Columbus Day Debate Essay - 695 Words

nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;The spirit and values of a nation are reflected in the nation’s heroes. Christopher Columbus has been regarded as an American hero since 1792. Every year Columbus Day is held on the second Monday in October to honor the man and his legacy. However, many people debate whether or not Columbus Day should be celebrated. I believe that Columbus Day should be celebrated in the United States because he opened up the New World to Europe, inspired a spirit of exploration and adventure that still lasts today, and he showed the importance of diversity and understanding of different cultures. nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;When Columbus landed on the beaches of the Watling Islands of the Bahamas in October, 1492, he had†¦show more content†¦The problem was that many people believed that the world was flat. Without knowing what was going to happen to him, Columbus went against the popular belief of his time and bravely set out with three ships and sailed out towards the horizon. Eventually he would reach land and open up an entire New World to Europe. Columbus, on his four voyages, explored all the islands of the Caribbean and Honduras. Columbus was a man ready and eager for adventure and discovery. Today we follow his example as we explore the universe, the ocean floors, and the microscopic world. Scientists, like Columbus, are always questioning popular beliefs and setting out to prove a new theory. Columbus is a hero for all scientists and explorers today. Columbus deserves to be recognized as an American hero on Columbus Day for inspiring all people to pursue courag e, discovery, exploration, and adventure. nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;In addition to opening up a New World to Europe and inspiring a spirit of adventure, Columbus’s experience also showed the importance of diversity. Columbus was an Italian, but he learned to sail from the Portuguese, and his trip was funded by the Spanish. He needed the help of several different countries to accomplish what we now know him for today. Conversely, Columbus’s confrontation with the Natives shows how cultures conflict when they do not understand each other. Columbus and his troops massacred thousands ofShow MoreRelatedDebate on Columbus Day Essay918 Words   |  4 PagesTo change Columbus Day to no longer be a holiday would be turning a blind eye to a difficult history, yet still turning that eye away from a history with a side to be celebrated. I instead ask of you to celebrate Columbus Day, learn the full history, including the wrong doings of Columbus and his crew, and celebrate the good change brought about by this event that u ltimately led to the lifestyle you lead today. If the wrongs of every event in history were to be scrutinized would we have a historyRead MoreEssay On Christopher Columbus1530 Words   |  7 PagesWe were taught in school the saying, In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue, to help us remember when Christopher Columbus discovered America. We learned the Spanish monarchy funded him and he set sail on the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria in hopes of finding a route to the riches that were in the west indies. He landed on an island, and this was how what we know as America was discovered and referenced as the New World. We even have a day set aside here in the United States to celebrateRead MoreEssay on The Debate about Honoring Christopher Columbus512 Words   |  3 Pagesthe great explorer who discovered America, Christopher Columbus. Tales of his many voyages and the names of his ships the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria are engrained into the minds of children through rhyme and song. For many years the history written in text books have been regard as fact however information provided by Howard Zinn excerpt has shed new light on the shadowy past of Christopher Columbus. In recent history, Christopher Columbus has been regarded as a great explorer renowned for hisRead MoreWe Should Abolish Columbus Day1389 Words   |  6 Pages2016 We Should Abolish Columbus Day Only two federal holidays in the United States bear the name of two specific men, ironically one of them fought racism -- Martin Luther King Jr., and the other was a genocidal racist – Chistopher Columbus. Opposition to Columbus Day (observed on the second Monday of October) has intensified in recent decades, while the former passes each year with relatively little controversy. The issue of if we should still celebrate Columbus Day is widely discussed. TheRead MoreSpeech On Columbus Day1430 Words   |  6 Pagesevery year on this day, Columbus Day, citizens across the nation are addressed with the issue of the â€Å"History of the West.† On one of our district’s campuses this morning, Native American and white students got into a large disagreement about the true happenings of the â€Å"History of the West.† For Native American students, Columbus Day is a day of mourning where these students and families think about the near genocide of their people an d culture. For white students, Columbus day can make the studentRead MoreChristopher Columbus and His Legacy: Positive vs. Negative Essay1435 Words   |  6 Pageswill have learned about the famous maritime explorer and navigator, Christopher Columbus. Born in 1451, Columbus was a Genoese captain commissioned by the king and queen of Spain to find a route to the Indies. However, he sailed the opposite direction of his intended goal by crossing the Atlantic and landing in the Americas, resulting in the discovery of the New World for Spain. Like all major figures in history, Columbus has left behind a legacy that people will always remember him for. The natureRead MoreHow Do Americans View George Washington and Christopher Columbus Today?772 Words   |  4 PagesWashington had an impact on America during the late 1700’s, and Columbus had an impact on what he hoped was the West Indies in the late 1400’s and early 1500’s. George Washington and Christopher Columbu s are viewed in two complete different ways. Columbus found America and brought the early English settlements over. Washington helped found our country. However even though both men affected our country both are viewed differently than today. George Washington set a legacy that we are still followingRead MoreChristopher Columbus s The New World1619 Words   |  7 PagesThe Federal holiday of ‘Christopher Columbus Day’ is celebrated on the second Monday of October because of Columbus’s ‘discoveries’ of the Americas in the New World. What most people do not know is that Christopher Columbus’s intentions were only for the betterment of himself. Columbus was a devout Catholic and could have been looking to spread the word of God to the ‘Indies’, his main goal was to find a water route from Europe to the West Indies. How did Christopher Columbus’s motives impact theRead MoreChristopher Columbus A Hero And Founder Of The New World1569 Words   |  7 PagesWas Christopher Columbus a hero and founder of the new world or villainous destroyer of indigenous people? There is much controversy and debate around this man. Many people believe that Columbus’s discoverie s were falsified or over exaggerated and that his misdeeds are left untold. Others believe that he was a great explorer and was responsible for the discovery and shaping of the new world. Is Christopher Columbus the brave explorer who ushered in the â€Å"age of exploration†, or was he the brutal andRead MoreChristopher Columbus : What It America?983 Words   |  4 Pages1492 Christopher Columbus finds America Explorer and navigator Christopher Columbus was born in 1451 in the Republic of Genoa, Italy. His first voyage into the Atlantic Ocean in 1476 nearly cost him his life. Columbus participated in several other expeditions after. He has been credited for opening up the Americas to European colonization. Columbus was rejected by Genoa, Portugal, Venice, and Spain for a crew to explore with. During his expedition to America he visited Haiti, Dominican Republic

A Brief Introduction to Methods of Word Formation in English Free Essays

A Brief Introduction to Methods of Word Formation in English I. Introduction Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context. We will write a custom essay sample on A Brief Introduction to Methods of Word Formation in English or any similar topic only for you Order Now The earliest known activities in descriptive linguistics have been attributed to Panini around 500 BCE, with his analysis of Sanskrit in Ashtadhyayi. The first subfield of linguistics is the study of language structure, or grammar. This focuses on the system of ruled followed by the users of a language. It includes the study of morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the formation and composition of phrases and sentences from these words), and phonology (sound system). Phonetics is a related branch of linguistics concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds and nonspeech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived. This paper is going to concentrate on part of morphology word formation, of the English language. Generally, in linguistics, word formation is the creation of a new word. Word formation is sometimes contrasted with semantic change, which is a change in a single word’s meaning. The boundary between word formation and semantic change can be difficult to define: a new use of an old word can be seen as a new word derived from an old one and identical to it in form. Word formation can also be contrasted with the formation of idiomatic expressions, although words can be formed from multi-word phrases. There are various mechanisms of word formation and this paper is going to present them in detail with necessary explanations and examples. II. Methods of Word Formations 1. Agglutination. In contemporary linguistics, agglutination usually refers to the kind of morphological derivation in which there is a one-to-one correspondence between affixes and syntactical categories. Language that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages. Agglutinative languages are often contrasted both with language in which syntactic structure is expressed solely by means of word order and auxiliary words (isolating language) and with languages in which a single affix typically express several syntactic categories and a single category may be expressed by several different affixes (as is the case in the inflectional or fusional anguage). However, both fusional and isolating language may use agglutinative in the most-often-used constructs, and use agglutination heavily in certain contexts, such as word derivation. This is the case in English, which has an agglutinated plural maker – (e)s and derived words such as shame ·less ·ness. 2. Back-formation In etymology, back-formation is the process of creating a new lexeme, usually by removing actual or supposed affixes. The resulting neologism is called a back-formation, a term coined by James Murray in 1889. Back-formation is different from clipping – back-formation may change the part of speech or the word’s meaning, whereas clipping creates shortened words from longer words, but does not change the part of speech or the meaning of the word. For example, the noun resurrection was borrowed from Latin, and the verb resurrect was the back-formed hundreds of years later from it by removing the ion suffix. This segmentation of resurrection into resurrect + ion was possible because English had examples of Latinate words in the form of verb and verb + -ion pairs, such as opine/opinion. These became the pattern for many more such pairs, where a verb derived from a Latin supine stem and a noun ending in ion entered the language together, such as insert/insertion, project/projection, etc. Back-formation may be similar to the reanalyzes of folk etymologies when it rests on an erroneous understanding of the morphology of the longer word. For example, the singular noun asset is a back-formation from the plural assets. However, assets is originally not a plural: it is a loan-word from Anglo-Norman asetz (modern French assez). The –s was reanalyzed as a plural suffix. Many words came into English by this route: Pease was once a mass noun but was reinterpreted as a plural, leading to the back-formation pea. The noun statistic was likewise a back-formation from the field of study statistics. In Britain, the verb burgle came into use in the 19th century as a back-formation from burglar (which can be compared to the North American verb burglarize formed by suffixation). Even though many English words are formed this way, new coinages may sound strange, and are often used for humorous effect. For example, gruntled (from disgruntled) would be considered a barbarism, and used only in humorous contexts, such as by P. G. Wodehouse, who wrote â€Å"I wouldn’t say he was disgruntled, but by no stretch of the imagination could be described as gruntled†. He comedian George Gobel regularly used original back-formations in his humorous monologues. Bill Bryson mused that the English language would be richer if we could call a tidy-haired person shevelled – as an opposite to dishevelled. In the American sitcom Scrubs, the character Turk once said when replying to Dr. Cox, â€Å"I don’t disdain you! It’s quite the opposite – I dain you. † Back-formations frequently begin in colloquial use and only gradually become accepted. For