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Katrin Blatt The word-formation process "clipping" Seminar paper English

The word formation process

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  • Katrin Blatt

    The word-formation process "clipping"

    Seminar paper

    English

  • PHILIPPS - UNIVERSITT MARBURG Fachbereich Fremdsprachliche Philologien

    PS Morphology & Syntax

    Sommersemester 2008

    The word-formation process clipping

    Author: Katrin Blatt

    Date: 16.9.2008

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    Contents

    1. Introduction.p. 3

    2. The word-formation process clipping..p. 4

    3. Development and usage of clippings..p. 6

    3.1 The Time Magazine Corpus.............p. 7

    3.2 The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)p. 11

    4. Conclusion.p. 15

    5. Bibliography..p. 16

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    1. Introduction

    Morphology is an extensive field of linguistics which deals among other things with different ways of forming neologisms and the shortening of words. The following paper concentrates on the specific word-formation process clipping. To be able to give an adequate insight into this field of morphology, certain important aspects will be examined, such as the rules of this word-formation process, the usage of clippings in todays language and the development of this linguistic phenomenon over the past few decades.

    During the preparation for this paper, I became curious about how we use clippings in everyday language and which form, the original or the clipped word, is used more often. Do we say more often mathematics or math? Is the more common term

    advertisement or ad?

    Even more interesting is to find out in which context which form is used more often. Are clippings still assumed as more colloquial or could some words already are taken over into Standard English and therefore into the academic world? Are clippings restricted to either spoken or written language?

    To answer those questions, I will mainly work with two different corpora of American English, namely the Time Magazine Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English. These corpora give much information about usage and development of certain words in different contexts. However, it has to be said, that this paper can only give a short introductory overview of the word-formation process clipping.

    In the first part of this paper the word-formation process clipping and the different types of clipping will be explained. Then a short overview about the two corpora used in this paper will be given. After that, I will first compare six words and their clippings since the 1920s, based on the Time Magazine Corpus. The next chapter will be about the comparison of the same words in different contexts from 1990 until today, based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English. In the end, a conclusion of the results will be presented.

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    2. The word-formation process clipping

    As already mentioned in the introduction, clipping is a word-formation process, but also the result of the process itself is called clipping. In general it can be said, that word formation is concerned with the process that expands the vocabulary of a language, i.e. create new lexemes (Kortmann 2005: p. 94).

    Still, there are differences to be made when talking about word-formation processes. According to Kortmann, there are productive and less productive word-formation processes, which are also called high productive and less productive. The most productive processes are responsible for the majority of neologisms, for example by prefixation like in ex-minister. Less productive word-formation processes basically are the various types of shortenings, such as back-formation, blend, acronym and clipping. Nevertheless, also within the group of less productive word-formation processes distinctions can be made. When on one hand, more than one word is affected by the process, the word-formation shall be either blend, initialism, acronyms or alphabetism. When on the other hand only one word is affected, the word-formation process must either be back-formation or clipping (Kortmann 2005: p. 109).

    However, these less productive word-formation processes, especially clipping, continuously get more and more important in daily life (Kortmann 2005: p. 95). This is due to the laziness of people on one hand and the increasing familiarity with the particular subject on the other hand (Harley 2006: p. 95). This last aspect is also the main reason why words are clipped and come into more common usage: most speakers do not think it is necessary to use the whole word to identify the topic and to understand the meaning of it. As a result a more easily and quickly pronounced version of the word is preferred (Harley 2006: p. 95). This is also a general feature of lower productive word-formation processes: their outcome is much shorter than their input (Kortmann 2005: p. 106). This becomes very obvious in the word-formation process clipping, for example the clipped form of advertisement is ad and demonstration is often called demo nowadays.

    The examples given in the text above already give a short idea about what clippings actually are. According to Laurie Bauer (2004: p. 326), clipping is the process of

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    shortening a word without changing its meaning or its part of speech. Heidi Harley is even more precise about that. She highlights, that a multi-syllabic word is reduced in size, usually to one or two syllables (2006: p.95). She also states, that the outcome of a clipped word with two syllables almost always equates a trochee, which could be called a stress-wise ideal word of English (2006: p. 96). To sum up, clipping is the process of removing some material from a longer word.

    The word-formation process clipping follows specific phonologically determined patterns (Harley 2006: p.95) and is not necessarily bound to morphological structure. In general, that part of the word, which bears main stress, tends to remain at the end of the word-formation process, for example the word racoon becomes coon. Here, the initial unstressed syllable is dropped (Harley 2006: p.95). Another feature of clipping is, that normally a phonological part of the word which is not interpretable as an affix or word is cut off (Rubba 2004). So it is not possible to keep the -essor in professor because it cannot be interpreted as a word or suffix. It is the same with -ther in brother.

