И. В. Арнольд
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§ 7.5 DISTINCTIVE STRESS Some otherwise homographic, mostly disyllabic nouns and verbs of Romanic origin have a distinctive stress pattern. Thus, 'conduct n ‘behaviour’ is forestressed, whereas con'duct v ‘to lead or guide (in a formal way)’ has a stress on the second syllable. Other examples are: accent, affix, asphalt, compact (impact),1 compound, compress (impress), conflict, contest, contract (extract), contrast, convict, digest, essay, export (import, transport), increase, insult, object (subject, project), perfume, permit, present, produce, progress, protest, rebel, record, survey, torment, transfer.2Examples of words of more than two syllables are very few: _____________________ 1 Words of the same root are given in brackets. 2 There are some meanings in which the verb is also forestressed. 10* 147 'attribute n : : a'ttribute v. Historically this is probably explained by the fact that these words were borrowed from French where the original stress was on the last syllable. Thus, ac'cent comes through French from Latin ac'centus. Verbs retained this stress all the more easily as many native disyllabic verbs were also stressed in this way: be come, be'lieve, for'bid, for'get, for'give. The native nouns, however, were forestressed, and in the process of assimilation many loan nouns came to be stressed on the first syllable. A similar phenomenon is observed in some homographic pairs of adjectives and verbs, e.g. ‘absent a : : ab’sent v; ‘frequent a : : fre'quent v; ‘perfect a : : per'fect v; ‘abstract a : : ab’stract v. Other patterns with difference in stress are also possible, such as arithmetic [э'riθ-mэtik] n : : arithmetical) [эпθ'metik(эl)] a. The fact that in the verb the second syllable is stressed involves a phonemic change of the vowels as well: [э/ае] and [э/i]. This stress distinction is, however, neither productive nor regular. There are many denominal verbs that are forestressed and thus homonymous with the corresponding nouns. For example, both the noun and the verb comment are forestressed, and so are the following words: exile, figure, preface, quarrel, focus, process, program, triumph, rivet and others. There is a large group of disyllabic loan words that retain the stress on the second syllable both in verbs and nouns: accord, account, advance, amount, approach, attack, attempt, concern, defeat, distress, escape, exclaim, research, etc. A separate group is formed by compounds where the corresponding combination of words has double stress and the compound noun is forestressed so that the stress acquires a word-building force: ‘black ‘board : : ‘blackboard and ‘draw'back : : ‘drawback. It is worth noting that stress alone, unaccompanied by any other differentiating factor, does not seem to provide a very effective means of distinguishing words. And this is, probably, the reason why oppositions of this kind are neither regular nor productive. § 7.6 SOUND IMITATION The great majority of motivated words in present-day language are motivated by reference to other words in the language, to the morphemes that go to compose them and to their arrangement. Therefore, even if one hears the noun wage-earner for the first time, one understands it, knowing the meaning of the words wage and earn and the structural pattern noun stem + verbal stem+ -er as in bread-winner, skyscraper, strike-breaker. Sound imitating or onomatopoeic words are on the contrary motivated with reference to extra-linguistic reality, they are echoes of natural sounds (e. g. lullaby, twang, whiz.) Sound imitation (onomatopoeia or echoism) is consequently the naming of an action or thing by a more or less exact reproduction of a sound 148 associated with it. For instance words naming sounds and movement of water: babble, blob, bubble, flush, gurgle, gush, splash, etc. The term onomatopoeia is from Greek onoma ‘name, word’ and poiein ‘to make1 → ‘the making of words (in imitation of sounds)’. It would, however, be wrong to think that onomatopoeic words reflect the real sounds directly, irrespective of the laws of the language, because the same sounds are represented differently in different languages. Onomatopoeic words adopt the phonetic features of English and fall into the combinations peculiar to it. This becomes obvious when one compares onomatopoeic words crow and twitter and the words flow and glitter with which they are rhymed in the following poem: The cock is crowing, The stream is flowing. The small birds twitter, The lake does glitter, The green fields sleep in the sun (Wordsworth). The majority of onomatopoeic words serve to name sounds or movements. Most of them are verbs easily turned into nouns: bang, boom, bump, hum, rustle, smack, thud, etc. They are very expressive and sometimes it is difficult to tell a noun from an interjection. Consider the following: Thum — crash! “Six o'clock, Nurse,” — crash] as the door shut again. Whoever it was had given me the shock of my life (M. Dickens). Sound-imitative words form a considerable part of interjections. Сf . bang! hush! pooh! Semantically, according to the source of sound, onomatopoeic words fall into a few very definite groups. Many verbs denote sounds produced by human beings in the process of communication or in expressing their feelings: babble, chatter, giggle, grunt, grumble, murmur, mutter, titter, whine, whisper