This document discusses word formation processes in English and Arabic. It begins by outlining the objectives of understanding word formation between languages. It then defines word formation and describes the main categories of processes as additive and reductive. In English, additive processes include derivation, compounding, and reduplication. Derivation adds affixes, compounding combines words, and reduplication repeats parts of words. Reductive processes shorten words through blending, clipping, initialization, and acronyms. Other processes that form English words are shifting meanings, borrowing, coining, conversion, backformation, eponyms, analogic creation, and idioms. Arabic word formation includes derivation, blending, mutation,

1. WORD FORMATION

2. OBJECTIVES
• To clarify the morphological symmetries and
divergences between the two languages.
• To enable translators and linguists identifying
the origin of words.
• To less and minimize falling in translation
mistakes between two languages.
• To identify linguistic students how words are
formed and invented.

3. DEFINITION OF WORD FORMATION
• “ It is the science of creating new
semantic entities in a language”.
Eman M. M. Elesawy,2002
• “ It is that branch of the science of
language which studies the patterns
on which a language forms new lexical
units". Hans Marchand,1969

4. Word
Formation
Processes in
English
Additive
processes
reduplication
derivation
compounding
Reductive
processes
blending
acronyms
initializatio
n
clipping
Others
Onomatopoeia
. Idioms and
Proverbs
Analogic
Creation
Eponyms
Backformation
Coining
Borrowing
Shifting

5. WORD FORMATION PROCESSES ARE
CLASSIFIED INTO TWO MAIN CATEGORIES:
Additive processes
• Morphological "additions" are annexed to the base.
• These additions might be free morphemes (discrete autonomous
words) or bound morphemes (affixes).
• Additive processes include compounding, derivation and
reduplication.
Reductive processes
• ln reductive processes certain parts are cut off the lexical
item and the remaining parts stand up in representation for
the original word.
• Reductive processes include clipping, initialization,

6. FIRST, ADDICTIVE PROCESSES
1. DERIVATION
• Crystal (2000) defines derivation as the process
of "building new words by adding derivational
affixes ,which do not apply regularly to an entire
class of words, but only to some subset ".
• Adding strings of prefixes and suffixes can
produce such monster words, as Crystal (2000)
says, e.g. indestructibility and
antidisestablishmentarianism.
• Affixes may be adjoined to both native, e.g.
tender - tenderize and non-native words, (French)

7. 2. COMPOUNDING
• Putting two or more words together to make a new word with;
meaning in some way different ,if only in being more
specific ,from that of its separate elements in
juxtaposition -for instance ,a "black board" is not the same
thing as a "blackboard"' . . .
• Compounds in English can function as any part of speech.
They can be verbs as in highlight ,nouns wishbone
,adjectives foolproof, adverbs overheard , prepositions
without or participial -ed adjectives as in open-minded.
• 3 types of compound word
- closed compound words e.g. grandmother
- open compound words, e.g. full moon
- hyphenated compound words, e.g. six-pack

8. 3. REDUPLICATION
• It is a repetitive process where , as Hatch states, "all or
parts of the words are repeated to add quantity, intensity,
or smallness qualities by repetition or elongation.“
• It is used in many languages of the world differently,
here are some examples:
- Vietnamese to modify and intensify adverbials e.g. nho'
nho' (smallish).
- Ilocano, (the major language in Philippine) is used for
pluralizing words e.g. talan (field) , tatalan (fields).
- In English is used for:
Diminutive and endearment e.g. teeny, tiny earrings.
Endearment e.g. sweety, the syllable -y ,/i/.
exaggeration e.g. tit for tat (one deed done in repayment of

9. SECOND CATEGORY, REDUCTIVE PROCESSES
1. BLENDING
• Crystal (1981) defines a "blend" as "the result of
two elements fusing to form a new word or
construction.
• Example
breakfast +lunch gives the blend brunch
• Blends are used heavily in Press and advertising
.They save space at printing and create a catch-
the-eye effect for the reader.

