7: Creation of New Lexicon

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Back in Chapter 1 we learned that mental grammar is generative, that is, it allows users to create, or generate, brand new words and sentences that have never been spoken before. And in fact, one of the fastest ways that languages change, and the easiest way to observe, is by new words entering the language.

There are all kinds of different ways that new words can make their way into a language. It’s possible to coin a new word, that is, to create a completely new form that hasn’t existed before. So I made up this form vrang; I don’t know what it means because I just made it up. But that was pretty hard to do — any new form I tried to make up turned out to have some obscure definition. So brand new coinages are possible, but they don’t actually happen very often.

One way that English gets a lot of new words is by borrowing them from other languages. For example, the Welsh word hiraeth means longing or yearning. It’s become common enough for English-speakers to use this Welsh word that in 2020, the Oxford English Dictionary added it. You can probably think of many other common English words that started out as borrowings from other languages and became deeply embedded in the English lexicon, like anime, from Japanese, limousine from French, and boomerang from Australian Indigenous languages.

Of course, one of the most obvious ways to derive a new words is with an affix. You might recognize the suffix –ology, which usually means “the study of”. So mythology involves studying myths, criminology is the study of criminality, and epidemiology is the study of epidemics. The Oxford English Dictionary recently added garbageology, the study of a society or community by investigating what people consider to be garbage.

In English, affixation is one of the most productive ways to derive new words: No matter what the word is, you can almost always add an affix to derive a new, related word from it. Some other new affixed words that have found their way into the dictionary are enoughness, farmette (a small farm), and unfathom.

Another extremely productive way of deriving new words in English is by compounding, that is, by taking two existing words, both of which are free morphemes, and sticking them together. For example, the year 2020 saw the words plant-based, jerkweed, and delete key added to the dictionary. You can learn more about compounds in Chapter 7.

So we can say that productivity is a property of morphological processes in the grammar of a language. A given process is productive if it’s one that the language uses a lot, and uses to generate new forms. For example, in English the plural morpheme spelled –s is extremely common, and we see it on words like socks, cars, bananas, stars, and thousands of others. In contrast, a plural affix –en is very rare in English: we see it on the plural forms children, oxen, and the very old-fashioned word brethren, but pretty much nowhere else. And if we coin a new word, like vrang, and then decide we have more than one vrang, the plural we use is going to be vrangs, not vrangen.

If you look through the lists of new words that get added to dictionaries each year, you’ll see that besides affixation and compounding, there are other morphological processes that occur in English. Here are some of them.

One thing that English does a lot is take a word from one syntactic category and just move it to another category with a new meaning. For example, the old meaning of ghost is the noun meaning, and then there’s the newer verb meaning, where if you ghost someone you just stop replying to their messages and kind of disappear from their life. Not very nice! Likewise, catfish and sundown have newer, verb meanings that are different from their original compound noun meanings.

Acronyms pretty frequently make their way into English and some of them stick around, especially in typed form online, like a link that’s not-safe-for-work, the classic LOL, and of course, “too long ,didn’t read”.

Clipping happens when we take a long word and just clip part of it off. Usually the meaning doesn’t change, but often the clipped form becomes much more frequent then the long form. Does anyone even know that fax is shortened from facsimile? And certainly no-one talks about electronic mail anymore.

A few years ago clipping had a brief moment in the way some young people talked, so you might have an outfit that’s totes adorbs, or a relaish that’s not serious, just cazh. This trend seems to have lost its popularity, the way language fads often do.

The word-formation process that I’ve left for last is my favourite because I find a lot of them so funny. That’s the blend, or portmanteau, the process whereby two words are kind of jammed together, but not in a compound. Instead some parts of the two words overlap with each other, like when spoon and fork combine to make spork. The best blends, the ones that stick around in the language and become permanent, seem to share a syllable like the second syllable in both hungry and angry, or at least share some segments and the rhythmic pattern, like athleisure. And then there are some that just seem to be trying too hard, peanutritious, Christmasketball, and (shudder) covidpreneur. I’m no prescriptivist, but I hope these words die a quick death.