and many more. Then there are sounds produced by animals, birds and insects, e.g. buzz, cackle, croak, crow, hiss, honk, howl, moo, mew, neigh, purr, roar and others. Some birds are named after the sound they make, these are the crow, the cuckoo, the whippoor-will and a few others. Besides the verbs imitating the sound of water such as bubble or splash, there are others imitating the noise of metallic things: clink, tinkle, or forceful motion: clash, crash, whack, whip, whisk, etc. The combining possibilities of onomatopoeic words are limited by usage. Thus, a contented cat purrs, while a similarly sounding verb whirr is used about wings. A gun bangs and a bow twangs. R. Southey’s poem “How Does the Water Come Down at Lodore” is a classical example of the stylistic possibilities offered by onomatopoeia: the words in it sound an echo of what the poet sees and describes. Here it comes sparkling, And there it flies darkling ... Eddying and whisking, 149 Spouting and frisking, ... And whizzing and hissing, ... And rattling and battling, ... And guggling and struggling, ... And bubbling and troubling and doubling, And rushing and flushing and brushing and gushing, And flapping and rapping and clapping and slapping ... And thumping and pumping and bumping and jumping, And dashing and flashing and splashing and clashing ... And at once and all o'er, with a mighty uproar, And this way the water comes down at Lodore. Once being coined, onomatopoeic words lend themselves easily to further word-building and to semantic development. They readily develop figurative meanings. Croak, for instance, means ‘to make a deep harsh sound’. In its direct meaning the verb is used about frogs or ravens. Metaphorically it may be used about a hoarse human voice. A further transfer makes the verb synonymous to such expressions as ‘to protest dismally’, ‘to grumble dourly’, ‘to predict evil’. § 7.7 BACK-FORMATION Back-formation (also called reversion) is a term borrowed from diachronic linguistics. It denotes the derivation of new words by subtracting a real or supposed affix from existing words through misinterpretation of their structure. The phenomenon was already introduced in § 6.4.3 when discussing compound verbs. The process is based on analogy. The words beggar, butler, cobbler, or typewriter look very much like agent nouns with the suffix -er/-or, such as actor or painter. Their last syllable is therefore taken for a suffix and subtracted from the word leaving what is understood as a verbal stem. In this way the verb butle ‘to act or serve as a butler’ is derived by subtraction of -erfrom a supposedly verbal stem in the noun butler. Butler (ME buteler, boteler from OFr bouteillier ‘bottle bearer’) has widened its meaning. Originally it meant ‘the man-servant having charge of the wine’. It means at present ‘the chief servant of a rich household who is in charge of other servants, receives guests and directs the serving of meals’. These examples are sufficient to show how structural changes taking place in back-formation became possible because of semantic changes that preceded them. In the above cases these changes were favoured by contextual environment. The change of meaning resulted in demotivation, and this paved the way for phonic changes, i.e. assimilation, loss of sound and the like, which in their turn led to morphemic alternations that became meaningful. Semantic changes often influence the morphological structure by 150 modifying the relations between stems and derivational affixes. Structural changes, in their turn, depend on the combined effect of demotivation and analogy conditioned by a higher frequency of occurrence of the pattern that serves as model. Provided all other conditions are equal, words following less frequent structural patterns are readily subjected to changes on the analogy of more frequent patterns. The very high frequency of the pattern verb stem+-er (or its equivalents) is a matter of common knowledge. Nothing more natural therefore than the prominent part this pattern plays in back-formation. Alongside the examples already cited above are burgle v teacher = painter = butler teach paint x then x = butle, and to butle must mean ‘to act as butler’. The process of back-formation has only diachronic relevance. For synchronic approach butler : : butle is equivalent to painter : : paint, so that the present-day speaker may not feel any difference between these relationships. The fact that butle is derived from butler through misinterpretation is synchronically of no importance. Some modern examples of back-formation are lase v — a verb used about the functioning of the apparatus called laser (see p. 143), escalate from escalator on the analogy of elevate — elevator. Cf. also the verbs aggress, automate, enthuse, obsolesce and reminisce. Back-formation may be also based on the analogy of inflectional forms as testified by the singular nouns pea and cherry. Pea (the plural of which is peas and also pease) is from ME pese The most productive type of back-formation in present-day English is derivation of verbs (see p. 126) from compounds that have either -er or -ing as their last element. The type will be clear from the following examples: thought-read v The semantic relationship between the prototype and the derivative is regular. Baby-sit, for example, means to act or