Modern English Word-Formation

The ability to make and understand new words is obviously as much a part of our linguistic competence as the ability to make and understand new sentences, and so, as Pennanen[11] points out, ‘it is an obvious gap in transformational grammars not to have made provision for treating word- formation.’ But, as we have already noticed, we may readily thing of words, like to piano and to violin, against which we can invoke no rule, but which are definitely ‘unacceptable’ for no obvious reason. The incongruence of grammaticality and acceptability that is, is far greater where words are concerned than where sentences are concerned. It is so great, in fact, that the exercise of setting out the ‘rules’ for forming words has so far seemed to many linguists to be out of questionable usefulness. The occasions on which we would have to describe the output of such rules as ‘grammatical but non-occurring’[12] are just too numerous. And there are further difficulties in treating new words like new sentences. A novel word (like handbook or partial) may attract unwelcome attention to itself and appear to be the result of the breaking of rules rather than of their application.And besides, the more accustomed to the word we become, the more likely we are to find it acceptable, whether it is ‘grammatical’ or not – or perhaps we should say, whether or not is was ‘grammatical’ at the time it was first formed, since a new word once formed, often becomes merely a member of an inventory; its formation is a historical event, and the ‘rule’ behind it may then appear irrelevant.

What exactly is a word? From Lewis Carroll onwards, this apparently simple question has bedeviled countless word buffs, whether they are participating in a game of Scrabble or writing an article for the Word Ways linguistic magazine. To help the reader decide what constitutes a word, A. Ross

Eckler[13] suggests a ranking of words in decreasing order of admissibility. A logical way to rank a word is by the number of English- speaking people who can recognize it in speech or writing, but this is obviously impossible to ascertain. Alternatively, one can rank a word by its number of occurrences in a selected sample of printed material. H.

Kucera and W.N. Francis's Computational Analysis of Present-day English[14] is based on one million words from sources in print in 1961. Unfortunately, the majority of the words in Webster's Unabridged[15] do not appear even once in this compilation – and the words which do not appear are the ones for which a philosophy of ranking is most urgently needed. Furthermore, the written ranking will differ from the recognition ranking; vulgarities and obscenities will rank much higher in the latter than in the former.

A detailed, word-by-word ranking is an impossible dream, but a ranking based on classes of words may be within our grasp. Ross Eckler[16] proposes the following classes: (1) words appearing in one more standard English- language dictionaries, (2) non-dictionary words appearing in print in several different contexts, (3) words invented to fill a specific need and appearing but once in print.

Most people are willing to admit as words all uncapitalized, unlabeled entries in, say, Webster's New International Dictionary, Third Edition

(1961). Intuitively, one recognizes that words become less admissible as they move in any or all of three directions: as they become more frequently capitalized, as they become the jargon of smaller groups (dialect, technical, scientific), and as they become archaic or obsolete. These classes have no definite boundaries – is a word last used in 1499 significantly more obsolete than a word last used in 1501? Is a word known to 100,000 chemists more admissible than a word known to 90,000 Mexican-

Americans? Each linguist will set his own boundaries.

The second class consists of non-dictionary words appearing in print in a number of sources. There are many non-dictionary words in common use; some logologists would like to draw a wider circle to include these. Such words can be broadly classified into: (1) neologisms and common words overlooked by dictionary-makers, (2) geographical place names, (3) given names and surnames.

Dmitri Borgmann[17] points out that the well-known words uncashed, ex-wife and duty-bound appear in no dictionaries (since 1965, the first of these has appeared in the Random House Unabridged). Few people would exclude these words. Neologisms present a more awkward problem since some may be so ephemeral that they never appear in a dictionary. Perhaps one should read

Pope's dictum "Be not the first by whom the new are tried, nor yet the last to lay the old aside."

Large treasure-troves of geographic place names can be found in The Times

Atlas of the World[18] (200,000 names), and the Rand McNally Commercial

Atlas and Marketing Guide[19] (100,000 names). These are not all different, and some place names are already dictionary words. All these can be easily verified by other readers; however, some will feel uneasy about admitting as a word the name, say, of a small Albanian town which possibly has never appeared in any English-language text outside of atlases.

Given names appear in the appendix of many dictionaries. Common given names such as Edward or Cornelia ought to be admitted as readily as common geographical place names such as Guatemala, but this set does not add much to the logological stockpile.

Family surnames at first blush appear to be on the same footing as geographical place names. However, one must be careful about sources.

Biographical dictionaries and Who's Who are adequate references, but one should be cautious citing surnames appearing only in telephone directories.Once a telephone directory is supplanted by a later edition, it is difficult to locate copies for verifying surname claims. Further, telephone directories are not immune to nonce names coined by subscribers for personal reasons. A good index of the relative admissibility of surnames is the number of people in the United States bearing that surname. An estimate of this could be obtained from computer tapes of the Social Security