    However, there are three different types of clippings (compare Kortmann 2005: p. 106; Marchant 1969: p. 93). The first one is called back-clipping. With this process, the beginning, mostly the first syllable, of a word is kept. This is also the most common and the easiest type of clipping. In the following, some examples of this type are given:

    advertisement ad demonstration demo professor prof

    examination exam

    public house pub bicycle bike

    The second type is fore-clipping, hereby the first part of a word is cut off. Here are some examples for that process:

    telephone phone

    racoon coon

    aeroplane plane

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    omnibus bus

    Only very rarely, a lexeme is both shortened at the beginning and at the end which is then called middle-clipping:

    influenza flu

    refrigerator fridge pyjamas jams detective tec

    The given examples show, that there is a wide range of different types of clippings but that it is also very easy to create a new clipping. Furthermore, this is what happens in everyday life all the time, for example when calling a person with its nickname. Most nicknames are simply clippings, for example Christopher Chris (Harley 2006: p.96).

    Clippings usually do not belong to the standard vocabulary of a language. Moreover, most of them are very colloquial (Kortmann 2005: p. 106). According to Laurie Bauer (2004: p. 326) the process of clipping frequently has the effect of making [the word] stylistically less formal. In general, clippings derive from a specific word field or group which is used in a certain environment, for example in school or in medical professions. In school, pupils do not talk about examinations, mathematics or laboratories anymore but instead about exams, math and labs. In medical professions it is all about vets and docs, but not so much about veterans and doctors anymore (Marchand 1969: p. 94). As already mentioned, clippings are rather colloquial. However, some words are so influential that they made their way into standard English, even into some dictionaries, for example bike (from bicycle) or gas (from gasoline) (compare Langenscheidt 2003). Even more important is that clippings get more and more into common usage, but this aspect will be discussed in the next chapter.

    3. Development and usage of clippings

    A comparison of selected words and their clipped forms in different ways in order to find out more about the development of the usage of clippings will be done in the

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    following chapter. One main research question is, if a serious magazine like the Times

    uses the original version of a word more often than the more colloquial matching clipped form. Moreover, a closer look will taken at the differences of more colloquial written texts and written and spoken journalism.

    The first part will be about the development of clippings and the original form from the 1920s to 2006. Therefore the TIME Magazine Corpus created by Mark Davies is used. The corpus contains about one hundred million words taken from more than 250.000 texts from the Time Magazine. Hereby, it will be seen if some words made it into more common use, also in respectable journalism.

    The second part focuses mainly on the differences of using clippings in informal and formal language. I will refer to the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), which was also created by Mark Davies. This corpus consists of more than 360 million words taken from different sources and mediums, such as newspaper articles, popular magazines, fiction and academic journals, but also transcripts of unscripted conversations from different TV and radio programmes. However, the COCA covers the years from 1990 to 2007. This gives a much more specific view on how clippings and the original words are used in different mediums, though the research will focus on popular magazines and fiction vs. academic journals and newspapers.

    This paper concentrates on two different categories: frequency and tokens by million words. Frequency simply means how often a word is mentioned in all the texts and sources of the corpus. The second category, tokens per million words, is a projection to help comparing words across the whole corpus, especially the same word in different decades, more easily. However, the paper mainly concentrates on the second category.

    3.1. The Time Magazine Corpus

    This chapter will try to give an overview about the development in the change of the usage of clippings and their original version from the 1920s until today. For this the Time Magazine Corpus is used and six words with their matching clipping are compared (compare Time Magazine Corpus).

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    (1) aeroplane plane

    Already in the 1920s, the word aeroplane was not used that often anymore and the number also decreased steadily in the following decades. Since the 1980s, aeroplane is not mentioned at all in Time Magazine articles anymore. Instead, its clipped version plane became more and more popular and is even a lexeme nowadays. The increasing number of usage in the twenties might be due to the First World War and articles about new technical inventions. Furthermore, as commercial flights became possible, people became more familiar with that subject and the term plane was sufficient to identify an aeroplane.

    (2) telephone phone

    SECTION 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s

    TELEPHONE

    PER MIL 92.9 119.0 81.9 82.4 82.7 72.7 89.1 76.2 27.7

    FREQ 709 1506 1266 1384 1330 988 1013 742 178 Quelle: http://corpus.byu.edu/time/ (last access: 4.9.2008)

    SECTION 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s

    PHONE

    PER MIL 2.9 4.6 25.5 40.1 46.8 59.4 76.9 143.9 189.2

    FREQ 22 58 394 673 753 808 874 1401 1216 Quelle: http://corpus.byu.edu/time/ (last access: 4.9.2008)

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    The development of usage of the words telephone and phone is shown in the charts above. Until the 1980s the word telephone was more often used than its clipping. However, this clearly changed in the 1990s. The clipped word phone has made a steady increase in usage in common language. This might be due to the fact, that phones have become a normal part and technical equipment of daily life. Like the clipping plane, it has made its way into our dictionaries as a fully accredited lexeme. Nowadays, it is also much more often used than telephone.