All these words are examples of the generativity of grammar. Languages are constantly adding new words, using the productive morphological processes that are part of the grammar. Pay attention to the new words you discover as you read and listen, and see if you can figure out how they’re formed.

Check Yourself

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Let's take a minute to walk through some more derivational as well as creational morphology. This is when we create new words, either out of the blue or on their own, as well as when we derive or create from a pre-existing lexicon. When talking about the creation of new terms or new lexicons, let's focus on a few of these. Catherine Anderson has already talked about some and I’m going to give you a few more.

Clipping, acronyms, and blending. Anderson more or less described those, and these are terms that you probably already know. Certainly, acronyms are very ubiquitous, at least among those of us that use text as a means of communication. Blending is something you're very familiar with, and in fact English is a great example of blending. We do this pretty regularly and we're one of the few languages that do this regularly and pervasively. In fact, we've been doing blending for a few hundred years; this is not a new phenomenon. Clipping is something that most languages do, and especially if we're talking about really technical terms, or if we are talking about high level language, or really educated speech. Think about an exam, math, and a dorm; if you have experience on a four-year university, you know what a dorm is. Even prof, although that one is used as much anymore. How many of you actually say examination anymore? or dormitory? Even the term mathematics is not very common certainly for average speakers of American English. Most of the time they're very specific terms.

A few more that I want to bring up and we'll come back to these when we get to historical linguistics because these are very common when we talk about. The history of the language and how it incorporates or creates new terms. Borrowing is a really common strategy that all speech communities use. We all borrow terms from other languages, especially if it's referring to technology, flora or fauna that is not native to us. Coup d'etat was a term that was created by a French philosopher to describe a certain political movement, and that term has been used throughout the world, regardless of what language we're talking about. A coyote is a term that I love bringing up; in fact, any of these terms that we borrow or that you see in Spanish that ending -ate or -ote up, they...have a very wonderful history in and of themselves. We have them in English like 'coyote', 'chocolate', 'tomato'; they were borrowed in from Spanish but Spanish actually borrowed the term from Nahuatl, which is the language that the Aztecs spoke. In many cases the Nahuatl term is borrowed from a different Mesoamerican language. it is a real historical domino effect and it shows the beauty of borrowing across cultures and across speech communities. Sometimes we borrow a term but make it more like the sounds in our own language; for example, [kojote] sounds a little Spanish so [kaɪjoʷtej] is what we say in English. In the case of a tsunami, we're pretty close. We say a tsunami; we just clip that [t]. In Japanese, you actually really shorten that 'u' sound almost make it voiceless: [tsu̥nami]. Sometimes, you borrow that and other times you don't.

Coinage is just creating the term on its own. These three lexicon, by the way, nerd, geek, chuck, have an interesting history of their own.

Name generalizations are a way for marketing gurus to have their day because we take that term and apply it to everything in that category. For example, if you work in an office environment, especially up until about 10 years ago, you used to not photocopy something; you used to Xerox something. How many of you actually say facial tissue or tissue when you go and grab that thing out of the box? Almost always you say a Kleenex, regardless of what brand that you're using. Maybe not so much here in the United States, but in many other English-speaking places, when you go to vacuum something you're actually Hoovering. Even eponyms are a part of this. We've taken the name, not from a brand name but from a place. That specific pastry that many of us have joined the mornings that comes originally from Denmark is a Danish. Yes, that lovely snack that we have, or even a lunch item that we have, with meat between two bread pieces of bread? Yes, it’s from the Earl of sandwich you've heard that story before and those would be two types of eponyms.

