Componymy as a New Word Formation Process

Fodil, Mohammed Sadek

If words were principally invented to convey human meaning, it can also be reasonable to affirm that over time, they substantially grow in morphological complexity to cater for the subtle details of evolving human condition. When writing was invented, different materials were designed to serve as locus for the ever increasing words being coined to satisfy the unending interaction needs of the various human communities. Some carved words in clay, others in parchment, leather, rock or other stuff, each time committed to preserve in the stored words and sentences, the different memories what were deemed important to bequeath for later generations. However, as human knowledge has continuously augmented in both quantity and quality, especially since the invention of the printing press, even thick books proved unfit to store amounts of knowledge which have exponentially evolved with the increase of published books around the planet. The change of knowledge storage from a physically situated to a virtual transient locus has started impacting word shape and its storage capacity by exploding the supposed stability of word units. Too much production of knowledge requires more sophisticated management tools, and linguistic structures principally words, are increasingly requested to accommodate the newly constructed realities by adopting coinage structures better fit to account for hypermodern expressions. In this paper, we argue that new knowledge representation constructions labelled ‘componyms’ like those listed by NetLingo are being invented to fulfil this task. The aim of this contribution is to demonstrate that these ‘componyms’ which are not built from phonemes like ordinary lexical items, but from MICUs (Minimal Informational Cooperative Units) appear more suited to answer the new linguistic needs of the knowledge society.

Componymy as a New Word Formation Process

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