THE ROLE AND PRINCIPLES OF WORD FORMATION IN

ENGLISH
Jabbarova Anora
Jizzakh State Pedagogical Institute
The word "noun" comes from the latin nomen meaning "name." Word
classes like nouns were first described by Sanskrit grammarian Pbaini and ancient
Greeks like Dionysios Thrax, and defined in terms of their morphological
properties. For example, in Ancient Greek, nouns can be inflected for grammatical
case, such as dative or accusative. Verbs, on the other hand, can be inflected for
tenses, such as past, present or future, while nouns cannot. Aristotle also had a
notion of onomata (nouns) and rhemata (verbs) which, however, does not exactly
correspond our notions of verbs and nouns. In her dissertation, Vinokurova has a
more detailed discussion of the historical origin of the notion of a noun.
Expressions of natural language will have properties at different levels. They have
formal properties, like what kinds of morphological prefixes or suffixes they can
take, and what kinds of other expressions they can combine with. But they also
have semantic properties, i.e. properties pertaining to their meaning. The definition
of nouns on the top of this page is thus a formal definition. That definition is
uncontroversial, and has the advantage that it allows us to effectively distinguish
nouns from non-nouns.
However, it has the disadvandage that it does not apply to nouns in all
languages. For example in Russian, there are no definite articles, so one cannot
define nouns by means of those. There are also several attempts of defining nouns
in terms of their semantic properties. Many of these are controversial, but some are
discussed below.
In traditional school grammars, one often encounters the definition of nouns
that they are all and only those expressions that refer to a person, place, thing,
event, substance, quality, or idea, etc. This is a semantic definition. It has been
criticized by contemporary linguists as being quite uninformative. Part of the
problem is that the definition makes use of relatively general nouns ("thing,"
"phenomenon," "event") to define what nouns are. The existence of such general
nouns shows us that nouns are organized in taxonomic hierarchies. But other kinds
of expressions are also organized in hierarchies. For example all of the verbs
"stroll," "saunter," "stride," and "tread" are more specific words than the more
general "walk." The latter is more specific than the verb "move." But it is unlikely
that such hierarchies can be used to define nouns and verbs. Furthermore, an
influential theory has it that verbs like "kill" or "die" refer to events,[2][3] and so
they fall under the definition.
Similarly, adjectives like "yellow" or "difficult" might be thought to refer to
qualities, and adverbs like "outside" or "upstairs" seem to refer to places. Worse
still, a trip into the woods can be referred to by the verbs "stroll" or "walk." But
verbs, adjectives and adverbs are not nouns, and nouns aren't verbs. So the
definition is not particularly helpful in distinguishing nouns from other parts of
speech. Another semantic definition of nouns is that they are prototypically
referential. That definition is also not very helpful in distinguishing actual nouns
from verbs. But it may still correctly identify a core property of nounhood. For
example, we will tend to use nouns like "fool" and "car" when we wish to refer to
fools and cars, respectively. The notion that this is prototypocal reflects the fact
that such nouns can be used, even though nothing with the corresponding property
is referred to:
John is no fool.
If I had a car, I'd go to Marakech.
The first sentence above doesn't refer to any fools, nor does the second one refer to
any particular car.
The British logician Peter Thomas Geach proposed a very subtle semantic
definition of nouns. He noticed that adjectives like "same" can modify nouns, but
no other kinds of parts of speech, like verbs or adjectives. Not only that, but there
also doesn't seem to exist any other expressions with similar meaning that can
modify verbs and adjectives. Consider the following examples.
Good: John and Bill participated in the same fight.
 Bad: *John and Bill samely fought.
There is no English adverb "samely." In some other languages, like Czech,
however there are adverbs corresponding to "samely." Hence, in Czech, the
translation of the last sentence would be fine; however, it would mean that John
and Bill fought in the same way: not that they participated in the same fight. Geach
proposed that we could explain this, if nouns denote logical predicate with identity
criteria. An identity criterion would allow us to conclude, for example, that
"person x at time 1 is the same person as person y at time 2." Different nouns can
have different identity criteria. A well known example of this is due to Gupta:
National Airlines transported 2 million passengers in 1979.
National Airlines transported (at least) 2 million persons in 1979.
Given that, in general, all passengers are persons, the last sentence above
ought to follow logically from the first one. But it doesn't. It is easy to imagine, for
example, that on average, every person who travelled with National Airlines in
1979, travelled with them twice. In that case, one would say that the airline
transported 2 million passengers but only 1 million persons. Thus, the way that we
count passengers isn't necessarily the same as the way that we count persons. Put
somewhat differently: At two different times, you may correspond to two
distinct passengers, even though you are one and the same person.
Word formation is a characteristic of human language is the potential to create
new words. The two most common types of word formation are derivational and
compounding. States that “derivational is process of word formation to be found in
the production of new English words”. It is accomplished by means of a large number
of small “bits” of the English language which are not usually given separated listings
in dictionaries. These small “bits” are generally described as affixes.
Derivational suffix is the process by which creates a new word from a stem,
usually through the addition of a suffix. There are four kinds of suffixes: nominal
suffixes, verbal suffixes, adjectival suffixes, and adverbial suffixes. Nominal Suffixes
are suffixes which are used to derive abstract noun form verbs, adjectives, and nouns.
The kind of nominal suffixes are –age, -al, -ance, -ant, -ce/-cy, -dom, -ee, -eer, -er, -
or, -(e)ry, -ess, -ful, - hood, -(i)an, -ing, -ion, -ism, -ist, -ity, -ment, -ness, -ity , -ship.
There are four suffixes which create verbs from other categories (mostly adjectives
and nouns): -ate, -en, -ify-, and –ize. The English adjectival suffixes can be divided
into two groups. The first is relational adjectives. It is adjectival suffixes whose role
is to relate the noun the adjective qualifies to the base word of derived adjective. For
example, algebraic mind means „a mind having to do with algebra, referring algebra,
characterized by algebra. The second group is qualitative adjective. This adjective
can adopt qualitative meanings as in she is a grammatical genius and it can adopt a
qualitative sense. Adjective sentences are –able/-ible, -al, -ary, -ed, -esque, -ful, -ic/-
ical, -ing, -ish, -ive, - less, -eous, -ous. adverbs are words used to provide more
information about the actions and events. Adverbial sentences are –ly, and –wise.
There are some parts of category: noun, verb, adjective, and adverb”. Nouns
refers to people, objects, creatures, places, qualities, phenomena, and abstract ideas as
if they were all „things‟. Verbs are words used to refer to various kinds of action
(run, jump) and states (be, seem) involving the „things‟ in events. Adjectives are
words used, typically with nouns, to provide more information about the „things‟
referred to (happy people, large objects, cute creatures, stupid ideas. Adverbs are
words used to provide more information about the actions and events (slowly).1
List of references:
1. Blokh M.Y. A Course in Theoretical English Grammar. – M.,1983.
2. Buranov J.B, Muminov A.A. Practical Course in English Lexicology. T.
“Ukituvchi” 1990.
3. Canon G. Historical Changes and English Wordformation: New Vocabulary
items. N.Y., 1986.
4. Ch. Barber. Linguistic change in Present-Day English. Edinburgh, 1964
5. Dubenets E.M. Modern English Lexicology (Course of Lectures) M.,
Moscow State Teacher Training University Publishers 2004.

1
Buranov J.B, Muminov A.A. Practical Course in English Lexicology. T. “Ukituvchi” 1990. p. 54.