Various Types and Ways of Forming Words.

There are some principal ways of word formation: word composition, conversion, shortenings, affixation.

Apart from principal there are some minor types of modem word-formation, i.e., blending, sound interchange, sound imitation, distinctive stress, and back-formation.

Blending is the formation of a new word by combining parts of two words. Blends may be of two types: 1) additive type that may be transformed into a phrase consisting of complete stems combined by the conjunction and, e. g. smog — sm(oke) and (f)og; 2) restrictive type that transformed into a phrase, the first element of which serves as a modifier for the second, e.g.: telecast — television broadcast.

Sound-interchange is the formation of a word due to an alteration in the phonemic composition of its root. Sound-interchange falls into two groups: 1) vowel-interchange (or ablaut):food — to feed. In some cases vowel-interchange is combined with suffixation: strong —strength, 2) consonant-interchange: advice — to advise.Consonant-interchange and vowel-interchange may be combined together: life — to live.

Sound imitation (or onomatopoeia) is the naming of an action or a thing a more or less exact reproduction of the sound associated with it cock-a-doodle-do (English) — Kу-кa-pe-Ky (Russian).

Semantically, according to the source sound, many onomatopoeic words fall into a few very definite groups: 1) words denoting sounds produced by human beings in the process of communication or expressing their feelings e.g. chatter, babble; 2) words denoting sounds produced by animals, birds, insects, e.g. moo, croak, buzz; 3) words imitating the sounds of water, the noise of metallic things, a forceful motion, e.g. splash, clink, whip, swing.

Back -formation is the formation of a new word by subtracting a real or supposed suffix from the existing words. The process is based on analogy.

For example, the word to butle 'to act or serve as a butler' is derived by subtraction of -er from a supposedly verbal stem in the noun butler

Distinctive stress is the formation of a word by means of the shift of the stress in the source word, cf: 'increase (n) — in'crease (v), 'absent -ab'sent (v).