logo search
Kovalenko_lexicology

3.4 Minor linear derivation types

Back-formation / Clipping / Blending / Reduplication / Acronyms / Iconic derivation

Back-formation consists in removing seeming or real suffixes from a word to coin a new word. In case when the suffix is real, it did not immediately participate in building the source word. For example, the verb to typewrite stems from the noun typewriter, which in its turn was derived by combining the stems type and writer.

The singular noun asset is a back-formation from what looks a plural form assets. However, assets is originally not a plural; it is a loan-word from Anglo-Norman asetz (modern French assez). The -s was erroneously taken to be a plural inflection.

Many words came into English by this route: pease was once a mass noun but was reinterpreted as a plural, leading to the back-formation pea. The noun statistic was likewise a back-formation from the field of study statistics. In Britain the word burgle came into use in the 19th century as a back-formation from burglar (although in some parts of North America burglarize is usually used) (Wikipedia, 2009).

The other examples of words coined by means of back-formation are to butle (from butler); to edit (from editor). Similarly, television gave rise to televise, double-glazing preceded double-glaze, and baby­sitter preceded baby­sit.

“Each year sees a new crop of back-formations. Some are coined because they meet a real need, as when a group of speech therapists in Reading in the 1970s felt they needed a new verb to describe what they did – to therap.­ Some are playful formations, as when a tidy person is described as couth, kempt, or shevelled. Back-formations often attract criticism when they first appear, as happened in the late 1980s to explete (to use an expletive) and accreditate (from accreditation)” (Crystal, 1995, p.130).

Clipping is deriving new words by means of omitting a rear or an initial part of a word. The beginning or the ending of the word functions instead of the full word. In most cases, the meaning of the word remains unchanged, but it acquires a new stylistic colouring.

In case of omission of the rear part of a word, back clipping takes place, for example bra (brassiere), cable (cablegram), demo (demonstration) doc (doctor), exam (examination), fab (fabulous), gas (gasoline), glam (glamorous), gym (gymnastics, gymnasium), lab (laboratory), math (mathematics), memo (memorandum), mod (modern), pop (popular), pub (slang shortening of public house, which originally meant ‘any building open to the public’), trad (traditional jazz), tux (tuxedo). Another term for this type of clipping is apocopation.

In cases of fore-clipping (aphaeresis), the initial part of the word is omitted: bus (autobus), chute (parachute), coon (racoon), gator (alligator), pike (turnpike), phone (telephone), plane (aeroplane), varsity (university).

In middle clipping or syncope, the middle of the word is retained. Examples are: flu (influenza), fridge (refrigerator), tec (detective), polly (apollinaris), jams (pyjamas), shrink (head-shrinker).

There are also several clippings which retain material from more than one part of the word, such as maths (UK), gents, and specs.

Several clipped forms also show adaptation, such as fries (from French fried potatoes), Betty (from Elizabeth), and Bill (from William).

Sometimes clipping is combined with adding the suffix –o to the clipped stem: Afro (African), boho (bohemian), disco (discotheque), logo (logogramme).

Blending is also described by the term telescopy. This type of word-formation suggests fusing two or more words or parts of words to produce a combined meaning. The result of blending is called a blend, a portmanteau or a telescopic word.

The term portmanteau to denote this kind of words was first used by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). In the book, Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice words from Jabberwocky, saying, "Well, slithy means lithe and slimy ... You see it's like a portmanteau— there are two meanings packed up into one word."8 Carroll often used such words to a humorous effect in his work.

In contemporary linguistics the term blending is more common. Typically, a blend is a word that is formed by combining both sounds and meanings from two or more words: the derived word has a part in the middle common to the both initial words, e.g. spork or foon from spoon/fork and fork/spoon, respectively; animatronics from animation and electronics; or blaxploitation from black and exploitation.

Sometimes the letter/sound at the boundary is common to both components, e.g., smog (smoke + fog). In the other cases, both components contain a common sequence of letters or sounds. The blend is composed of the beginning of the first component, the common part and the end of the second component. For example, the word Californication, popularized by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, sounds as if it were California + fornication. Other examples of this type of blend are: motel (motorway + hotel); slanguage (slang + language).

In case of the word skorts (skirt + shorts) the beginning of the first word is joined to the ending of the second word, and, besides, the deriving stems have common initial letter and an inside element rt.

The word chortle (chuckle + snort) is an example of a blend, where elements of both deriving words are intermixed, although they have no any common elements. The same type of blend is the word polyester (a type of cloth) – a combination of the English noun polymer with the German essigäther (Engl. acetic ether).

In some blends the beginning of one word is prepended to the end of the other, e.g., brunch (breakfast + lunch); edutainment (education + entertainment); Eurovision (European + television); heliport (helicopter + airport); infomercial (information + commercial); shortalls (shorts + overalls).

In rare cases the beginning of one word is combined with a short full word at the end, e.g. alcopop (alcohol + pop).

