Minor types of lexical oppositions

I.V. Arnold [] speaks about so-called minor types of lexical oppositions, to which she referred Sound interchange, Distinctive stress, Sound imitation.

Sound interchange is defined as an opposition in which words or word forms are differentiated due to an alternation in the phonemic composition of the root, e.g., food – to feed; or root consonant as in to speak - speech, life - live. It may be combined with affixa­tion: strong - strength or with affixation and shift of stress as in 'democrat – de`mocracy.

The process is not active in the language at present.

Distinctive stress

Some nouns and verbs of Romanic origin have a distinctive stress pattern: conduct- 'beha­viour' – to conduct - 'to lead or guide (in a formal way); accent, contest, contract (extract), contrast, export), increase.protest, rebel, record, sur­vey, torment.

Historically this is probably explained by the fact that these words were borrowed from French where the original stress was on the last syl­lable.

Sound imitation

Sound imitating or onomatopoeic words are phonetically motivated echoes of natural sounds, e.g: words naming sounds and movement of water: babble, blob, bubble, flush, gurgle, splash, etc. But onomatopoeic words don`t re­flect the real sounds directly, irrespective of the laws of the language, be­cause the same sounds are represented differently in different languages, e.g., the English word cock-a-doodle-do and the Russian ku-kori-ku.

The majority of onomatopoeic words serve to name sounds or move­ments. Most of them are verbs easily turned into nouns: bang, boom, bump, rustle, smack. There is a theory that in language typical sound combination(phonostemes) have a certain meaning. In Russian bilabial sound refer smth. round: бублик, бобы. In English words with sl denote a) verbal or physical attack: slam, slander, slap, slaughter, slay b) a sliding movement: slide, slalom, sledge, slip, slope.

Back-formation

Back-formation is a term which denotes the derivation of new words by subtracting a real or supposed affix from existing words through misinterpretation of their structure.

The process is based on analogy. The words beggar, butler, cobbler or typewriter look very much like agent nouns with the suffix -er-or, such as actor or painter. But their last syllable is subtracted from the word leaving what is understood as a verbal stem, e.g., the verb butle -'to act or serve as a butler' is derived by subtraction of -er from a supposedly verbal stem in the noun butler. The process of back-formation has only diachronic relevance. For synchronic approach butler- butle is equivalent to painter – paint. A modern example of back-formation is to lase — a verb used about the functioning of the apparatus called laser.

The most productive type of back-formation in present-day English is derivation of verbs from compounds that have either -er or -ing as their last element: thought-read<ithought-reader<ithought-reading, to air-condition <air-conditioner <air-conditioning. Other examples of back-formations from compounds are the verbs baby-sit, beachcomb, house-break.

Conversion

The process of coining a new word in a different part of speech but without adding any de­rivative element, so that the basic form of the original and the basic form of the derived words are homonymous, is called con­version. The other terms are zero derivation, root formation or functional change.

The phenomenon has been treated differently by different scholars. The term conversion appeared in 1891 in H. Sweet`s “New English Grammar”[]. The essence of the phenomenon lies in the fact that the word paper exists in the English -language as a noun, and a verb may be formed from the same stem without changing the stem in any way, so that both forms are homonymous. Their distribution on the other hand is quite different: I need some paper. I papered my room. The verb paper takes the functional verbal suffix -ed and occupies the position of a verbal pred­icate. Italso has the lexico-grammatical meaning of a verb. The difference between paper n and paper v is morphological, syntactic and semantic: the origi­nal and the resulting word are grammatically different; a new paradigm is acquired and the syntactic functions and ties are those of a verb.

Conversion is also called zero derivation, root formation and functional change.

Conversion is productive in English. The main reason for it is the absence of formal signs marking the part of speech to which the word belongs.

The problem of conversion is considered differently from the synchronic and diachronic approach. Diachronically the causes that made conversion so widely spread are the following. Nouns and verbs have become identical in form firstly as a result of the loss of endings. When endings disappeared phonetical development resulted in the merging of sound forms for both elements: OE: carian v.-caru n.– ME.:care v.n.; OE: drincan v. – drinca n.- ME. drink.

A similar homonymy resulted in the borrowing from French of numer­ous pairs of words of the same root but belonging in French to different parts of speech. These words lost affixes and became phonetically identical in the process of assimilation: OFr: crier v- cri -ME: cry v,n.