Language Change - Key Terms (Lexis) Flashcards
What is borrowing?
It is taken words from other languages.
e.g. karaoke
What is Affixation?
It is attaching parts of words to others to form a new one.
e.g. microbiology, eco-warrior
What is Compounding?
It is when words form from joining together two other words with or without a
hyphen.
e.g. laptop, see-through
What is Blending?
It is when parts of words are chopped off and put together to form a new word.
e.g. smog, frappe
What are Proprietary names?
When a word is coined from a company name/ the name of the inventor of a product.
e.g. Hoover, Walkman
What are Acronyms?
They are words word made up of the first letters of a phrase, which is pronounced as if it were a usual word.
e.g. RADAR (Radio Detection And Ranging) or TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space).
What is Initialism?
A word made up of the first letters of a phrase, where the letters are individually pronounced.
e.g. CD, FBI
What is Coinage/neologism?
The creation of completely new words, similar to proprietary names.
What is Back-formation?
The removal of part of a word.
e.g. editor > edit
What is Clipping?
It is a more drastic form of back formation, creating new words by extracting an arbitrary portion of a longer word.
