communication principle
pranisha khadka
Shortening--AWordFormationProcess1.pptx
Word Formation
A focus on shortening
By
Geoff Campbell
A Quick Primer on Word Formation
* English speakers add words to the language all the time.
* “They may do so because there is no word to express an idea (i.e., they perceive a lexical gap and fill it), because they don’t know or can’t remember an already existing word to express the idea, or because, for reasons of style or whim, they prefer to make up a word” (Curzan and Adams 110).
Word Formation Processes
English word formation processes include:
Combining (think “sunflower” or “cupcake”).
Blending (think “motel” for motor hotel or “mocktail” for an alcohol-free cocktail).
Functional shifting (when a word in one part of speech – a noun, say – is also employed as another part of speech – for example, as a verb; think “e-mail” or “commute,” which can be either nouns or verbs.)
Photo at right: A sunflower at sunrise—the power of combining. Photo by Geoff Campbell.
Word Formation Processes Continued
Reanalysis occurs when “we hear words in ways that misrepresent their etymological forms” and “reanalyze morphemes phonologically…in ways that create new morphemes” (Curzan and Adams 116). Think about the word hamburger, which originally referred to a Hamburger steak, which is to say one prepared in the Hamburg style, meaning the morphological boundaries were hamburg + er. It was reanalyzed as ham + burger, which in turn allowed new words like cheeseburger.
Photo at right: A hamburger and fries from Ode Brewing in El Paso, Texas. The word hamburger may have undergone a reanalysis, but its popularity as a food remains unchallenged. Photo by Geoff Campbell.
Word Formation Processes continued
Reduplication (when we repeat a morpheme; think “win-win,” as in, “That’s a win-win proposition.”)
Another word formation process in English is shortening, which will be our focus the rest of this presentation.
As the name “shortening” implies, this process involves making words shorter.
Types of Shortening
English words are typically shortened in one of the following ways:
Alphabetism.
Acronymy.
Clipping.
Backformation.
Crisco. (Gotcha! Crisco is a trade name for a brand of shortening used in cooking. Sadly, it is not a word formation process, but like new words, it can make life better.)
Alphabetism
If you visit Washington, D.C., you’ll be visiting the nation’s capital.
If you look closely enough, you’ll find you’re also in the capital of alphabetism.
Here you’ll find the DOJ (Department of Justice), FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) and DOT (Department of Transportation) among many other government entities often known by their initialisms.
Alphabetism continued
As these examples show, alphabetism is the word formation process by which a word is formed from the initials of a phrase.
Importantly, alphabetisms are pronounced “as the resulting sequence of letters” (Curzan and Adams 112). In other words, the letters are not pronounced as if they were letters in a typical word.
Alphabetisms continued
* In his exhaustive study of American English, H.L. Mencken in The American Language noted that the “general American liking for short cuts in speech…is…shown in the popularity of abbreviations.” (Mencken 204)
* He added, “O.K., C.O.D., N.G. and P.D.Q. are American masterpieces; the first has been borrowed by all the languages of Western Europe and some of those of Asia, and in the days of the great immigrations the immigrants learned all four immediately after hell and damn” (Mencken 205).
Photo at right: Geoff Campbell’s fire-damaged yet still usable copy of H.L. Mencken’s The American Language. Photo by Geoff Campbell.
Alphabetisms continued
Mencken himself was no stranger to the use of alphabetisms in his own work.
For example, his autobiographical essay “Adventures of a Y.M.C.A. Lad,” part of his Heathen Days, uses the alphabetism for Young Men’s Christian Association, and within the essay he further shortens the name to a single letter, as in “a new neighborhood branch of the Y” (“Adventures” 27).
Alphabetisms continued
The popularity of alphabetisms has continued since Mencken’s time (the first edition of The American Language was published in 1919), fueled especially by widespread texting – sending short word messages by phone.
Photo at right depicts commonly used alphabetisms in texting. Screenshot by Geoff Campbell.
