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 this order, but in main clauses, the verb is moved back to the V2 position (technically, the verb undergoes "V-to-T raising"). That is said to explain the fact that Old English allows inversion of subject and verb as a general strategy for forming questions, while modern English uses this strategy almost only with auxiliary verbs and the main verb "to be", requiring "do"-support in other cases. Because of its similarity with Old Norse, it is believed that most of the time the word order of Old English changed when asking a question, from SVO to VSO. While many purport that