Lexical Creativity in English: Minor Methods of Word Formation.

Abstract

In the following article we intend to analyse the behaviour of the minor methods of word formation of the English language. English is characterised by its high level of lexical creativity through different morphological processes, such as compounding, derivation or conversion. Nevertheless, we can also find other minor methods of word formation such as “clippings”, “blends” and “acronyms”. They have not been so widely analysed and very few academic studies can be found about them. Hence, the main objective of our article is to present a description of these phenomena by focusing on a corpus of examples obtained from different teenagers’ magazines. The main theoretical basis will be obtained from Quirk (1997) and Bauer (1983)