Alphabetisms continued (Warning: This slide contains a word some consider vulgar/offensive.)
For those doubting whether alphabetism remains an active force in word formation, look no further than the online store for staid National Public Radio (NPR), which is selling T-shirts reading, “NPR AF,” the AF serving as an initialism for “as fuck” and meaning to a great degree or extent (“T-SHIRTS,” shop.npr.org/collections/t-shirts). This is in keeping with the frequent use of fuck as an intensifier.
Photo at right: A photo of the NPR online store. Photo by Geoff Campbell. NPR Shop accessed Aug. 6, 2021.
Acronymy
* A close cousin of alphabetism is acronymy, which describes what happens when “groups of words are shortened to initials and then pronounced as though the initials were merely letters in a typical word, as in RAM ‘Random Access Memory’ and ROM ‘Read Only Memory’” (Curzan and Adams 112).
Acronymy continued
Remember Washington, D.C., the capital of alphabetism (and the United States)?
Turns out it’s also the capital of acronymy.
If you visit, you may want to see POTUS (President of the United States), and you’ll definitely want to see the SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) building.
Photo at right: Linda Campbell (l) and Geoff Campbell stop by the White House but fail to see POTUS, who apparently had better things to do than greet visitors – perhaps he had a meeting with SECDEF (Secretary of Defense). Photo by Mackenzie Campbell on Geoff Campbell’s phone.
Acronymy continued
While acronyms are a commonplace in Washington, they also get a fair workout in daily life elsewhere.
Advertising copywriters might conduct a SWOT analysis, for example – a strategic planning technique in which one considers strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
And in addition to the RAM and ROM examples mentioned earlier, others are also far from unusual.
“Some acronyms are so common that speakers are no longer aware they began as acronyms: radar (radio detection and ranging), sonar (sound navigation and ranging), and perhaps even scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus) and AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome)” (Curzan and Adams 113).
A Special Note on Alphabetism and Acronymy
While we have here distinguished between alphabetism (aka – I see what you did there -- initialism) and acronymy, the notion of a distinction is of fairly recent vintage.
It wasn’t until 1943 when “acronym started catching on in the more restricted sense for abbreviations pronounced as words, thanks to the proliferation of such contractions during the wartime effort” (Zimmer nytimes.com).
A Special Note on Alphabetisms and Acronymy continued
As an example, “’absent without leave,’ abbreviated as A.W.O.L., could be pronounced by its initial letters (‘ay double-u oh ell’) or acronymically (‘ay-wol’). Some words continue to go either way, such as F.A.Q. for ‘frequently asked questions,’ sometimes pronounced as an initialism (‘eff ay queue’) and sometimes as an acronym (‘fack’)” (Zimmer nytimes.com).
Zimmer writes that “[a]cronymy has ancient roots, as illustrated by the early Christian use of the Greek word ichthys meaning ‘fish’ as an acronym for Iēsous Christos, Theou Huios, Sōtēr (‘Jesus Christ, God's son, Savior’) (Zimmer nytimes.com).
A Special Note on Alphabetisms and Acronymy continued
According to Zimmer, the first known use of acronyms (as opposed to alphabetisms) in English arose in 1879 in telegraph code developed by a United Press Association reporter.
This code used SCOTUS for Supreme Court of the United States and POT for President of the (which by 1895 had been lengthened to POTUS, or President of the United States.
“Those shorthand labels have lingered in journalistic and diplomatic circles -- now joined by FLOTUS, which of course stands for ‘First Lady of the United States’” (Zimmer nytimes.com).
Clipping
Yet another form of shortening is clipping, which describes what happens when a word “loses an element, often at its primary morphemic boundary, next to the root or base” (Curzan and Adams 113).
Mencken called this “a sort of instinctive search for short roots in long words” (Mencken 168).
