Comparative Analysis of Word Building in Prose and Poetry on the basis of E.A. Poe's works

Word Building as a part of Lexicology. The Ways of Word Building: affixation, conversion, abbreviation, composition. Role of word building a relevant in prose and poetry in E. Poe’s works; to investigate which of them are the most frequent and productive.
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Contents

Introduction

Chapter One. Word Building as Lexicological Phenomenon

1.1 Word Building as a part of Lexicology

1.2 The Ways of Word Building

1.2.1 Affixation

1.2.2 Conversion

1.2.3 Abbreviation

1.2.4 Composition

Chapter Two. Analysis of the Examples from E. A. Poe's Prose and Poetry

2.1 Derivation by means of Affixation

2.1.1 Suffixation

2.1.2 Prefixation

2.2 Conversion

2.3 Abbreviation

2.4 Composition

Conclusions

Bibliography

Appendix

Appendix



Introduction

The theme of our diploma paper is “Comparative Analysis of Word Building in Prose and Poetry” (on the basis of E.A. Poe's works). The cause of this selecting is the linguistic importance of this subject because word building is a major part of morphology representing the study of construction rules of words and comparative analysis of its usage in a few different kinds of literature (prose and poetry in our case) can bring a particular linguistic value. Our investigation is connected with E.A. Poe's works because both prose and poetry are represented in his literary creation and they give a vast field for the linguistic research due to high quality and innovation.

The main goal is to prove that major processes of word building play a relevant role in prose and poetry in E. A. Poe's works and to investigate which of them are the most frequent and productive.

It leads to several objectives:

a) to select theoretical sources connected with the subject-matter;

b) to study these theoretical sources;

c) to learn what ways of word building exist;

d) to find out which of these ways are the most productive;

e) to investigate the works of E. Poe (in poetry and prose);

f) to pick out and analyze a certain amount of examples in order to prove the hypothesis of the diploma;

g) to come to certain conclusions;

h) to present the results of the investigation

The hypothesis of the work is that affixation is the most productive process of word building in E. A. Poe's prose and poetry.

(Actuality of the diploma is in the importance of the subject and practical investigation of the novels written in British English and American English)

Actuality of this paper is in the importance of the subject of the research that opens prospects in further studying of this aspect, because knowledge of word-formation is one of the most effective aids to the expanding of one's vocabulary, and is of great value in inferring word meaning.

The following methods of investigation have been used, such as: selective, syntactical, and comparative (different methods of translation). The structure of the work is the following: Introduction, Chapter One, Chapter Two, Conclusions, Bibliography, and two Appendixes.

Chapter One is called “Word Building as a Lexicological Phenomenon”. It contains many theoretical data on different ways of word building as affixation, conversion, abbreviation, and dealing with compounds - composition. We see that there are numerous different patterns of compound formations, which can be distinguished, based on formal and semantic criteria. It represents the theoretical material for studying of such authors as: V. Adams, Ginsburg R.S., Arnold I.V, H. Marchand, and O. Meshkov O.D. etc.

Chapter Two is entitled “Analysis of the Examples on the Basis of E.A. Poe's Prose and Poetry”. It represents about 200 examples picked out of E. Poe's prose and poetry, which are collected, classified, analyzed, and presented in different tables. The chapter is divided into several subchapters. Each of them gives the detailed analysis of the examples picked out of E.A. Poe's prose and poetry of each above mentioned word formation pattern.

Conclusions is the part of the diploma in which the results of the investigation as well as the confirmation of the hypothesis of the work is shown to our satisfaction, that is, affixation is the most productive process of word building in E.A. Poe's prose and poetry.

Bibliography presents a good and important selection of the authors dealing with the subject of the investigation and some internet sites connected with the same subject. It also presents the list of dictionaries used in the course of work and literary sources by E.A. Poe.

Appendix 1 shows the examples, which were not included in Chapter Two.

Appendix 2 presents the statistic data of the research.



Chapter One. Word Building as a Lexicological Phenomenon

Word building is the study of words, dealing with the construction or formation rules of words in a certain language. This paper studies and analyses various ways of word-building two kinds of literature (prose and poetry) so that similarities and differences are found between them through comparison. This will be done in the following, theoretically-oriented chapter, where we present some theories that have explicitly aimed at modeling these relationships.

We have studied the theoretical sources dealing with numerous affixation processes in English in this part of the diploma. We saw that it is not always easy to differentiate affixes from other morphological entities, and then after investigating some general characteristics of English affixation, we see that suffixation and prefixation are very common and extremely restricted phenomenon in English word-formation. In the next section of this chapter we will have a closer look at the characteristics of some non-affixational processes by which new words can be derived. First, three major problems of conversion will be discussed and, then abbreviations will be investigated. We have touched upon one of the most productive means of creating new words in English, compounding, in the final subparagraph of our work. We have seen that there are numerous different patterns of compound or composed formations which can be distinguished on the basis of formal and semantic criteria.

Nowadays, the term “word building” does not have a clear cut, universally accepted usage. It is sometimes referred to all processes connected with changing the form of the word by, for example, affixation, which is a matter of morphology. In its wider sense word formation denotes the processes of creation of new lexical units. Although it seems that the difference between morphological change of a word and creation of a new term is quite easy to perceive, there is sometimes a dispute as to whether blending is still a morphological change or making a new word. There are, of course, numerous word formation processes that do not arouse any controversies and are very similar in the majority of languages. [12, 34]

One of the distinctive properties of human language is creativity, by which we mean the ability of native speakers of a language to produce and understand new forms in their language. Even though creativity is most apparent when it comes to sentence formation, it is also manifest in our lexical knowledge, where new words are added to our mental lexicon regularly. The most comprehensive expositions of word formation processes that speakers of a language regularly use both consciously and unconsciously to create new words in their language are presented in this paper. [9, 56]

1.1 Word building as part of lexicology

The term word-building or derivational pattern is used to denote a meaningful combination of stems and affixes that occur regularly enough to indicate the part of speech, the lexico-semantic category and semantic peculiarities common to most words with this particular arrangement of morphemes. Every type of word building (affixation, conversion, abbreviation, and composition for compound words) as well as every part of speech has a characteristic set of patterns. [3, 81]

By word-building are understood processes of producing new words from the resources of this particular language. Together with borrowing, word building provides for enlarging and enriching the vocabulary of the language.

The English language is in a permanent state of renewal and change. Language is the mirror of society and the English vocabulary reflects the quick social, cultural, and scientific changes undergone by modern society. New entries are constantly added, as speakers have to refer to new concepts, objects, and ideas. In the English vocabulary verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs belong to open classes, that is to say, they are open because they can be extended indefinitely by the addition of new items. [4, 45]

But these new words, save exceptions, are not created from nowhere, but are either borrowed or formed by combining words or parts of words which already exist in the language, abbreviating them or changing their word class Speakers of English can easily coin new terms to su...