Here are some more examples of blends: advertorial (advertisement + editorial); Chunnel (Channel + Tunnel); Oxbridge (Oxford + Cambridge); Yarvard (Yale + Harvard); guesstimate (guess + estimate); squaerial (square + aerial); toytoons (toys + cartoons); breathalyser (breath + analyser); affluenza (affluence + influenza); infomercials (information + commercials); dockominium (dock + condominium).

In most cases, the second element is the one which controls the meaning of the whole. So, brunch is a kind of lunch, not a kind of breakfast – which is why the lexeme is brunch, and not, say, *lunkfast. Similarly, toytoon is a kind of cartoon (one which generates a series of shop toys), not a kind of toy. “Blending seems to have increased in popularity in the 1980s, being increasingly used in commercial and advertising contexts. Products are sportsational, swimsational and sexational. TV provides dramacons, docufantasies and rockumentaries” (Crystal, 1995, p.130). The forms were felt to be quite eye-catching and exciting, but not all of them have become part of the language lexical stock.

Reduplication is creating new words by means of repeating the same or similar elements. Full (or exact) reduplication reminds of baby-talk: frou-frou (type of dress), bonbon, bye-bye, couscous, din-din, fifty-fifty, gee-gee, go-go (shoe style), goody-goody, knock-knock, night-night, no-no, so-so.

Partial reduplication, i.e. using two stems similar in spelling or pronunciation, is more frequent, particularly in colloquial language and the domains of fashion and popular alternative cultures. Here belong cases of:

Rhyming reduplication: abracadabra, boogie-woogie, bow-wow, drape shape, harum-scarum, helter-skelter, hi-fi, hocus-pocus, honey-bunny, hot-pot, hotch-potch, hurry-scurry, lovey-dovey, nitty-gritty, nitwit, okey-dokey, pall-mall, picnic, razzle-dazzle, reet pleat, sci-fi, super-duper, teenie-weenie, tidbit, tie-dye, touchy-feely, walkie-talkie, willy-nilly, wingding, zoot suit.

Ablaut reduplication (changing the inner vowel of the second element): bric-a-brac, chit-chat, criss-cross, ding-dong, flip-flop, hip-hop, kitty-cat, knick-knack, ping-pong, see-saw, sing-song, splish-splash, tic-tac-toe, tick-tock, tip-top, wish-wash, zig-zag.

Reduplicatives are used in a variety of ways:

Mass media and advertisers frequently use phonetic reduplication (the repetition of the same sounds in a word-combination) in order to attract attention. Among the collocations, often used by media, are: disco diva, bold gold, petite fit, makeup maven, luxe looks, cool look, beauty beat.

Abbreviations are words produced by means of combining initial letters or parts of two or more words.

“Often thought to be an exclusively modern habit, the fashion for abbreviations can be traced back over 150 years. In 1839, a writer in the New York Evening Tatter comments on what he calls 'the initial language ... a species of spoken short-hand, which is getting into very general we among loafers and gentlemen of the fancy, besides Editors, to whom it saves much trouble in writing'. He was referring to OK ('all correct'), PDQ ('pretty damn quick') – two which have lasted – GT ('gone to Texas'), LL ('liver loafers), and many other forms introduced, often with a humorous or satirical intent, by society people (Crystal, 1995, p.120).

The fashionable use of abbreviation – a kind of society slang –comes and goes in waves, though it is never totally absent. In the XXth century, however, there started an abbreviation boom with the emergence of abbreviations in science, technology, and other special fields, such as cricket, baseball, drug trafficking, the armed forces, and the media.

The reasons for using abbreviated forms are: linguistic economy, succinctness and precision, conveying a sense of social identity (to use an abbreviated form is to be 'in the know’ – part of the social group to which the abbreviation belongs).

There exist several types of abbreviation:

Initialisms are the items which are spoken as individual letters, such as BBC, DJ, MP, EEC, e.g.. They are also called alphabetisms. The vast majority of abbreviations fall into this category. Not all of them use only the first letters of the constituent words: PhD, for example, uses the first two letters of the word philosophy, and GHQ and TV take a letter from the middle of the word.

Acronyms are the initialisms which are pronounced as single words, such as NATO, laser, UNESCO, and SALT (talks). Such items would never have periods separating the letters – a contrast with initialisms, where punctuation is often present (especially in older styles of English). However, some linguists do not recognize a sharp distinction between acronyms and initialisms, but use the former term for both.

Another group of acronyms are those produced by means of initial parts of their constituent words bigger than one letter. One of the most well-known examples is cyborg, a term which is commonly used to refer to a cybernetic organism. Other examples are: Velcro (velvet + crochet) – a name of a peculiar fabric type that sticks to itself and is used instead of buttons in clothes; adidas – a sportswear company name that is a combination of the initial parts of its founder’s name (Adi Dassler).

There are also awkward cases - abbreviations which do not fall clearly into neither of the above categories. Some forms can be used either as initialisms or acronyms (UFO – 'U F 0' or 'you-foe'). Some mix these types in one word (CDROM, pronounced 'see-dee-rom'; JPEG, pronounced ‘jay-peg’ and MS-DOS, pronounced ‘em-es-dos’). These abbreviations are sometimes described as acronym–initialism hybrids. Some can form part of a larger word, using affixes (ex-JP, pro-BBC, ICBMs). Some are used only in writing (Mr, St. are always pronounced in full in speech).

