Soundinterchange is the way of word-building when somesounds are changed to form new words which are differentiated due toalternation in the phonemic composition of the root. This process is not activein Modern English but it was productive in Old English.

In many cases we have vowel and consonantinterchange. By means of vowel interchange we distinguish different parts ofspeech: full – to fi ll, food – to feed,blood – to bleed. In some cases vowel interchange is combined with affixation:long – length, strong – strength, nature– natural.

In nouns we have voiceless consonants andin verbs we have corresponding voiced consonants because in Old English theseconsonants in nouns were at the end of the word and in verbs in the intervocalposition which made it voiced. It has made the distinctive feature of a nounand a verb. There is a long series of verbs and nouns and also some adjectivesdiffering in this way.

Observe for example, the opposition ofvoiced and unvoiced consonants in the following: to advise – advice, to prove– proof. In some cases we observe both vowel and consonant interchange: to bathe – bath, to live – life, to breathe– breath, to lose – loss etc.

There are some particular cases ofconsonant interchange:

[k] – [tj] – to speak – speech, to break –breach;[s ]–[d] – defence – to defend, offence – to offend;

[s ]-[t] – evidence – evident, importance –important.

Stressinterchange can be mostly met in verbs and nouns.Many English verbs of Latin, French origin are distinguished from thecorresponding nouns by the position of stress: nouns have the stress on the first syllable and verbs on the last syllable, e.g. `accent – to accent, `conflict – to con`flict, `export – to export,`extract – to ex`tract, `present – to pre`sent, `content – to con`tent etc.As a result of stress interchange we have also vowel interchange in such wordsbecause vowels are pronounced differently in stressed and unstressed positions.

In Reduplicationnew words are made by doubling a stem, either without any changes as in bye-bye or with a variation of theroot-vowel or consonant as in ping-pong,tip-top, chit-chat. Most words made by reduplication represent informalgroups: slang and colloquialisms, e.g. walkie-talkie(a portable radio); riff-raff (theworthless or disreputable element of society); hip-hop (the culture of the young African Americans and others whoenjoy this type of music, including speech styles of art, dancing, dress).

Soundimitation or Onomatopoeiais the naming of an action or thing by more or less reproduction of sounds. Itis a way of wordbuilding when a word is formed by imitating different sounds.Semantically, according to the source sound, many onomatopoeic words fall intoa few definite groups:

a)  sounds produced by humanbeings, such as: to whisper, to

giggle,to mumble, to sneeze, to whistle;

b)  sounds produced by animals,birds, insects, e.g. dogs – bark, cows –moo, frogs – croak, cats – mew or miaow, ducks – quack, bee

– buzz;

c) sounds produced by nature and objects,such as: to splash, to rustle, toclatter, to bubble, to ding-dong, to tinkle etc. The corresponding nounsare formed by means of conversion, e.g. clang(of a bell), chatter (of children)etc.

 

 Back formation or Reversion is the way of word-building when a word is formed bydropping the final morpheme to form a new word. It is opposite to suffixation,that is why it is called back formation. At first it appeared in the languageas a result of misunderstanding the structure of a borrowed word. Prof.Yartseva explains this mistake by the influence of the whole system of thelanguage on separate words. E.g. it is typical of English to form nounsdenoting the agent of the action by adding the suffix -er to a verb stem (speak-speaker). So when the French word «beggar»was borrowed into English the final syllable «ar» was pronounced in the sameway as the English -er and Englishmenformed the verb «to beg» by droppingthe end of the noun. Other examples of back formation are: to accreditate (from accreditation), to bach (from bachelor), tocollocate (from collocation), toenthuse (from enthusiasm), to compute(from computer), to emote (fromemotion) to reminisce (fromreminiscence), to televise (from television)etc.

 Aswe can notice in cases of back formation the part-of-speech meaning of theprimary word is changed, verbs are formed from nouns.