example, enthuse (from enthusiasm) is gaining popularity, though it is still considered substandard by some today. The immense celebrations in Britain at the news of the relief of the Siege of Marketing briefly created the verb to maffick, meaning to celebrate both extravagantly and publicly. â€Å"Maffick† is a back-formation from Mafeking, a place-name that was treated humorously as a gerund or participle. There are many other examples of back-formation in the English language. . Acronym An acronym is an abbreviation formed from the initial components in a phrase or a word. These components may be individual letters (as in CEO) or parts of words (as in Benelux and Ameslan). There is no universal agreement on the precise definition of various names for such abbreviations nor on written usage. In English and most other languages , such abbreviations historically had limited use, but they became much more common in the 20th century. Acronyms are a type of word formation process, and they are viewed as a subtype of blending. There are many different types of the word-formation process acronym. Here are several pairs of them. (1) Pronounced as a word, containing only initial letters, like the followings. AIDS: acquired immune deficiency syndrome NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organization Scuba: self-contained underwater breathing apparatus Laser: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation (2) Pronounced as a word, containing non-initial letters Amphetamine: alpha-mehyl-phenethylamine Interpol: International Criminal Police Organization Nabisco: National Biscuit Company 3)Pronounced as a word, containing a mixture of initial and non-initial letters Necco: New England Confectionery Company Radar: radio detection and ranging 4. Clipping In linguistics, clipping is the word formation process which consists in the reduction of a word to one of its parts. Clipping is also known as â€Å"truncation† or â€Å"shortening†. According to Marchand, clippings are not coined as words belonging to the standard vocabulary of a language. They originate as terms off a special group like schools, army, police, the medical profession, etc. in the intimacy of a milieu where a hint is sufficient to indicate the whole. For example, exam(ination), math(ematics), and lab(oratory) originated in school lang. while clipping terms of some influential groups can pass into common usage, becoming part of Standard English, clipping of a society unimportant class or group will remain group slang. Also, clipping mainly consists of the following types: back clipping, fore-clipping, middle clipping and complex clipping. (1) Back clipping Back clipping is the most common type, in which the beginning is retained. The unclipped original may be either a simple or a composite. Examples are: ad (advertisement), cable (cablegram), doc (doctor), exam (examination), fax (facsimile), gas (gasoline), gym(gymnastics, gymnasium), memo (memorandum), mutt(muttonhead), pub (public house), pop (popular music). (2) Fore-clipping Fore-clipping retains the final part. Examples are: chute (parachute), coon (raccoon), gator (alligator), phone (telephone), pike (turnpike), varsity (university). (3) Middle-clipping In middle clipping, the middle of the word is retained. Examples are: flu (influenza), jams or jammies (pajamas/pyjamas), polly (Apollinairs), shrink (head-shrinker), tec (detective). (4) Complex clipping Clipped dorms are also used in compounds. One part of the original compound most often remains intact. Examples are: cablegram (cable telegram), opart (optical art), org-man (organization man), and linocut (linoleum cut). Sometimes both halves of a compound are clipped as in navicert (navigation certification). In these cases it is difficult to know whether the resultant formation should be treated as a clipping or as a blend, for the border between the two types is not always clear. According to Bauer, the easiest way to draw the distinction is to say that those forms which retain compound stress are clipped compound, whereas those that take simple word stress are not. By this criterion bodbiz, Chicom, Comsymp, Intelsat, midcult, pro-am, photo op, sci-fi, and sitcom are all compounds made of clippings. 5. Semantic loan A semantic loan is a process of borrowing semantic meaning (rather than lexical items) from another language, very similar to the formation of calques. In this case, however, the complete word in the borrowing language already exists; the change is that its meaning is extended to include another meaning its existing translation has in the leading language. Calques, loanwords and semantic loans are often grouped roughly under the phrase â€Å"borrowing†. Semantic loans often occur when two language are in close contact. 6. Compound In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem, compounding or composition is the word formation that creates compound lexemes. Compounding or word-compounding refers to the faculty and device of a language to form new words by combing or putting together old words. In other words, compound, compounding or word-compounding occurs when a person attaches two or more words together to make them one word. The meanings of the words interrelate from the meanings of the words in isolation. Also, there is incorporation formation. Incorporation is a phenomenon by which a word, usually a verb, forms a kind of compound with, for instance, its direct object or adverbial modifier, while retaining its original syntactic function. Incorporation is central to many polysynthetic languages such as those found in North America, but polysynthetic does not necessary imply incorporation. Neither does the presence of incorporation in a language imply that that language is polysynthetic. Though not regularly. English shows some instrument incorporation, as in breastfeed, and direct object incorporation, as in babysit. Etymologically, such verbs in English are usually back-formations: the verbs breastfeed and babysit are formed from the adjective breast-fed and the noun babysitter respectively. Incorporation and pain compounding many be fuzzy categories: consider backstabbing, name-calling, and axe-murder. In many cases, a phrase with an incorporated noun carries a different meaning with respect to the equivalent phrase where the noun is not incorporated into the verb. The difference seems to hang around the generality and definiteness of the statement. The incorporated phrase is usually generic and indefinite, while the non-incorporated one is more specific. 