Language Change - Key Terms (Lexis) Flashcards
(10 cards)
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.
