Abstract: English Back-formation Words have gained rapid development and much attention since World War II. Back-formation is the process of creating a shorter lexeme by removing an imagined affix from the already existed longer word. For example, televise is back-formed from television by deleting the supposed suffix -ion. This paper attempts to illustrate the function of analogy in the formation process of back-formation words, and finds that analogy helps produce both regularities and irregularities of back-formation. 

Key words: back-formation; analogy; regularities; irregularities

Contents

Abstract

中文摘要

1.-Introduction-1

2.-The Theory of Analogy-2

2.1 The Concept of Analogy-3

2.2 Different Categories of Analogy-4

2.3 Features of Analogy-7

3. Classification of English Back-formation-9

3.1 Back-formation related to Derivational Morphology-9

3.2 Back-formation Related to Inflectional Morphology-14

4. Analogy in Back-formation-14

4.1 Back-formation as an Analogy Operation-15

4.2 Analogy in the Regularity of Back-formation-17

4.3 Analogy in the Irregularity of Back-formation-18

5. Conclusion-19

Reference-21