6.6 Creating New Words
Check Yourself
Video Script
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