There also exist facetious forms, used particularly in electronic comunication (TGIF –Thank God It's Friday).

Traditionally, in English, abbreviations have been written with a full stop in place of the deleted part. In the case of most acronyms and initialisms, each letter is an abbreviation of a separate word and, in theory, should get its own termination mark. Such punctuation is diminishing with the belief that the presence of all-capital letters is sufficient to indicate that the word is an abbreviation. Some influential style guides, such as that of the BBC, no longer require punctuation, or even proscribe it. Larry Trask, American author of The Penguin Guide to Punctuation, states categorically that, in British English, "this tiresome and unnecessary practice is now obsolete" (Trask, 1997). Nevertheless, some American style guides still require periods in certain instances. The New York Times’ guide recommends separating each segment with a period when the letters are pronounced individually, as in K.G.B., C.I.A., but not when pronounced as a word, as in NATO. When a multiple-letter abbreviation is formed from a single word, periods are generally proscribed, although there are exceptions. TV, for example, may stand for a single word (television), and is generally spelled without punctuation (except in the plural). Although PS stands for the single word postscript (or the Latin postscriptum), it is often spelled with periods (P.S.).

Some style manuals also base the letters' case on their number. The New York Times, for example, keeps NATO in all capitals (while several guides in the British press may render it Nato), but uses lowercase in Unicef (from United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund) because it is more than four letters. Some abbreviations undergo assimilation into ordinary words, when they become common: for example, when technical terms become commonplace among non-technical people. Often they are then written in lower case, and eventually it is widely forgotten that the word was derived from the initials of others: scuba (Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) and laser (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation), for instance.

In some cases, an acronym or initialism has been turned into a name, creating a pseudo-acronym (this term is generally used for all abbreviations of the type, in spite of the fact that most of them are actually initialisms).This trend has been common with many companies hoping to retain their brand recognition while simultaneously moving away from what they saw as an outdated image: American Telephone and Telegraph became AT&T, SBC followed suit changing from Southwestern Bell Corporation, Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC, British Petroleum became BP to emphasize that it was no longer only an oil company (captured by its motto ‘beyond petroleum’), Silicon Graphics, Incorporated became SGI to emphasize that it was no longer only a computer graphics company. DVD now has no official meaning: its advocates couldn't agree on whether the initials stood for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc, and now both terms are used.

Initialisms may have advantages in international markets: for example, some national affiliates of International Business Machines are legally incorporated as IBM (or, for example, IBM Canada) to avoid translating the full name into local languages. Similarly, UBS is the name of the merged Union Bank of Switzerland and Swiss Bank Corporation.

Rebranding can lead to redundant-acronym syndrome, as when Trustee Savings Bank became TSB Bank. A few high-tech companies have taken the redundant acronym to the extreme: for example, ISM Information Systems Management Corp. and SHL Systemhouse Ltd. Another common example is RAM memory, which is redundant because RAM (random-access memory) includes the initial of the word memory; NIC card is similarly redundant, NIC standing for network-interface card. PIN stands for personal identification number, obviating the second word in PIN number. Other examples include ATM machine (Automatic Teller Machine machine), EAB bank (European American Bank bank), HIV virus (Human Immunodeficiency Virus virus), SAT test (Scholastic Achievement/Aptitude/Assessment Test test, now simply SAT Reasoning Test).

There are a number of words in the English language that are not acronyms originally, but were interpreted as such later. The words interpreted as acronyms are sometimes called backronyms. For example, the word posh (fashionable, chic) did not originally stand for Port Outward Starboard Home (referring to the 1st class cabins shaded from the sun on outbound voyages East, and homeward heading voyages West). The musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang popularised this erroneous etymology.

The same way, the word Golf is not an acronym for Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden as has been suggested. It is actually derived from the Scottish name for the game, gowf.

SOS, the international distress signal, chosen solely for its easy recognizability in Morse code (...---...), as drawn up in the International Wireless Telegraph Convention, was later interpreted as standing gor the English save our ship or even save our souls.

GI, slang for a U.S. soldier, often thought to stand for Government Issue as G.I. was supposedly stamped on soldiers' equipment. Sometimes thought to stand for General Infantry, or in Europe for General Invasion. In fact, the abbreviation GI comes from galvanized iron, GI being used in US Army bookkeeping to describe items such as trash cans made from it.

Iconic derivation is quite a rare word-formation type that consists in using alphabetic letters to denote different kinds of shape. The term iconic comes from semiotics, where it is used to denote a type of signs. “According to Charles Peirce an icon is a sign exhibiting a resemblance with the object it denotes. An iconic sign in language is one whose signans (the signifier) shows a relation of similarity or analogy with signatum (the signified)” (Galéas, 1997). A photograph is a typical example of an iconic sign.

Iconic words are the words consisting of two parts – the first part being a letter of the English alphabet used to show shape, and the second – usually a noun that names an object whose shape is described: A-skirt, H-line (dress), T-junction, T-strap (shoes), S-curve, V-neck, X-crossing, Y-silhouette.

⁂