FOCUS ON LANGUAGE

SOME NOVELTIES IN ENGLISH WORLD-FORMATION

Vocabulary is commonly known to be both static and dynamic. On the one hand, it must retain some invariant core in order to remain a means of communication for consecutive generations, on the other, meeting society’s demand of nominating new objects and notions, it should produce new words and at the same time get rid of obsolete ones or at least push them to the periphery of the word-stock.
New words are mainly coined of the material available in the language according to its productive structural patterns. They may also be new meaning of words which already existed in the language. Borrowing is another important source of neologisms.
Looking through a dictionary of new words is informative and exciting.
It is like looking through an album of photographs after an interesting travel: you see a picture and memory takes you back to the moments you experienced during your travel. So do some new words. They show us how much the world around has changed and you wonder how you could quite recently do without such things as e-mail, or a PC or a teletext. Studying new words is linguistically important: taken as a whole they mark the direction in which the language system develops.
Analysing British dictionaries including new English words of the last three decades helps us see some characteristic features of the present-day word-building. The majority of the patterns remain productive and serve to form a lot of words. Innovations can be grouped as: 1) new meanings of long-established patterns; and 2) new patterns.
There are a great number of words formed by means of the suffix -ism. Traditionally it forms abstract nouns denoting an action or result (baptism, organism), a typical conduct or condition (heroism, magnetism), a system or principle, a theory or doctrine (liberalism, Darwinism) and a pathological condition, especially induced by excessive use of drugs or the like (alcoholism, dwarfism). The suffix is considered to be stylistically marked: nouns containing it mainly refer to the bookish vocabulary. The suffix itself is devoid of evaluative power and denotes negatively-coloured notions only when combining with stems of derogatory character, e.g. blackguardism, facism.
Among the new words, alongside with traditional coinages such as monetarism, consumerism, volunteerism there are quite a few negatively coloured formations with their stems expressing no evaluation at all, e.g. electoralism – consideration of electoral advantage in formulating one’s politics; paternalism – unsolicited interference of adults into youngsters’ affairs.
Still more distinctively the negative power of the suffix is felt in recent coinages denoting various kinds of discrimination. The pattern may have been triggered by the word feminism which denoted the movement for recognition of women’s claims to equal rights with men. It was followed by sexism – discrimination and prejudice against women. Since it became strongly linked with specifically anti-female prejudice, the term genderism appeared denoting unfair discrimination against either sex. The notion of discrimination is found in ageism – a bias against the old simply because they are old, ableism – unfair discrimination in favour of able-bodied people, alphabetism – (used somewhat ironically) discrimination on the grounds of the alphabetical place of the first letter of one’s surname, fattyism – discrimination against or ill-treatment of fat people, heightyism – discrimination on the grounds of height, specifically unfair treatment of tall women and short men.
V. I. Zabotkina marked one more newly-developed meaning of the suffix -ism: adherence to something, e.g. Afroism – adherence to African culture.
The suffix -ship seems to fuse with the semi-suffix -man in some coinages to form a compound suffix -manship. The suffix -ship normally forms nouns of collective meaning, like viewership – television watchers, or ridership – all the passengers on some kind of transport, but now it often appears in combination with – man when a separate stem with -man has not been registered. This compound suffix adds some ironic colouring to the coinage, e.g. looksmanship – the art of maximising one’s visual appeal, gamesmanship – the art of winning by doubtful though not legally prohibited means.
The suffix -y/-ie needs some more consideration. It remains active and retains its colloquial colouring but it has acquired the meaning of “an obsessive enthusiast”, e.g. druggie – a drug addict, winie – a person with an obsessive interest in wine, deccie – a person obsessively interested in interior decoration and compulsively redecorating his/her flat, Cuppie – a wealthy middle-class devotee of yacht racing etc.
Acronymy is highly popular in Modern English. Some of the acronyms combine with the suffix -y/-ie. The acronym Yuppie – young urban professional + the suffix -y/-ie turned out to give rise to numerous words of the type, e.g. buppie – black yuppie, yeepie – youthful energetic elderly people involved in everything, pippie – a person inheriting parents’ property, usually of middle age, who undergoes a sudden massive increase of wealth, Dinky – either member of a (married) partnership in which both members have a job and there are no children (double income, no kids). Many of those informal words are either derogatory or ironic.
Blending in which parts of two distinct words are joined together to form a third one is highly prolific. Some of the blends sound bookish, e.g. fertigation – fertilize + irrigation, eyelyser – a device for gauging alcohol consumption by measuring the level of alcohol in vapour given off by the eyes (eye + analyser), but many are expressively ironic, such as blaxploitation – exploitive treatment of black people in films or publications by emphasising stereotypical characteristics to bring commercial success, cosmopillization – introduction of elements from various cultures or ethnic groups, making cosmopolitan, Frenglish (French = English), magalog – (magazine = catalogue).
In the preface to his dictionary John Ayto remarks that “an area particularly rich in blends has been the cross-over genre in television and other media. The phenomenon seems to have begun with docudramas and faction of the early 1980s, but the trickle has now become a flood of docufantasies, dramacoms, dramedies, gastrodramas, infomercials, plugumentaries, rockumentaries, sit-tragedies, telebooks or toytoons”.
A curious coinage is “babushkaphobia”. The element -phobia is frequent in numerous medical terms such as hydrophobia, claustrophobia etc. The inner structure of the word is “fear of something” and literally babushkaphobia is fear of grandmother, but in fact it means dislike or aversion to grandchildren. It sounds strange since Russian grandmothers are known for their devoted love for their grandchildren.
As for the new patterns, such suffixes as -aholic (workaholic, milkaholic, chocoholic etc.), -gate (Irangate, gospelgate and quite recent Russiangate), collective -ati (glitterati, numerati, jazzerati) form quite a few words alongside with other less frequent word-building elements.
Compound adjectives of uncommon structure are found among new words. They are represented by verbal and substantive phrases, e.g. a can-do attitude – willing to accept challenges and confident of meeting them, a hands-on leader – having practical experience or active personal involvement. Dictionaries register them as adjectives, their hyphenated spelling proves their status of separate words. Three patterns are more distinct: noun + postpositive (hands-on manager, heads-up tennis); verb + post- positive (a drive-by killing); modal verb + infinitive (a can-do mentality, a must-have wine, a must-see film).
It is difficult to predict their future, they may flourish or be forgotten soon but that is true concerning all new words.

By Maya Ryashchina,
Astrakhan State Pedagogical University

References:

1. Ayto John. The Longman Register of New Words. Русский язык. Москва, 1990
2. Green Jonathan. New Words. Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd. 1994
3. Заботкина В.И. Новая лексика современного английского языка. М., Высшая школа, 1989
4. Трофимова З.С. Словарь новых слов и значений в английском языке. Павлин. 1993