Derivation is also really a key piece here, or sometimes it's called misanalysis (I use actually as misanalysis. This is when we analyze something incorrectly sometimes; they are native terms or lexicon and sometimes they are items that we have borrowed in. The examples here for subtractive derivation or frequently what we call backformation. We speakers misanalyze it; we think it's really a derivation of something else when it's not and then we create a whole new history for those. I'll come back to this more when we get to historical linguistics because this is always an historical process and always this happens not within one generation, but over several generations. Although I will say the one exception to that is the second one: hamburger. A Hamburger steak was brought in, I believe, at the end of the 19th century into English speaking cultures, most probably connected to the Victorian court and Britain. Within two generations, we get this concept of it not being a Hamburg steak, but a hamburger and then within two more generations of that, burger is the lexicon that can stand alone, and it can be modified by any number of combinations most of them being compounds like tofu burger, veggie burger, turkey burger, Spam burger, you get the idea. We can also have an additive situation, where we are adding on pieces, either morphemes or compounding various lexicon. The one I love to bring up, especially as a native Californian is this one, the second one. If you're in Southern California, you know where the La Brea Tar Pits are and you know what they are; they are quite literally tar pits. Here's the fun bit and the part that, unless you speak Spanish, you probably didn't know: la brea in Spanish is 'the tar' or 'the tar pits'; it means both. Quite literally, if we're translating everything out, we're saying: 'the tar pits tar pits'. We're really saying that. We are thinking of la brea, not as a Spanish term, meaning 'the tar pits'; we're thinking of it as a place name that we just borrowed in.

A couple more to go through, and these are really interesting. I'm showing you not just English, but many other languages, although English certainly has its place in these types of processes. Let's talk about composition first. This is where Germanic languages shine, including English. We compound everything; think about these lexicon in English—specifically, when they are combined they mean one thing, while when they're separated out they mean something different. Girlfriend/boyfriend: if we mean a specific loved one, then they're combined, but if we mean a friend who happens to have a specific gender identity, then we split them out. Girlfriend, lifeguard chair, air conditioner, looking glass, textbook, aircraft carrier, bookcase, tennis racket. I could go on and on; Germanic languages love composition. In fact, look up the word for 'research' in German; do it on your own and there's the perfect example of composition.

Reduplication is also a really important piece, maybe not so much in English and another Indo-European languages, but certainly throughout the Australio-Pacific languages, many of the Niger-Congo (languages in Africa) and throughout the world. Reduplication is just what you think; it is you are duplicating part or all of the lexicon. I'm going to give you an example of total reduplication, meaning all of the lexicon is being reduplicated, as well as an example of partial reduplication, when only part of it is being duplicated. Indonesian pluralization is total reduplication, so you have a term for 'house', a term for 'mother' and a term for 'a fly' like an insect: rumah, ibu, lalat. If you want to pluralize them, you repeat them: rumahrumah, ibuibu, lalatlalat. Just all combined together in the in a full stand-alone term, a lexicon. Here's an example of Tagalog, where you have partially reduplication. In the Australio-Pacific languages tends to be very common as a type of inflection. In this case, you have the base form, the infinitive form of the verb, and then you have the future form; the future form is made by repeating the first syllable. Bili is the term for 'to buy'; bibili would be 'will buy'; kaim, kakaim; pasok, papasok, you get the idea.

The last two processes will also revisit when we come to historical linguistics because, again, these are processes that tend to happen over time: extension and narrowing, and then functional shift. Extension and narrowing is increase and decrease; extension like 'holiday' or 'business', narrowing like 'hound' or 'doctor'. I'll explain these more when we get to historical linguistics, but suffice it to say that, over time, meaning changes. Functional shift also happens over time, where you have terms that change roles in the sentence and can have more than one role. For example, laugh used to only be a verb and then, when we wanted to describe it as a noun, we just use the same term; we didn't change it in any way. The same thing happened with process, position, contrast, and so many more. This is just an example of English, but other languages do this, too. It is interesting to note that, at least with respect to English, sometimes we can change a little bit of the pronunciation as well. For example, frequently the noun version will have the stressed vowel as the first syllable, but the verb version will be stress on the last syllable. This is something we'll come back to both extension/narrowing and functional shift when we get to historical linguistics.