Historical Change and English Word-Formation: Recent Vocabulary (review)

Reviews143 Historical Change and English Word-Formation: Recent Vocabulary. 1987. Garland Cannon. New York: Peter Lang. 340 pp. Selected bibliography ; word index; topic and name index. $35.95 U.S. "While grammar is the domain of systems," Barbara Strang once wrote, "lexis is the domain of vast lists of formal items about which rather little generalization can be made" (1968, 215). Garland Cannon's survey of 13,683 words added to the English vocabulary during the 1960s and 1970s bears this out. His study is a taxonomy of the morphological processes in recent English. Each new word is classified into one of 21 categories of wordformation , for the most part modeled on the categories set forth in an earlier pilot study by John Algeo entitled "Where Do AU the New Words Come From?" (1980; see also Algeo 1978). Cannon's 21 categories in turn are further divided into four "divisions" of word-formation, namely, shifts, borrowings , shortenings, and additions. The relative productivity of the four types, and of the 2 1 word-formation categories, is estimated in terms of percentages calculated for each. Much of Cannon's discussion consists of lists of words illustrating the 2 1 morphological categories. His data are presented in prose in the course of discussion. At times one wishes for the complete lists, rather than selected examples . Nevertheless, Cannon's book is of great value as a resource in the lexicographic study of recent English. Cannon begins with a brief introduction to English language history and to dictionaries (1-17), with an emphasis on the three dictionaries used as sources for his data (18-28). His study would have been better served by a different sort of introduction, one that dealt with the theoretical problems encountered in the taxonomy of word-making, such as the phenomena of lexicalization, the productivity of certain compounding patterns, and affixes that are statistically prominent in his analysis. Instead, Cannon offers a general history of the language that necessarily is too brief to do justice to the subject and that must be used with caution. As our pronouns, prepositions, determiners, and conjunctions are almost all from Old English, they dictate the continuing Germanic structure of modern sentences. The thrust of modern sentences is usually clear even if we insert nonsense symbols elsewhere, as in "In this A you may C to the D." The full sentence might be "In this resort you may go to the disco." (3) English is, to be sure, a slot-filler language (if that is the author's point), but is syntax really shaped by the pronouns, prepositions, determiners, and conjunctions of a language? And is there really such a thing as a "Germanic structure"? Modern English, like French, is a subject/verb/object (SVO) language , whereas Modern German is ambiguously SVO (mainly in independent 144Reviews clauses) and SOV (mainly in subordinate clauses). Old English syntax is similar to that of Modern German in this regard and has been characterized variously as SOV, as SVO, or as having no predominant word order, whereas West Germanic is thought by most linguists to have been an SOV language. Cannon notes the census of about 35,000 headwords in Clark Hall's Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (1960), compared to Fries's estimate of 45,000 words in Middle English and about 125,000 words by A.D. 1700 (Fries 1963: 168). He does not attempt to estimate the number of headwords in the much larger Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (1898) and its supplements (Toller 1921; Campbell 1972), but he assures us that the Old English lexicon was adequate for the West Saxons. When new things, methods, and attitudes developed later, items denoting those needs came into the language. (3) This sentiment derives from the politically correct companion dogmas often espoused by linguists concerning the sufficiency and plenitude of all vocabularies, namely, that every culture possesses a vocabulary sufficient to its needs, and that all aspects of experience pertinent to a culture are reflected in its vocabulary: there are no semantic gaps. Linguists have wanted to emphasize the point that there are no "primitive" languages, that all languages are comparably complex grammatically, and that dialects within languages , including...