Учебное пособие: Lectures in Contrastive Lexicology of the English and Ukrainian Languages

- -ньк (дівчинонька).

All Ukrainian diminutive suffixes are productive. In English only –ie/ey, -ette are productive.

4. Gender/sex expressing suffixes.

In the Ukrainian language they can expressmasculinegender:

- -ар/яр (лікар, школяр);

- -ист/іст (бандурист);

- -ій (водій);

- -ант/ент (студент).

Feminine gender can be expressed by means of the following suffixes:

- -к (артистка);

- -их (кравчиха).

Neuter gender is expressed by means of:

- -атк (курчатко);

- -к (вушко);

- -ц (винце).

English gender suffixes are only sex expressing: actor – actress.

5. International suffixes:

- -er/or ор(conductor, кондуктор);

- -ist/іст (socialist, соціаліст);

- -tion/ц (revolution, революція);

- -able/абельн(readable, читабельний).

In both languages there are semi-affixes. In English these are the elements:

loadsa-, friendly, -something.

In Ukrainian the semi-suffixes are:повно-, ново-, само-, авто-, -вод, -воз(повноправно, автопілот, водовоз, тепловоз).

4. Conversion

Conversion (zero derivation, root formation, functional change) is the process of coining a new word in a different part of speech and with different distribution characteristics but without adding any derivative element, so that the basic form of the original and the basic form of derived words are homonymous. This phenomenon can be illustrated by the following cases: work – to work, love – to love, water – to water.

If we regard these words from the angle of their morphemic structure, we see that they are root words. On the derivational level, however, one of them should be referred to a derived word, as having the same root morpheme they belong to different parts of speech. Consequently the question arises here: “What serves as the word-building means in such cases?” It would appear that the noun is formed from the verb (or vice versa) without any morphological change, but if we probe deeper into the matter, we inevitably come to the conclusion that the two words differ only in the paradigm. Thus, it is the paradigm that is used as a word-building means. Hence, we can define conversion as the formation of a new word through changes in its paradigm.

The change of the paradigm is the only word-building means of conversion. As the paradigm is a morphological category, conversion can be described as a morphological way of forming words.

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 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 word back. It may be a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb.