frequently used for this mechanism is based on a German calque volk etymologie, but some authors refer to it as popular etymology. Folk etymology goes back to the remotest past of the history of language but its effect is most frequently felt in words of foreign origin (Bejan Asandei 1981: 60). Folk etymology is used in relation with folk or popular theories (that is, the thoughts of ordinary, nonacademically- educated people) about the origins, forms and meanings of words, sometimes resulting in changes to the words in question. Plantar wart, a wart on the sole of the foot (from Latin planta), was reinterpreted as planters wart (McArthur 1996: 372). Most of the examples illustrating folk etymology are based on words or compounds of foreign origin, French and Latin in particular. Thus, the French chaise longue (a chair, with or without arms, for reclining, having a seat lengthened to form a complete leg rest and sometimes an adjustable back WEUD 1996: 342) was modified to chaise lounge by the end of the 18th century. The process is also used as an argument for the explanation assigned to charterhouse from the MF chartrouse, irreg. fr., or to crayfish from the MF crevice which was akin to the OHG krebiz for crab. The principle of analogy was active in folk etymology not only to replace parts

of words, but also to reinterpret their meaning or to improve their spelling by means of newly inserted letters. Thus, Wood (1969: 130) exemplifies the adjective posthumous which originally spelt without h and which meant coming after in order of time. By a mistake of etymology, argues the historian linguist, the second half of the word, -humous, was assumed to be connected with death and burial, and so, the meaning after death developed. Historically, further sustains Wood (1969: 131) that there should be no l in the case of could and yet, it has been inserted in the modal on analogy with the verbs should and would, where there is historical justification for it. D. False analogy Unlike the preceding process, where the authors of newly created words were people having little to do with words, false analogy is the mechanism by means of which: erroneous words are sometimes introduced into the vocabulary by respected users of the language who simple make a mistake (Bill Bryson 65). The same author brings forward the case of Shakespeares use of illustrious as an opposite of lustruous, which, for a time gave it a sense that wasnt called for. Bill Bryson (1990: 64) discusses about a special category, the ghost words i.e., those words created by error, such as dord. The 1934 edition of the Merriam Webster international Dictionary uses it as another word for density. In fact, it was a misreading of the scribbled D or d, meaning that density could be abbreviated either to a capital or to a lower-case letter. The people at MerriamWebster quickly removed it, but not before it found its way in other dictionaries. According to the first supplement of the OED there are at least 350 words in English dictionaries that owe their existence either to typographical errors or other misrenderings. For the most part they are fairly obscure. One such is messuage, a legal term used to describe a house, its land and buildings. It is thought to be simply a careless transcription of the French mnage. Many other words owe their existence to mishearings. Button-hole was once a buttonhold. Sweetheart was originally sweetard, as in dullard and dotard. Metanalysis Based on a Greek etymology (meta- across, anlusis loosening up), the term was coined by Otto Jespersen to denote a change in the way the elements in a phrase or sentence are interpreted and used (McArthur 1996: 589). At word level the change involves the indefinite article preceding a noun whose initial sound is a vowel and to which the n of the article attaches. This phenomenon is also called false division. Thus, Wood (1969: 122) mentions the case of nickname, which until the middle of the 15th century was known as an ick name. Ick is an allomorph of an old word, eke, meaning also, hence, an ick name could be translated as an alsoname, one which was given to a person in addition to the real one. In the course of years the final n of the indefinite article moved to the beginning of the next word and so was evolved the modern term. Similarly, argues Wood (1969: 123), the modern adjective tawdry (first recorded in 1548) is derived by the same method, from St. Audrey, the patron saint of finery, at whose fair on October 17th of each year a vast amount of lace and trinketry was sold, much of it, no doubt, of inferior quality. Sometimes the process works the other way and the article steals an n from the noun that follows it. Thus, an adder, the common venomous viper in Europe (first recorded in 1377) was originally (in Middle English, a naddre, from Old English ndre, akin to Old High German ntara), an apron (1535) was a napron (the Middle French word was naperon), and an orange (first recorded in the early 13th century) was a norange (the ultimate source of the term, according to some opinions, is Arabic). Nevertheless, the Webster dictionary describes a long linguistic journey of this term which entered the English vocabulary in the 14 th century, i.e., in

Middle English period, coming from Middle French, from the Old Provenal auranja, from Arabic nranj, from Persian nrang, from Sanskrit nranga meaning orange tree). Metathesis Metathesis is a term of Greek origin (metathesis placing across) and entered English via Latin in the 16th century. This mechanism is described as the transposition of elements of language, usually two sounds and/or letters in a word (McArthur 1996: 592), which should be considered from a diachronic perspective. McArthur gives two examples of such alterations with the Old English bridd which is in Modern English bird and the Middle English Manisk which has evolved to Modern English Manx. Few lexicologists include metathesis among the means of creating new words, and their omitting it may be for some reasons. Among the first of them it would probably be because, like in other cases, metathesis is rather an outcome than a pattern; it may equally be probably because it is frequently associated with spoonerism. Spoonerism (a term derived from W.A. Spooner 1844-1930, an English clergyman noted for such slips) is a transposition of usually initial sounds of two or more words (Webster 1989: 1375), as in tons of soil for sons of toil, and in our queer old dean for our dear old queen. Conclusions The mechanisms which lead to alterations allow for a distinction between deflection, as an example of moribund phenomenon (Katamba 101), and folk etymology whose unsystematic application of etymon-interpreting principles may still result in errors, faux amis and fanciful connections where there are none (Room, 1986).