Special Aspects of Word-Formation in the English and French Languages

COURSE PAPER

« Special Aspects of Word-formation in the English and French Languages »

45.03.02 – Linguistics

Moscow 2018

CONTENTS

Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 4

1. Theoretical aspects of studying word-formation in English and French ............................ 6

1.1 The definition of the term ‘word-formation’ .................................................................... 6

1.2 Word-formation in the English language .......................................................................... 9

1.3 Word-formation in the French language ...........................................................................15

2. Word-formation in modern English and French on the base of authentic media ............... 21

2.1 Word-formation in English ............................................................................................... 21

2.2 Word-formation in French ................................................................................................ 25

2.3 Comparison of word-formation in English and French .................................................... 29

Conclusion............................................................................................................................... 31

References ............................................................................................................................... 33

Appendix 1. Articles in English .............................................................................................. 35

Appendix 2. Articles in French ............................................................................................... 36

INTRODUCTION

The term ‘word-formation’ suggests that the fundamental unit of this linguistic subdiscipline is the word. Formation implies that we are dealing with rules that form (create, generate, derive) words. The units of word-formation, in particular the word and its components, are essentially the same as the units of morphology in general, and some concepts that are relevant to word-formation presuppose certain notions of inflectional morphology. Therefore, neither the theoretical discussion nor the examples can be strictly confined to word-formation to the exclusion of inflection.

The exact nature of word-formation rules and their place in a model of grammar have been the subject of a great deal of debate. Some linguists describe word-formation by means of bidirectional static relations (alias redundancy rules or constructional schemas) between items in the lexicon rather than unidirectional dynamic rules or processes with words as their output. Others assume that unfriendly is not derived from or related to friendly by some kind of rule but simply consists of the elements friend.

Word-formation of such languages like English and French has some differences, which can be explained by the fact that English is the analytic language but French is semi-analytic as we can find in it some characteristics of the synthetic language. All these things make this thesis relevant.

The aim of the thesis is to analyze special aspects of word-formation in the English and French languages.

To achieve this aim we have set the following tasks:

1) to define of the term ‘word-formation’;

2) to describe the processes of word-formation in the English language;

3) to describe the processes word-formation in the French language;

4) to analyze word-formation in English on the basis of authentic media;

5)  to analyze word-formation in French on the basis of authentic media;

6) to compare word-formation in English and French.

The object of the thesis is English and French morphological system.

The subject of the thesis is classification of word formation in both languages.

We use different scientific methods of research for the topic: analytical, statistical, descriptive method.

This thesis is based on works of such linguists as E. Benveniste, C. Certa, D. Crystal, R. Huddleston, R.B. Lee, J. Lyons, H. Marchand, P.H. Matthews, A. Odebunmi, A. Onysko, P. Štekauer, etc.

The received data and the conclusions may be applied while teaching the English and French languages, in courses of lexicology, comparative linguistics, the theory of translation, theoretical and practical grammar, etc.

The structure of the thesis: introduction, two parts, conclusion, references and appendixes. We put the aim and the tasks in the introduction. In the first part, we analyze types of word-formation in both languages. In the second part, we compare two languages in the aspect of word-formation.

1. THEORETICAL ASPECTS OF STUDYING WORD-FORMATION IN ENGLISH AND FRENCH

1.1 The definition of the term ‘word-formation’

In this paragraph, we will consider the term ‘word-formation’ on the base of different linguistic studies. In linguistics (particularly morphology and lexicology), word formation refers to the ways in which new words are made on the basis of other words or morphemes, which is also called derivational morphology. Word-formation can denote either a state or a process, and it can be viewed either diachronically (through different periods in history) or synchronically (at one particular period in time).

The study of word-formation and its analysis has a long history starting from ancient Greece and Rome. Such philosophers as Plato and Aristotle and grammarians Dionysins Thrax and Terentius Varro took part in studying the ways of forming new words. The classical study of word-formation was based only on Greek and Latin words and divided words into simple words and complex. Simple words were studied in terms of root or, in other words, as a root word, because they generally consisted of a root, stem and inflection. Complex words were studies in terms of derivation and composition.