    (3) facsimile fax

    For most people today, especially for the youth, facsimile seems like a very old-fashioned word and younger people would hardly know, what it actually means. Nevertheless, facsimile was still used in the Time Magazine in the 2000s with nine tokens, but in comparison with its clipping fax with 31 tokens it is only a rare occurrence. However, one has to take into consideration that facsimile is a quite new invention from the 1980s and became more popular in the nineties. Already from that time on, the clipped form was preferred by the majority of journalists: the frequency per million words was 1,6 for facsimile and 15,8 for fax in the 1990s.

    (4) examination exam

    The two words examination and exam are good examples for clipping where both version, namely the original and the clipped form, are more or less used equally. As it can be seen in the charts below, the shorter form exam became more popular only in the last few years and was not even used by Times authors in the 1920s. Exam does not belong to Standard English and is also not a lexeme so far but this might only be a matter of time.

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    SECTION 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s

    EXAMINATION

    PER MIL 23.6 27.1 17.6 20.3 17.8 17.8 14.8 10.6 8.4

    FREQ 180 343 272 340 286 242 168 103 54 Quelle: http://corpus.byu.edu/time/ (last access: 4.9.2008)

    SECTION 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s

    EXAM

    PER MIL 0.0 0.1 2.4 5.0 6.9 5.7 8.7 9.5 12.0

    FREQ 0 1 37 84 111 78 99 92 77 Quelle: http://corpus.byu.edu/time/ (last access: 4.9.2008)

    (5) influenza flu

    Already in the 1940s the clipped form of the word influenza was more popular than the original influenza. This might be due to the historical background and the already long existence and knowledge of the disease. However, nowadays, the whole lexeme influenza is mainly used in medical professions whereas flu is used in normal daily life.

    (6) refrigerator fridge

    The clipping fridge again refers to a technical modernization of refrigerators in the 1930s, but first appeared in the Time Magazine in the seventies. The reason for that might be central technical advancements in the fifties and sixties. Nonetheless, fridge is still the informal name for a refrigerator although everyone knows what a fridge is, it is still outnumbered in Time articles by its real name refrigerator.

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    To sum up it can be said, that in general there is an increasing number in the use of clippings and also shown over the last few decades. However, nowadays mostly both versions of a word are used more or less equally. One big exception certainly is facsimile where the clipped form fax is the common word to identify this communication medium. Nevertheless, some clippings were also already used in the 1920s, for example plane.

    3.2. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)

    In this part the focus is on the question of how and in which medium clippings and the original words are used from 1990 until 2007. For this the Corpus of Contemporary American English will be used and more colloquial or common language from popular magazines and fiction with the formal language of academic journals and newspapers will be compared. Therefore the same words as in 3.1 will be used to have the option of comparing the words (compare COCA).

    (1) aeroplane plane

    In the charts below it becomes very obvious, that the original word aeroplane is not used very often anymore, neither in academic journals or newspapers nor in more colloquial written language. Only in fiction it makes,

    however, a small difference, maybe because it is a more technical term. Plane is the much more common version of the word. The reason for this could be that aircrafts as a means of transport are a part of normal daily life nowadays. Everyone is comfortable with the clipped form plane, so there is no need in saying the whole word anymore.

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    SECTION SPOKEN FICTION MAGAZINE NEWSPAPER ACADEMIC

    AEROPLANE

    PER MIL 0.0 0.7 0.1 0.1 0.1

    FREQ 0 51 9 6 9 http://www.americancorpus.org/ (last access: 4.9.2008)

    SECTION SPOKEN FICTION MAGAZINE NEWSPAPER ACADEMIC

    PLANE

    PER MIL 82.1 69.0 61.8 61.8 26.3

    FREQ 6287 4807 4824 4541 1918 http://www.americancorpus.org/ (last access: 4.9.2008)

    (2) telephone phone

    In comparison to aeroplane and plane, as well telephone and phone both are used quite often. Nevertheless, again the clipped form is commonly preferred also in academic texts (telephone: 32,1 words per million; phone: 36,1 words per million). Especially in fictional texts is a clear preference seen for the clipping: phone (20611 tokens) is more than five and a half time more often used than telephone (3625 tokens).

    (3) facsimile fax

    At this point I have to refer back to what has already been said about the word facsimile in 3.1: it is a very old-fashioned word which is hardly known by young people today. This becomes very obvious referring to COCA. Facsimile is hardly used in any texts but mostly, however, in popular magazines (1,4 words per million) and academic journals (1,3 words per million). Conversely, fax is used

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    in magazines 1587 times (20,6 words per million) and in academic journals 1504 times (20,3 words per million). Nevertheless, both words are not mentioned very often in any kind of the media worked with. This could be a hint that other ways of communication, for example e-mails or text messages, become much more important.

    (4) examination exam

    The case exam and examination is a contrary example. Here, not the clipped form but the original word is used more often. Interestingly, just in newspapers exam is the slightly preferred term examination was used 682 times, exam 728. Even in popular magazines like Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping examination is the more common word.

    SECTION SPOKEN FICTION MAGAZINE NEWSPAPER ACADEMIC

    EXAMINATION

    PER MIL 10.4 8.6 12.2 9.3 74.5

    SIZE (MW) 76.6 69.6 78.1 73.4 73.0 FREQ 797 598 955 682 5441

    http://www.americancorpus.org/ (last access: 4.9.2008) SECTION SPOKEN FICTION MAGAZINE NEWSPAPER ACADEMIC

    EXAM

    PER MIL 6.9 7.4 10.8 9.9 12.7

    SIZE (MW) 76.6 69.6 78.1 73.4 73.0 FREQ 525 514 842 728 927

    http://www.americancorpus.org/ (last access: 4.9.2008)

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    (5) influenza flu

    The usage of the words influenza and flu in the 1990s until now is again a good example for the preference of the clipped version of a word in all media. This becomes especially obvious in spoken language. Here, influenza is outnumbered by flu with more than seven times flu has 1161 tokens, influenza only 164.

    (6) refrigerator fridge

    Although fridge is a well-known and in daily life often used word, surprisingly its original version refrigerator is the preferred alternative throughout the media used for the COCA. As it becomes obvious in the charts below, it is a clear distinction of number in usage between the two words and this is not broken down into the different sections.

    SECTION SPOKEN FICTION MAGAZINE NEWSPAPER ACADEMIC

    REFRIGERATOR

    PER MIL 6.4 26.3 19.0 14.4 3.0

    FREQ 489 1831 1485 1054 220 http://www.americancorpus.org/ (last access: 4.9.2008) SECTION SPOKEN FICTION MAGAZINE NEWSPAPER ACADEMIC

    FRIDGE

    PER MIL 1.5 9.8 6.4 2.3 0.1

    FREQ 115 683 497 170 8 http://www.americancorpus.org/ (last access: 4.9.2008)

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    To put sum up, clippings are more often used in rather informal contexts, such as popular magazines and fictional texts. In newspapers and academic journals mostly the original version of a word is still preferred (there are exceptions!). However, it is far more common to use clippings in spoken language although most TV and radio programmes COCA refers to deal with politics and economy.

    4. Conclusion

    Clipping is a very common way of showing his or her familiarity with a certain

    subject not only nowadays but also already in the 1920s and presumably even before. However, today it is generally used more often and it is likely for people to create a clipping of a newly heard word right away because it is much easier to say and suffiecient to identify the topic. In general, clippings need some time to develop and are dependent on new inventions. When the first facsimiles were introduced to publicity in the 1980s people first needed to get to know this new form of communication. Nowadays only few people know at all, that originally there was another word for fax. This is a good example for a clipping which made its way into Standard English and is recognized as a lexeme, and widely even more known as the original word.

    To sum up, it can be said that clippings are much more often used in spoken language and popular magazines and become more and more common. Nevertheless, clippings are still rather colloquial and only few made it into academic journals and written language. However, to get generally valid results on this topic further research definitely had to be done.

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    5. Bibliography

    Bauer, Laurie. Introducing linguistic morphology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003.

    Bauer, Laurie. A glossary of morphology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.

    Harley, Heidi. English Words: A linguistic introduction. Singapore: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.

    Kortmann, Bernd. English linguistics: Essentials. Berlin: Cornelsen Verlag, 2005.

    Marchand, Hans. The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-formation. Mnchen: C.H.Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1969.

    Willmann, Helmut et al. Langenscheidt: Taschenwrterbuch Englisch. Berlin, Mnchen: Langenscheidt KG, 2002.

    Internet References:

    Davies, Mark (2008). Corpus of Contemporary American English. http://www.americancorpus.org/ (last access: 4.9.2008)

    Davies, Mark (2008). Time Magazine Corpus. http://corpus.byu.edu/time/ (last access: 4.9.2008)

    Rubba, Johanna (2004). http://cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba/morph/morph.over.html (last access: 1.9.2008)