Clipping continued
Mencken continued: “This habit, in Restoration days, precipitated a quasi-English word, mobile, from the Latin mobile vulgus, and in the days of William and Mary it went a step further by precipitating mob from mobile. Mob is now sound English, but in the Eighteenth Century it was violently attacked by the purists then in eruption....” (Mencken 168-69).
Mob, as we have seen from press coverage of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, remains a useful word to this day.
Clipping continued
And clipping itself retains good standing.
“Some words are foreclipped, such as net (from Internet), server (originally file server), and scanner (from optical scanner). Apparently, e-mail, already a shortened form, isn’t short enough for some who have resorted simply to e, a hindclipping. Other high-tech hindclippings are cell (from cellular) and both comp and sci in the common clipped form of computer science” (Curzan and Adams 113).
Photo at right depicts the word internet being foreclipped – inter is being clipped off to create the resulting word net. Photo by Geoff Campbell.
Backformation
Yet another way to create a new word through shortening is backformation.
“In backformation, a new word is formed by removing an affix (or what looks like an affix) from a word to form a word that never existed before” (Curzan and Adams 113).
An example of this process can be seen in the word beg.
“A classic example is the borrowed French word beggar. The word is one morpheme in French, but English speakers reinterpreted it as a suffixed form: verb + -er. In this way, through backformation, speakers created the new verb beg” (Curzan and Adams 113).
Backformation
A more contemporary example comes from the word defrag, which was formed through backformation.
“You need a disk-optimizing program to defrag, and you need backformation (and affixation) to create the verb defrag. First, you have to backform…the verb fragment from fragmentation, then apply the derivational prefix de-, to fragment, and then, in pursuit of an even shorter, slangier word, backform defrag from defragment” (Curzan and Adams 113-14).
Backformation continued
In other words, backformation is an involved process.
Not surprisingly, “[t]he process of backformation is relatively rare” (Curzan and Adams 114).
An additional thought about shortening
Sometimes new words get formed through combinations that involve shortening.
Consider, for example, the word formation process of blending.
“Blends are created by joining two or more words, at least one of which must be clipped: blending is a hybrid process of clipping and combining” (Curzan and Adams 114).
Continuation of an additional thought
In some blends, all of the combined words are clipped.
Brunch, for example, is a combination of the shortened breakfast and lunch.
Some words are so common we may not even think of them as being blends.
For example, “Internet is a blend, derived from inter(connected) net(work)” (Curzan and Adams 114).
Another common blend that will be enjoying a great deal of use in the next few years has its roots in early American history.
“…American began to make contributions at an early date, e.g., gerrymander (from Gerrry and salamander, c. 1812), and it has been supplying English with others ever since….” (Mencken 171).
In summary
The process of word formation shows that language isn’t a fixed thing, a museum curiosity kept under glass and unchanging for all eternity.
Inventions, changing circumstances, and discoveries will continue to fuel the addition of new words, just as they did when colonists first arrived in North America.
As Mencken noted at the beginning of The American Language, “The first American colonists had perforce to invent Americanisms, if only to describe the unfamiliar landscape and weather, flora and fauna confronting them” (Mencken 3).
In summary continued
Shortening is an important part of the word formation process.
In addition to playing a part in the word formation process of blending, it also makes contributions through alphabetism, acronymy, clipping, and backformation.
Because of these contributions, we can create a sentence like, “OMG, the IRS wants to disallow my deduction for the net, but perhaps I can write POTUS and beg for his intervention.”
Works Cited
Curzan, Anne, and Michael Adams. How English Works: A Linguistic
Introduction. Third edition. Longman, 2012.
Mencken, H.L. Heathen Days. Alfred A. Knopf, 1943.
---. The American Language. Fourth edition. Alfred A. Knopf, 1980.
“T-SHIRTS,” National Public Radio, NPR Shop. shop.npr.org/collections/t-shirts.
Accessed 6 Aug. 2021.
Zimmer, Ben. “On Language: Acronym.” nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19FOB- onlanguage-t.html. Accessed 7 Aug. 2021.