become employed as a baby-sitter’, that is to take care of children for short periods of time while the parents are away from home. Similarly, beachcomb is ‘to live or act as a beachcomber’; the noun is a slightly ironical word de- 151 noting a disreputable former sailor who searches along the shore for flotsam and refuse or spends his time loafing in sea-ports. Housekeep conies in a similar way from housekeeper and housekeeping. There may be cases of homonymy in the group, namely: house-break is a verb derived by back-formation from house-breaker and house-breaking meaning respectively 'burglar' and 'burglary'. House-break is also a back-formation from house-broken and means 'to accustom an animal or a baby to indoor habits and civilized behaviour. In concluding this paragraph it must be emphasized that back-formation is another manifestation of the fact that a language constitutes a more or less harmonious and balanced system the components of which stand in reciprocal connection and tend to achieve an even greater equilibrium of the whole. Chapter 8 CONVERSION AND SIMILAR PHENOMENA § 8.1 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS The process of coining a new word in a different part of speech and with a different distribution characteristic but without adding any derivative element, so that the basic form of the original and the basic form of the derived words are homonymous, is variously called conversion, zero derivation, root formation, transposition or functional change. The essence of the phenomenon may be illustrated by the following example: His voice silenced everyone else (Snow). The word silence exists in the English language as a noun, and a verb may be formed from the same stem without adding any affix or without changing the stem in any other way, so that both basic forms are homonymous. Their distribution on the other hand is quite different. In our example silence not only takes the functional verbal suffix -ed but occupies the position of a verbal predicate having voice as a subject and everyone else as its object. Its lexico-grammatical meaning is also that of a verb. The difference between silence n and silence v is morphological, syntactic and semantic: the original and the resulting word are grammatically different; a new paradigm is acquired and the syntactic functions and ties are those of a verb. Compare also: silence one's critics; silence enemy guns. The term basicformas used in the above definition means the word form in which the notion denoted is expressed in the most abstract way. For nouns it is the Common case singular, for verbs, the Infinitive. Each of the five terms given above for the type of the word-formation process itself, i.e. conversion, zero derivation, root formation, transposition or functional change, has its drawbacks. The term conversion is in a way misleading as actually nothing is converted: the original word continues its existence alongside the new one. As to zero derivation, it does not permit us to distinguish this type from sound interchange (food n — feed v) where no derivative morpheme is addecj either. The term root formation is not always suitable as the process can involve not only root words, but also words containing affixes and compounds (as was the case with the word silence above; compare also audition v, featherbed v). The terms functional change or transposition imply that the process in question concerns usage, not word-formation. This immediately brings us into an extremely controversial field. Accepting the term functional change one must admit that one and the same word 153 can belong to several parts of speech simultaneously. The majority of the Soviet linguists are convinced of the impossibility of a word belonging at the same time to several parts of speech, because this contradicts the basic definition of a word as a system of forms.1 In what follows the term conversion will be used in preference to the other four, because in spite of its deficiencies it is more widely accepted to denote this word-forming process. As a type of word-formation, conversion exists in many languages. "What is specific for the English vocabulary is not its mere presence, but its intense development. The study of conversion in present-day English is of great theoretical interest, as nowhere, perhaps, are the interdependence of vocabulary and grammar and the systematic character of language so obviously displayed. Studying it, one sees the dependence of word-building types on the character of word structure already frequent in the language. The main reason for the widespread development of conversion in present-day English is no doubt the absence of morphological elements serving as classifying signals, or, in other words, of formal signs marking the part of speech to which the word belongs. The fact that the sound pattern does not show to what part of speech the word belongs may be illustrated by the following table.
Many affixes are homonymous and therefore the general sound pattern does not contain any information as to the possible part of speech. Compare:
Compare also such homophones as Finnish a and finish v; principle n and principal a and n. 1  This definition is not flawless, especially as the existing classifications into parts of speech do not seem to satisfy anybody.154 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||