10. 2. CLIPPING
• A process where a syllable or more is cut off the word in
order to produce a shortened form.
Clipped forms may be roots or affixes.
• Examples of affixes
- Bus is a clipping of omnibus
- Influenza is clipped to flu
- laboratory to lab
• Examples of roots
- Exam of examination
- dorm of dormitory
- fridge of refrigerator.

11. 3. INITIALIZATION AND ACRONYMS
• An acronym , as defined by Pyles, is "a word coined up from
Greek 'akros' meaning 'tip' and onyma i.e. name. " Thus an
acronym literally means "tip of a name".
• Initialization(abbreviations), a reductive process where
only the initials of a group of words ,of a phrase or even
of a title are clustered together into a group of letters
written capitalized ,in conjunction one to the other or
separated by full stops.
• A distinction between acronyms and initializations is that
letters in initializations are pronounced as individual
separate phonemes in FBI which stands for "Federal Bureau of
Intelligence",etc. Whereas in acronyms letters are
pronounced as a sequence of undivided phonemes e.g. UNRWA.

12. OTHER PROCESSES EMPLOYED IN ENGLISH WORD FORMATION
1. SHIFTING
• Shifts are cases where language development results in
the change of meaning of the lexical item thus leading
to the creation of a new word bearing the same
orthography yet with a new different meaning.
• Semantic shifts may expand, limit or replace the
original meanings of words.
• Examples
- Anglo-Saxon, meat meant "food"; today, it means a
certain type of food.
- deer which once meant "wild animals" in general.
- pretty once meant "ingenious".

13. 2. BORROWING
• languages borrow words from each other.
• Borrowing is one of the most vital and influential
processes in English word formation.
• Examples
- wigwam, wampum, and tomahawk from the Indian
languages
- adobe and corral from the Spanish
- Arabic / sherbet
ets

14. 3. COINING
• Coining, is sometimes called word-manufacture .
It is the process of inventing new words.
• This phenomenon is especially common in cases
where industry requires a new and attractive
name for a product.
• Examples of some coinages, wireless,
hypermarket, kleenex, xerox.

15. 4. CONVERSION
• A process where existing lexical items change their
part of speech in order to create new items bearing
the same meaning but belonging to different
grammatical categories.
• It is considered derivation by adding a zero-morpheme
to the base (root).
• Examples
- verb from noun (pen/penning)
- verb from preposition (up/upped)
- N. from Adj. ( commercial/commercials)
adj. from phrasal verbs (breakaway)

16. 5. BACKFORMATION
• O"Grady defines the process of backformation as : A process
that creates a new word removing a real or supposed affix
from another word in the language...A major source of
backformations in English has been words that end with –or
or -er and have meanings involving the notion of an agent,
such as editor, peddler, swindler, and striker.
Examples swindle , edit, communicate.
• Sometimes verbs are backformed from adjectives Examples ill-
treat , ill-use
• Other examples
housekeep from housekeeper, wordprocess from wordprocessor
,orient from Orientate, enthuse from enthusiasm , donate from

17. 6. EPONYMS
• Words adopted from proper names are called eponyms.
• For example Maverick is a name of a major of San Antonio who
refused to brand his cattle. The word maverick came then to
become a term for unbranded cattle ,and later for anyone who
took an independent stand.
• Sandwich is the name of the fourth Earl of Sandwich (1718-
92), said to have spent twenty-four hours at the gaming
table with no other refreshment than slices of meat between
slices of bread.
• The word boycott is the name of a retired British army
captain Boycott who oversaw estates in Ireland and refused
to give humanitarian concessions to his Irish tenants. They

18. EPONYMS
• Eponyms can be names of places as in
Camembert (cheese) and Limousine (car)
which are names of places in France .
• Charleston the dance is also the name of
an American city. Tabasco (a sauce)is
the name of a river in Mexico.
• Frankfurter comes from Frankfurt,
mayonnaise from Mayon, roman(type) from

