Word formation Word formation In linguistics, word formation is the creation of a new word. Word formation is sometimes contrasted with semantic change, which is a change in a single word's meaning. The boundary between word formation and semantic change can be difficult to define: a new use of an old word can be seen as a new word derived from an old one and identical to it in form. See 'conversion'. There are a number of methods of word formation. A blend is a word formed by joining parts of two words after clipping. An example is "smog", which comes from
Old English grammar broken. In Beoƿulf, for example, main clauses frequently have verb-initial or verb-final order, and subordinate clauses often have verb-second order. (However, in clauses introduced by "þā", which can mean either "when" or "then", and where word order is crucial for telling the difference, the normal word order is nearly always followed.) Those linguists who work within the Chomskyan transformational grammar paradigm often believe that it is more accurate to describe Old English (and other Germanic languages with the same word-order patterns like modern German) as having underlying subject-object-verb (SOV) ordering. According to this theory, all sentences are initially generated using