7. Conversion In linguistics, conversion, also called zero derivation, is a kind of word transformation: specifically, it is the creation of a word (of a new word class) from an existing word (of a different word class) without any change in form. For example, the noun green in golf (referring to a putting-green) is derived ultimately from the adjective green. Conversions from adjectives to nouns and vice versa are both very common and unnotable in English: much more remarked upon is the creation of a verb by converting a noun or other word (e. g. , the adjective clean becomes the verb to clean). 8. Loanword A loanword (or loan word) is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort, while calque is a loanword from French. The terms borrow and loanword, although traditional, conflict with the ordinary meaning of those words because nothing is returned to the donor languages. However, note that this metaphor is not isolated to the concept of loanwords, but also found in the idiom â€Å"to borrow an idea. An additional issue with the term loanword is that it implies that the loaning is limited to one single word as opposed to deja vu, an English loanword from French. While this phrase may be used as one lexical item by English speakers, that is to say, an English speaker would not say only deja to convey the meaning associated with the full term deja vu, in t he donor language (French), speakers would be aware of the phrase consisting of two words. For simplicity, adopt/adoption or adapt/adaption are used by many linguists, either in parallel to, or in preference to, these words. Some researchers also use the term lexical borrowing. Some English loanwords remain relatively faithful to the donor language’s phonology, even though a particular phoneme might not exist or have contrastive status in English. The majority of English affixes, such as -un, –ing, and –ly, were present in older forms in Old English. However, a few English affixes are borrowed. For example, the agentive suffix –er, which is very prolific, is borrowed unlimitedly from Latin- arius. The English verbal suffix –ize comes from Greek –izein via Latin –izare. 9. Onomatopoeia Onomatopoeia (common term is sound word) refers to the property of such words. Common occurrences of onomatopoeia include animal noises, such as â€Å"oink† or â€Å"meow† or â€Å"roar† or â€Å"chirp†. Some other very common English-language examples include hiccup, zoom, bang, beep, moo, and splash. Machines and their sounds are also often described with onomatopoeia, as in honk or beep-beep for the horn of an automobile, and vroom or brum for the engine. When someone speaks of a mishap involving an audible arcing of electricity, the word â€Å"zap† is often used. For animal sounds, words like quack (duck), moo (cow), bark or woof (dog), roar (lion), meow or purr (cat) and baa (sheep) are typically used in English. Some of these words are used both as nouns and as verbs. Sometimes things are named from the sounds they make. In English, for example, there is the universal fastener which is named for the onomatopoeia of the sound it makes: the zip (in the UK) or zipper (in the U. S. ). many birds are named after their calls, such as the Bobwhite quail, the Weero, the Morepork, the killdeer, chickadee, the cuckoo, the chiffchaff, the whooping crane and the whip-poor-will. 0. Phono-semantic matching Phono-semantic matching (PSM) is a linguistic term referring to camouflaged borrowing in which a foreign word is matched with a phonetically and semantically similar pre-existent native word/root. It may alternatively be defined as the entry of a multisourced neologism that preserves both the meaning and the proximate sound of the parallel expression i n the source language, using pre-existent words/roots of the target language. Phono-semantic matching is distinct from calquing. While calquing includes (semantic) translation, it does not consist of phonetic matching (i. . retaining the proximate sound of the borrowed word through matching it with a similar-sounding pre-existent word/morpheme in the target language). Phone-semantic matching is also distinct from homophonic translation, which retains only the sound, and not the semantics. 11. Eponym An eponym is a person or thing, whether real or fictional, after which a particular place, tribe, era, discovery. Or other item is named or thought to be named. Eponyms are aspects of etymology. There are different types of eponym which come from various area. Places and towns can also be given an eponymous name through a relationship (real or imagined) to an important figure. Peloponnesus, for instance, was said to derive its name from the Greek god Pelops. In historical times, new towns have often been named (and older communities renamed) after their founders, discoverers, or after notable individuals. Examples include Vancouver, British Columbia, named after the explorer George Vancouver; and Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, originally called Isbister’s Settlement but renamed after Queen Victoria’s husband and consort in 1866. Also, in science and technology, discoveries and innovations are often named after the discoverer (or supposed discoverer) to honor some other influential workers. Examples are Avogadro’s number, he Diesel engine, Alzheimer’s disease, and the Apgar score. Because proper nouns are capitalized in English, the usual default for eponyms is to capitalize the eponymous part of a term. The common-noun part is not capitalized (unless it is part of a title or it is the first word in a sentence). For example, in Parkinson disease (named after James Parkinson), Parkinson is capitalized, but disease is not. However, some eponymous adjectives are nowadays entered in many dictionaries as lowercases when they have evolved a common status, no longer deriving their meaning from the proper-noun origin. For example, Herculean when referring to Hercules himself, but often herculean when referring to the figurative generalized extension sense. For any given term, one dictionary may enter only lowercase or only cap, whereas other dictionaries may recognize the capitalized version as a variant, either equally common as, or less common than, the first-listed styling (marked with labels such as â€Å"or†, â€Å"also†, â€Å"often† or â€Å"sometimes†). English can use either genitive case or attributive position to indicate the adjectival nature of the eponymous part of the term. (In other words, that part may be either possessive or nonpossessive. ) Thus Parkinson’s disease and Parkinson disease are both acceptable. Medical dictionaries have been shifting toward nonpossessive styling in recent decades, thus Parkinson disease is more likely to be used in the latest medical literature (especially in post prints) than is Parkinson’s disease. American and British English spelling differences can occasionally apply to eponyms. For example, American style would typically be cesarean section whereas British style would typically be caesarean section. III. Conclusion In a word, there are several ways of word-formation in the English language. However, not all these ways are isolated from each other. In fact, some of them all overlapped which means that a new word may be considered as a result of different ways of formation. Also, understanding these various methods of forming a new word, as an integrated component of linguistics, enables us to dig out the hidden rules behind thousands of new emerging words. Therefore, although many new words would appear as the world move on and new technologies are developed, people are able to grasp these new words with ease because of these word-formation rules. Meanwhile, people are exposed to different accesses of forming new words with already existing ones to express the unexpected phenomenon or tectonics in the future. Works cited: (1) Crystal, David. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, Sixth Edition, Blackwell Publishers, 2008. (2) Fischer, Roswitha. Lexical change in present-day English: A corpus-based study of the motivation, institutionalization, and productivity of creative neologisms. 1998 (3) Marchand, Hans. The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-formation. Munchen: C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung,1969 (4) Ghil’ad Zuckermann,  Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003 (5) Baker, Mark C. The Polysynthesis Parameter. Oxford: Oxford University Press,1998 (6) Mithun, Marianne. The evolution of noun incorporation. Language,  1984 How to cite A Brief Introduction to Methods of Word Formation in English, Papers A Brief Introduction to Methods of Word Formation in English Free Essays A Brief Introduction to Methods of Word Formation in English I. Introduction Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context. We will write a custom essay sample on A Brief Introduction to Methods of Word Formation in English or any similar topic only for you Order Now The earliest known activities in descriptive linguistics have been attributed to Panini around 500 BCE, with his analysis of Sanskrit in Ashtadhyayi. The first subfield of linguistics is the study of language structure, or grammar. This focuses on the system of ruled followed by the users of a language. It includes the study of morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the formation and composition of phrases and sentences from these words), and phonology (sound system). Phonetics is a related branch of linguistics concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds and nonspeech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived. This paper is going to concentrate on part of morphology word formation, of the English language. Generally, in linguistics, word formation is the creation of a new word. Word formation is sometimes contrasted with semantic change, which is a change in a single word’s meaning. The boundary between word formation and semantic change can be difficult to define: a new use of an old word can be seen as a new word derived from an old one and identical to it in form. Word formation can also be contrasted with the formation of idiomatic expressions, although words can be formed from multi-word phrases. There are various mechanisms of word formation and this paper is going to present them in detail with necessary explanations and examples. II. Methods of Word Formations 1. Agglutination. In contemporary linguistics, agglutination usually refers to the kind of morphological derivation in which there is a one-to-one correspondence between affixes and syntactical categories. Language that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages. Agglutinative languages are often contrasted both with language in which syntactic structure is expressed solely by means of word order and auxiliary words (isolating language) and with languages in which a single affix typically express several syntactic categories and a single category may be expressed by several different affixes (as is the case in the inflectional or fusional anguage). However, both fusional and isolating language may use agglutinative in the most-often-used constructs, and use agglutination heavily in certain contexts, such as word derivation. This is the case in English, which has an agglutinated plural maker – (e)s and derived words such as shame ·less ·ness. 2. Back-formation In etymology, back-formation is the process of creating a new lexeme, usually by removing actual or supposed affixes. The resulting neologism is called a back-formation, a term coined by James Murray in 1889. Back-formation is different from clipping – back-formation may change the part of speech or the word’s meaning, whereas clipping creates shortened words from longer words, but does not change the part of speech or the meaning of the word. For example, the noun resurrection was borrowed from Latin, and the verb resurrect was the back-formed hundreds of years later from it by removing the ion suffix. This segmentation of resurrection into resurrect + ion was possible because English had examples of Latinate words in the form of verb and verb + -ion pairs, such as opine/opinion. These became the pattern for many more such pairs, where a verb derived from a Latin supine stem and a noun ending in ion entered the language together, such as insert/insertion, project/projection, etc. Back-formation may be similar to the reanalyzes of folk etymologies when it rests on an erroneous understanding of the morphology of the longer word. For example, the singular noun asset is a back-formation from the plural assets. However, assets is originally not a plural: it is a loan-word from Anglo-Norman asetz (modern French assez). The –s was reanalyzed as a plural suffix. Many words came into English by this route: Pease was once a mass noun but was reinterpreted as a plural, leading to the back-formation pea. The noun statistic was likewise a back-formation from the field of study statistics. In Britain, the verb burgle came into use in the 19th century as a back-formation from burglar (which can be compared to the North American verb burglarize formed by suffixation). Even though many English words are formed this way, new coinages may sound strange, and are often used for humorous effect. For example, gruntled (from disgruntled) would be considered a barbarism, and used only in humorous contexts, such as by P. G. Wodehouse, who wrote â€Å"I wouldn’t say he was disgruntled, but by no stretch of the imagination could be described as gruntled†. He comedian George Gobel regularly used original back-formations in his humorous monologues. Bill Bryson mused that the English language would be richer if we could call a tidy-haired