19. 7. ANALOGIC CREATION
• Coining brand new words is a totally
different process from analogic creation.
Whereas coining invents and innovates brand
new lexical items, analogic creation is a
process that depends on parody and creating
items similar to an existing model.
• For example
Dacron, Teflon and Orlon are all names for
industrial products created in analogic

20. 8. IDIOMS AND PROVERBS
• Forming idioms is one way of forming
complex lexical items in English
besides compounding and derivation.
• An idiom is a phrase whose meaning
can not be predicted from the
individual meaning of the morphemes
it comprises.
• Examples, stir up trouble or the

21. ARABIC
WORD FORMATION
Helal (1995) categorized word formation in Arabic into
eight processes:
derivation al?eshteqaq,
blending (alnaht),
Mutation and metathesis (al?ebdal wa alqalb
coining (al?ertegal),
analogic creation(alqeyas),
Arabicization(borrowing)
translation (altargamah)
metaphoric usage (shifts and idiomatic usage)

22. 1. DERIVATION (AL?ESHTEQAQ) ‫االشتقاق‬
• Derivation in Arabic means generating a new
word from an existing one in order to denote a
new meaning and relation of receiving an
action ,being the goal of an action, its place
,its doer, etc.
• Example
-Taqalnasa means to wear a qolonswah (a helmet)
-tamanTaqa means to argue using logic ,to use
logic in reasoning

23. TYPES OF DERIVATION IN ARABIC
1. Regular derivation employs the regular metric patterns of
language. Words are generated to pre-known meanings. E.g.
the combination fa3eel to create exaggerative adjectival
forms as in: Qateel “murdered”, Hazeen “sad”.
2. Irregular derivation: no exact or specific rule is
followed to generate words. Words created from proper
names and Arabized words where the base does not match any
pattern in the language (musically derived).
E.g. from Arabized word Tubaster/bastara from
pasteurization.
Amsara from proper name Mesr (Egypt).
• Derivation using phones: so if a man pronounces the sound

24. 2. ARABIZATIONS (BORROWINGS) ‫التعريب‬
• “Arabicization is a lexical item that Arab people of pure
descent have adopted from a foreign language and used into
theirs.” Magalat Almagma3
• Arabized words can be derived from too .
• For example,
- Allajam (the saddle) is an Arabicized word of Persian
origin. The verb aljama is an Arabic derivative meaning ,,to
saddle a horse,,
- In modern age “tefezyun” is an Arabicization from English
,the verb tarfaza "televise" is an Arabic derivation from
this root.

25. METHODS OF ARABIZATIONS
• 1. Transcription/ interference/ transliteration ( ‫الصوتي‬ ‫)النسخ‬
Is the literal spelling of English term in Arabic letters as
it exactly pronounced.
Examples: bank(‫)بنك‬, computer(‫)كمبيوتر‬, radio(‫)راديو‬, virus(‫)فايروس‬
• 2. Naturalization (‫)التطبيع‬
This method is based on adapting the English term to Arabic
pronunciation, alphabet, and grammar, by modifying its
pronunciation only partly, changing the spelling of one or
more of its letters into close Arabic ones, and using it in
singular, plural, masculine, feminine or verb form.
Example: Oxide(n) ‫أكسيد‬, oxidate/oxidize ‫يؤكسد‬,
oxidation/oxidization ‫أكسدة‬
/
‫تأكسد‬ , oxidant/oxidizer ‫د‬ِ‫س‬‫مؤك‬,
oxidated/oxidized ‫د‬َ‫س‬‫مؤك‬.

26. 3. TRANSLATION ‫الترجمة‬
• A method of Arabization, translation is
the transmission of English technical terms
into Arabic, using words that are already a
part of Arabic language vocabulary.
• Examples
Geology ‫األرض‬ ‫علم‬, Geometry ‫الهندسة‬, cells ‫الخاليا‬,
capacity ‫السعة‬, blood group ‫الدم‬ ‫زمرة‬.

