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In linguistics, 'word formation' is the creation of a new word. Word formation is sometimes contrasted with semantic change, which is a change in a single word's meaning. The line between word formation and semantic change is sometimes a bit blurry; what one person views as a new use of an old word, another person might view as a new word derived from an old one and identical to it in form; ''see'' Conversion (linguistics). Word formation can also be contrasted with the formation of idiomatic expressions, though sometimes words can form from multi-word phrases; ''see'' Compound (linguistics) and Incorporation (linguistics).

Contents

See also

Literature

See also

The following articles describe various mechanisms of word formation:

★ Acronym (a word formed from initial letters of the words in a phrase, like English ''laser'' from ''light amplified by stimulated emission of radiation'')

★ Affix (a morpheme that attaches to a base morpheme to form a word, like ''re-'' or ''-ness'')

★ Agglutination (the process of forming new words from existing ones by adding affixes to them, like ''shame'' + ''less'' + ''ness'' → ''shamelessness'')

★ Back-formation (removing seeming affixes from existing words, like forming ''edit'' from ''editor'')

★ Blend (a word formed by blending two older words, like ''smog'', which comes from ''smoke'' and ''fog'')

★ Clipping (lexicography) (taking part of an existing word, like forming ''ad'' from ''advertisement'')

★ Compound (linguistics) (a word formed by stringing together older words, like ''earthquake'')

★ Conversion (linguistics) (forming a new word from an existing identical one, like forming the verb ''green'' from the existing adjective)

★ Incorporation (linguistics) (a compound of a verb and an object or particle, like ''intake'')

★ Loanword (a word borrowed from another language, like ''cliché'', which comes from French)

★ Neologism (a completely new word, like ''quark'')

★ Noun adjunct (a noun that modifies another noun, like ''chicken'' in ''chicken soup'')

★ Phono-semantic matching (matching a foreign word with a phonetically and semantically similar pre-existent native word/root)

Literature

★ Bussmann, Hadumod (1996), ''Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics'', London: Routledge.

★ Grzega, Joachim (2004), ''Bezeichnungswandel: Wie, Warum, Wozu? Ein Beitrag zur englischen und allgemeinen Onomasiologie'', Heidelberg: Winter.

★ Koch, Peter (2002), “Lexical Typology from a Cognitive and Linguistic Point of View”, in: Cruse, D. Alan et al. (eds.) (2002-), ''Lexicology: An International Handbook on the Nature and Structure of Words and Vocabularies / Lexikologie: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Natur und Struktur von Wörtern und Wortschätzen'', [Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft 21], Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, vol. 1, p. 1142-1178.