person shevelled – as an opposite to dishevelled. In the American sitcom Scrubs, the character Turk once said when replying to Dr. Cox, â€Å"I don’t disdain you! It’s quite the opposite – I dain you. † Back-formations frequently begin in colloquial use and only gradually become accepted. For example, enthuse (from enthusiasm) is gaining popularity, though it is still considered substandard by some today. The immense celebrations in Britain at the news of the relief of the Siege of Marketing briefly created the verb to maffick, meaning to celebrate both extravagantly and publicly. â€Å"Maffick† is a back-formation from Mafeking, a place-name that was treated humorously as a gerund or participle. There are many other examples of back-formation in the English language. . Acronym An acronym is an abbreviation formed from the initial components in a phrase or a word. These components may be individual letters (as in CEO) or parts of words (as in Benelux and Ameslan). There is no universal agreement on the precise definition of various names for such abbreviations nor on written usage. In English and most other languages , such abbreviations historically had limited use, but they became much more common in the 20th century. Acronyms are a type of word formation process, and they are viewed as a subtype of blending. There are many different types of the word-formation process acronym. Here are several pairs of them. (1) Pronounced as a word, containing only initial letters, like the followings. AIDS: acquired immune deficiency syndrome NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organization Scuba: self-contained underwater breathing apparatus Laser: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation (2) Pronounced as a word, containing non-initial letters Amphetamine: alpha-mehyl-phenethylamine Interpol: International Criminal Police Organization Nabisco: National Biscuit Company 3)Pronounced as a word, containing a mixture of initial and non-initial letters Necco: New England Confectionery Company Radar: radio detection and ranging 4. Clipping In linguistics, clipping is the word formation process which consists in the reduction of a word to one of its parts. Clipping is also known as â€Å"truncation† or â€Å"shortening†. According to Marchand, clippings are not coined as words belonging to the standard vocabulary of a language. They originate as terms off a special group like schools, army, police, the medical profession, etc. in the intimacy of a milieu where a hint is sufficient to indicate the whole. For example, exam(ination), math(ematics), and lab(oratory) originated in school lang. while clipping terms of some influential groups can pass into common usage, becoming part of Standard English, clipping of a society unimportant class or group will remain group slang. Also, clipping mainly consists of the following types: back clipping, fore-clipping, middle clipping and complex clipping. (1) Back clipping Back clipping is the most common type, in which the beginning is retained. The unclipped original may be either a simple or a composite. Examples are: ad (advertisement), cable (cablegram), doc (doctor), exam (examination), fax (facsimile), gas (gasoline), gym(gymnastics, gymnasium), memo (memorandum), mutt(muttonhead), pub (public house), pop (popular music). (2) Fore-clipping Fore-clipping retains the final part. Examples are: chute (parachute), coon (raccoon), gator (alligator), phone (telephone), pike (turnpike), varsity (university). (3) Middle-clipping In middle clipping, the middle of the word is retained. Examples are: flu (influenza), jams or jammies (pajamas/pyjamas), polly (Apollinairs), shrink (head-shrinker), tec (detective). (4) Complex clipping Clipped dorms are also used in compounds. One part of the original compound most often remains intact. Examples are: cablegram (cable telegram), opart (optical art), org-man (organization man), and linocut (linoleum cut). Sometimes both halves of a compound are clipped as in navicert (navigation certification). In these cases it is difficult to know whether the resultant formation should be treated as a clipping or as a blend, for the border between the two types is not always clear. According to Bauer, the easiest way to draw the distinction is to say that those forms which retain compound stress are clipped compound, whereas those that take simple word stress are not. By this criterion bodbiz, Chicom, Comsymp, Intelsat, midcult, pro-am, photo op, sci-fi, and sitcom are all compounds made of clippings. 5. Semantic loan A semantic loan is a process of borrowing semantic meaning (rather than lexical items) from another language, very similar to the formation of calques. In this case, however, the complete word in the borrowing language already exists; the change is that its meaning is extended to include another meaning its existing translation has in the leading language. Calques, loanwords and semantic loans are often grouped roughly under the phrase â€Å"borrowing†. Semantic loans often occur when two language are in close contact. 6. Compound In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem, compounding or composition is the word formation that creates compound lexemes. Compounding or word-compounding refers to the faculty and device of a language to form new words by combing or putting together old words. In other words, compound, compounding or word-compounding occurs when a person attaches two or more words together to make them one word. The meanings of the words interrelate from the meanings of the words in isolation. Also, there is incorporation formation. Incorporation is a phenomenon by which a word, usually a verb, forms a kind of compound with, for instance, its direct object or adverbial modifier, while retaining its original syntactic function. Incorporation is central to many polysynthetic languages such as those found in North America, but polysynthetic does not necessary imply incorporation. Neither does the presence of incorporation in a language imply that that language is polysynthetic. Though not regularly. English shows some instrument incorporation, as in breastfeed, and direct object incorporation, as in babysit. Etymologically, such verbs in English are usually back-formations: the verbs breastfeed and babysit are formed from the adjective breast-fed and the noun babysitter respectively. Incorporation and pain compounding many be fuzzy categories: consider backstabbing, name-calling, and axe-murder. In many cases, a phrase with an incorporated noun carries a different meaning with respect to the equivalent phrase where the noun is not incorporated into the verb. The difference seems to hang around the generality and definiteness of the statement. The incorporated phrase is usually generic and indefinite, while the non-incorporated one is more specific. 