27. 4. METAPHORIC AND NON-METAPHORIC
SPEECH‫والمجاز‬ ‫الحقيقة‬
• using words figuratively to convey new meanings and give
particular collocations.
• Figurative usage of speech is classified into three types:
• 1. Allegory: An allegory can be used to express different
relations between two referents. The relation between the
two referents is mostly something other than similarity .
• 2. Metaphors and similes : Metaphors can be explicit or
implicit (or as Arabic linguists put it "direct" or
"indirect" ). Metaphors are employed if the relation between
the two referents bears some of similarity and so are
similes .

28. 5. BLENDING ‫النحت‬
• Helal defines blending as " the process whereby some letters
are extracted from more than one word and appended together to
create a new word .“
• Blending was well-known and used by old Arabs ,yet it is not as
productive and generative in MSA as it is in Indo-European
languages .
• Blending in Arabic is subdivided into two types:
• a)Auditory Blending: "Audition" and "hearing" were the norm for
Arabs in their coinages and derivations. .Auditory blending
creates words out of two lexical items or a whole sentence or a
phrase. Blends created this way would have new different
meanings from both parent words, and a different form too.
Examples
- Two words: ?emro? (man) +?alqays (the tribe of Qays)--+
emrolqaysbelonging to?alqays tribe or to the famous poet

29. BLENDING ‫النحت‬
• b )Regular Blending: extrapolating a letter or more of one
of the two items and affixing to the other either initially
(prefix), medially (prefix) or finally(suffix)
- Two words
‫عرم‬
/
‫عرمرم‬
،
‫عبدشمي‬
‫الى‬ ‫نسبة‬
‫عبد‬
‫شمس‬
،
‫عبدري‬
‫الى‬ ‫نسبة‬
‫عبد‬
‫الدار‬
،
‫جلمود‬
‫لـ‬ ‫اختصار‬
‫وجمد‬ ‫جلد‬ “.
- Tree Words
‫حيعل‬
‫وتعني‬
‫الفالح‬ ‫على‬ ‫حي‬
- Four words
‫بسمل‬
‫وتعني‬
‫الرحيم‬ ‫الرحمن‬ ‫هللا‬ ‫بسم‬
- More than four

30. ANALOGIC CREATION ‫القياس‬
• The process through which an Arabic speaker
generates new lexical items using the
analogy and symmetry of existing models.
• Analogic creation involves modeling words
to words, patterns to patterns or even
usages to usages in order to achieve
linguistic growth and also to preserve the
regularity of linguistic phenomenon.

31. ANALOGIC CREATION IN ARABIC INCLUDES
THREE MAIN PROCESSES
• a)Extending the meaning of an Arabic item to a foreign one.
This is done for no reason other than their being similar or
identical in form (metrical pattern) or function.
e.g. khamr means wine
• b)Patterning words of the same morphological build together
so that their semanticity is predictable by the speaker or
learner.
e.g. booklet ‫كت‬
‫ي‬
‫ب‬ , leaflet ‫ور‬
‫ي‬
‫قة‬ .
• c) Words that are morphologically similar though
functionally are treated different as belonging to one
category even if only in form.
• e.g. Words ends with (t,h) in Arabic treated as feminine

32. 7. COINING/COINAGE ‫االرتجال‬
• Three ways for coinage
1. Revival (‫)االحياء‬
Also called engendering (‫)التوليد‬. It is the use of an old, dead
word with a new meaning. Its old meaning usually ignored.
Examples
- Train (‫)قطار‬: used to mean “a line of camels”. now, it is used to
indicate the Arabized word “train”.
- Telephone(‫)الهاتف‬: used to mean “a person whose voice is heard,
but not seen.” now, it used to Arabize the word telephone.2.
2. Neologism ‫المستجدات‬
New word, ideas and expressions which were not known in Classical
Arabic.
e.g. Psychology‫النفس‬ ‫علم‬ , calculator‫حاسبة‬ ‫آلة‬ , spaceship ‫فضاء‬ ‫سفينة‬

33. 8.METATHESIS AND MUTATION: ‫واالبدال‬ ‫القلب‬
a) Metathesis ‫القلب‬
• one of the radicals of the trilateral root is forefronted
over the others .
• The new entry would have the same core meaning of the mother
entry but with minor lexical differences expressing fine
semantic shades or gradations .
e.g. ya?esa and ?ayesa (to despair) ‫يأس‬ ‫و‬ ‫أيس‬
b) Mutation ‫االبدال‬
• a linguistic phenomenon where one of the consonantal
radicals of the trilateral root is replaced with a new
different consonant.

34. 9. ACRONYMS
• In Arabic some acronyms are found in the Koran such as: ‫حم‬
،
٬
‫ﻁ‬
‫س‬
،
٬
‫ﻳﺱ‬
،
٬
‫ﻁﻪ‬
،
‫كهيعص‬
.
• Other acronyms that exist in Modern Standard Arabic like ،
٬
‫ا‬
‫ﺍ‬
‫ال‬
‫ﻭ‬
‫بك‬
‫اليونسكو‬
،
٬
‫ا‬
‫ﺭﺍ‬
‫مكو‬
‫ﻭ‬
،
٬
‫اال‬
‫ﻭ‬
،‫ابك‬
٬
، ‫اليونسيف‬
٬
‫الناتو‬
‫ﻭ‬ are borrowed from English.
• Abbreviations
‫ﻡ‬
/
‫ﺙ‬
(
‫متر‬
‫ﺭ‬
‫الثانية‬ ‫في‬
)
،
٬
‫كم‬
/
‫سا‬
(
‫ا‬ ‫في‬ ‫كيلومتر‬
‫ﺍ‬
‫لساعة‬
)
،
٬
‫ﺵ‬
(
‫شا‬
‫ﺭ‬
‫ع‬
)
،
٬
‫ﺹ‬
(
‫صفحة‬
)

35. 10. ONOMATOPOEIA
• It is a modified type of coining in which a word
is formed as an imitation of some natural sound
associated with the object or action involved.
• English
• tinkle, buzz, pop, moo, bow-wow, mew, chickadee
• Arabic
• ‫مواء‬
‫ﺍ‬
‫لقط‬
‫ﻁ‬
،
٬
‫خر‬
‫ﻳ‬
‫ا‬ ‫ر‬
‫ﺍ‬
‫لماء‬
،
٬
‫ا‬
‫ﺯﻳﻳ‬
‫ز‬
‫ﺍ‬
‫لطائر‬
‫ﺍ‬
‫ت‬
،
٬
‫نباح‬
‫ﺍ‬
، ‫لكلب‬
٬
‫عو‬
‫ﺍ‬
‫ء‬
‫ﺍ‬
‫لذئب‬
،
٬
‫زئير‬
‫ﺍ‬
‫السد‬
،
‫خوار‬
‫ﺍ‬
‫لبقر‬
‫ﺭ‬
،
٬
‫خشخشة‬
‫ﺍ‬
، ‫لحلي‬
٬
‫ﺩ‬
‫و‬
‫ﺍ‬ ّ‫ﻱ‬‫ﻭ‬
‫لمدافع‬
،
٬
‫ثرثر‬
،
٬
‫جرجر‬
،
٬
‫خرخر‬
،
٬
‫شرشر‬

36. REFERENCES
• Eman M. M. Elesawy. (2002) Word-formation in Modern Standard
Arabic and English A Corpus-based Study. Minia
University,Egypt.
• Hasan Ghazala. (1995) Translation as problems and solutions.
• Reima Al-Jarf. (1994) A Contrastive Analysis of English and
Arabic Morphology for Translation Students.
• ‫العربية‬ ‫اللغة‬ ‫في‬ ‫النحت‬