7. Conversion In linguistics, conversion, also called zero derivation, is a kind of word transformation: specifically, it is the creation of a word (of a new word class) from an existing word (of a different word class) without any change in form. For example, the noun green in golf (referring to a putting-green) is derived ultimately from the adjective green. Conversions from adjectives to nouns and vice versa are both very common and unnotable in English: much more remarked upon is the creation of a verb by converting a noun or other word (e. g. , the adjective clean becomes the verb to clean). 8. Loanword A loanword (or loan word) is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort, while calque is a loanword from French. The terms borrow and loanword, although traditional, conflict with the ordinary meaning of those words because nothing is returned to the donor languages. However, note that this metaphor is not isolated to the concept of loanwords, but also found in the idiom â€Å"to borrow an idea. An additional issue with the term loanword is that it implies that the loaning is limited to one single word as opposed to deja vu, an English loanword from French. While this phrase may be used as one lexical item by English speakers, that is to say, an English speaker would not say only deja to convey the meaning associated with the full term deja vu, in t he donor language (French), speakers would be aware of the phrase consisting of two words. For simplicity, adopt/adoption or adapt/adaption are used by many linguists, either in parallel to, or in preference to, these words. Some researchers also use the term lexical borrowing. Some English loanwords remain relatively faithful to the donor language’s phonology, even though a particular phoneme might not exist or have contrastive status in English. The majority of English affixes, such as -un, –ing, and –ly, were present in older forms in Old English. However, a few English affixes are borrowed. For example, the agentive suffix –er, which is very prolific, is borrowed unlimitedly from Latin- arius. The English verbal suffix –ize comes from Greek –izein via Latin –izare. 9. Onomatopoeia Onomatopoeia (common term is sound word) refers to the property of such words. Common occurrences of onomatopoeia include animal noises, such as â€Å"oink† or â€Å"meow† or â€Å"roar† or â€Å"chirp†. Some other very common English-language examples include hiccup, zoom, bang, beep, moo, and splash. Machines and their sounds are also often described with onomatopoeia, as in honk or beep-beep for the horn of an automobile, and vroom or brum for the engine. When someone speaks of a mishap involving an audible arcing of electricity, the word â€Å"zap† is often used. For animal sounds, words like quack (duck), moo (cow), bark or woof (dog), roar (lion), meow or purr (cat) and baa (sheep) are typically used in English. Some of these words are used both as nouns and as verbs. Sometimes things are named from the sounds they make. In English, for example, there is the universal fastener which is named for the onomatopoeia of the sound it makes: the zip (in the UK) or zipper (in the U. S. ). many birds are named after their calls, such as the Bobwhite quail, the Weero, the Morepork, the killdeer, chickadee, the cuckoo, the chiffchaff, the whooping crane and the whip-poor-will. 0. Phono-semantic matching Phono-semantic matching (PSM) is a linguistic term referring to camouflaged borrowing in which a foreign word is matched with a phonetically and semantically similar pre-existent native word/root. It may alternatively be defined as the entry of a multisourced neologism that preserves both the meaning and the proximate sound of the parallel expression i n the source language, using pre-existent words/roots of the target language. Phono-semantic matching is distinct from calquing. While calquing includes (semantic) translation, it does not consist of phonetic matching (i. . retaining the proximate sound of the borrowed word through matching it with a similar-sounding pre-existent word/morpheme in the target language). Phone-semantic matching is also distinct from homophonic translation, which retains only the sound, and not the semantics. 11. Eponym An eponym is a person or thing, whether real or fictional, after which a particular place, tribe, era, discovery. Or other item is named or thought to be named. Eponyms are aspects of etymology. There are different types of eponym which come from various area. Places and towns can also be given an eponymous name through a relationship (real or imagined) to an important figure. Peloponnesus, for instance, was said to derive its name from the Greek god Pelops. In historical times, new towns have often been named (and older communities renamed) after their founders, discoverers, or after notable individuals. Examples include Vancouver, British Columbia, named after the explorer George Vancouver; and Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, originally called Isbister’s Settlement but renamed after Queen Victoria’s husband and consort in 1866. Also, in science and technology, discoveries and innovations are often named after the discoverer (or supposed discoverer) to honor some other influential workers. Examples are Avogadro’s number, he Diesel engine, Alzheimer’s disease, and the Apgar score. Because proper nouns are capitalized in English, the usual default for eponyms is to capitalize the eponymous part of a term. The common-noun part is not capitalized (unless it is part of a title or it is the first word in a sentence). For example, in Parkinson disease (named after James Parkinson), Parkinson is capitalized, but disease is not. However, some eponymous adjectives are nowadays entered in many dictionaries as lowercases when they have evolved a common status, no longer deriving their meaning from the proper-noun origin. For example, Herculean when referring to Hercules himself, but often herculean when referring to the figurative generalized extension sense. For any given term, one dictionary may enter only lowercase or only cap, whereas other dictionaries may recognize the capitalized version as a variant, either equally common as, or less common than, the first-listed styling (marked with labels such as â€Å"or†, â€Å"also†, â€Å"often† or â€Å"sometimes†). English can use either genitive case or attributive position to indicate the adjectival nature of the eponymous part of the term. (In other words, that part may be either possessive or nonpossessive. ) Thus Parkinson’s disease and Parkinson disease are both acceptable. Medical dictionaries have been shifting toward nonpossessive styling in recent decades, thus Parkinson disease is more likely to be used in the latest medical literature (especially in post prints) than is Parkinson’s disease. American and British English spelling differences can occasionally apply to eponyms. For example, American style would typically be cesarean section whereas British style would typically be caesarean section. III. Conclusion In a word, there are several ways of word-formation in the English language. However, not all these ways are isolated from each other. In fact, some of them all overlapped which means that a new word may be considered as a result of different ways of formation. Also, understanding these various methods of forming a new word, as an integrated component of linguistics, enables us to dig out the hidden rules behind thousands of new emerging words. Therefore, although many new words would appear as the world move on and new technologies are developed, people are able to grasp these new words with ease because of these word-formation rules. Meanwhile, people are exposed to different accesses of forming new words with already existing ones to express the unexpected phenomenon or tectonics in the future. Works cited: (1) Crystal, David. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, Sixth Edition, Blackwell Publishers, 2008. (2) Fischer, Roswitha. Lexical change in present-day English: A corpus-based study of the motivation, institutionalization, and productivity of creative neologisms. 1998 (3) Marchand, Hans. The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-formation. Munchen: C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung,1969 (4) Ghil’ad Zuckermann,  Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003 (5) Baker, Mark C. The Polysynthesis Parameter. Oxford: Oxford University Press,1998 (6) Mithun, Marianne. The evolution of noun incorporation. Language,  1984 How to cite A Brief Introduction to Methods of Word Formation in English, Essay examples

Gym Candy free essay sample

The author of Gym Candy is Carl Deuker. Carl Deuker grew up in California. He attended University of California, Berkeley, majoring in English. He currently lives in Washington and is a teacher at Shelton View Elementary School. He wrote seven novels and is working on an eighth. His novels so far are, On the Devil’s Court, Heart of a Champion, Night Hoops, Painting the Black, High Heat, Runner, and Gym Candy. Four of his novels won awards. His novels all have something to do with teens, sports, and take place in Washington. The setting of the novel is in present day in Seattle, Washington. The main character of the story is Mick Johnson. Mick’s father was a failure as an NFL football player and now looks to Mick to pick up his dreams as a football player. Mick’s best friend is Drew Carney. Drew is the quarterback that struggles to make starting varsity but then makes it. We will write a custom essay sample on Gym Candy or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page DeShawn Free is another friend of Mick that is also on the football team and is wide receiver. He ends up becoming best friends with Drew when they drift away from Mick. Kaylee is on the volleyball team and likes Mick. Matt Drager is an antagonist in the novel. Matt is starting running back and a â€Å"bully† towards Mick. Aaron Clark is also an antagonist. Aaron is the starting quarterback and is Matt Drager’s friend. He is also a â€Å"bully† toward Mick. Peter Volz is Mick’s personal trainer. When he is first introduced he is assumed to be gay but then when he is reintroduced we find out he is not. Peter introduces Mick to steroids and is his supplier. Mick Johnson is the son of Mike Johnson. Mike Johnson is a superstar football player until he goes to the NFL. Mike Johnson dropped out of training camp in the NFL. Mike now looks to Mick to fulfill his dreams as a star football player. Mick is pressured by multiple things, including his father to do well on the football team. Mick is pressured so much that he ends up taking steroids to please himself and his father. In the end Drew, his best friend, finds out and says he is going to tell. Mick tries to take the easy way out of Drew telling about the steroids. I believe that this novel was really good. I’ve liked Carl Deuker’s books since I read Runner. If I had to rate this book I would rate it about 4 ? out of 5. It was very detailed and had some action from the football point of view. As I read this book I did not want to put it down because I wanted to see what would happen next. It was kind of like TV with the cliff hangers. But it was like that in every spot. I didn’t want to miss anything so I didn’t want to stop reading. The introduction into the book was well written and so was the ending. Instead of giving you the ending and just saying, â€Å"There it is, its over,† it made you do some thinking. I liked that a lot. I also liked how the information was revealed in the book, instead of giving it all to you in the beginning and building a story off of that, he built a story into revealing the information and built little problems into that. As far as the action went, it wasn’t that bad. The games that were explained went into detail so I could follow along with what happened in the game, I liked that. Everything painted a clear picture in my head the whole time so it was as if I was watching a movie. Mick Johnson is the protagonist of the novel. The novel never actually tells what he looks like but in my head I picture him to be average height, muscular, since he took steroids and plays football, and have brown hair. Mick is pressured by his dad to be a star in football so he can fulfill his father’s dreams. He becomes best friends with Drew Carney and DeShawn Free. They all three stick together through football and high school. Mick undergoes multiple conflicts through out the story. Mick feels pressured by his father to do well in football so to gain his father’s gratitude he takes steroids to do better. Mick also has conflicts with the antagonist, Matt Drager, on the football field and in school. The steroids also conflict with Mick because he wants to hang out with friends but is embarrassed because of some of the things the steroids did to him. Even worse than being embarrassed in front of his friends, he is embarrassed in front of Kaylee, the girl that he likes. The steroids also gave him rage at times and put him in depression. On top of that he had to stay secret most of the time in fear of getting caught with steroids. In the end the steroids cause Mick to point a gun at his best friend, and even worse, shoot himself in the head. He solves the steroid problem in the end by going to rehab, which keeps his whole steroid profile hidden for a chance to play football again.