Introduction to final paper:

When most people think of William Shakespeare, they usually attribute his name to the numerous well-known plays and sonnets he created. However, what many people do not realize is that Shakespeare not only created such classic works of literature but has also created words and coined phrases in his writing that were not previously heard of before in history. There are several different types of word usage and formation found in Shakespeare’s plays. In order to invent new words/lexemes, Shakespeare used several processes, such as derivation, often adding prefixes and suffixes to words to form new meanings, like merging the prefix “un” with “real” to create the lexeme “unreal,” meaning something that is unbelievable or incredible. In addition, he used compounding, where two free morphemes are combined to form a new lexemes. An example of this is combining the free lexemes “be” and “dazzle” to form the word “bedazzle,” which can mean to decorate or to astound or impress. Shakespeare also used conversion in many ways: he took nouns and made them into verbs; for example, he adapted the noun champion to be used as a verb as in “to champion,” as seen in his play Macbeth, (Mabillard 1).

In order to investigate the words/phrases coined by the Bard, I will be looking at several sources including his own plays to determine if he was indeed the first to create/coin the formation and usage of these words. It is important to determine if Shakespeare was truly the origin of the word, so that it can be rightfully attributed to him and not to the times. To do this, I examined several sources that list words Shakespeare invented, to increase the credibility. Furthermore, I searched to see if the word appeared in any works prior to Shakespeare.

Sources:

1. Mabillard, Amanda. Words Shakespeare Invented Shakespeare Online. 20 Aug. 2000. (date when you accessed the information) < http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/wordsinvented.html >.
2. McQuain, Jeff. Coined by Shakespeare: Words and Meanings First Penned by the Bard. Merriam-Webster, 1999. 

 

For my final paper, the topic I would like to focus on is word formation and usage found within Shakespeare’s work. For instance, I think that it would be really interesting to analyze some of the many words that Shakespeare has created and used. As I researched words by Shakespeare, I noticed that he invented words by making nouns into verbs, verbs into adjectives, adding prefixes and suffixes, and putting words together. For example, Shakespeare coined the word “bedazzle,” which I believe is an example of compounding. I am planning on looking into the words he created, and how he formed them, and discover if he used compounding, derivation, etc.

Some issues that I expect might come up are finding sources that are reliable/credible as well as being able to find that correct information. I have only begun a bit of research for this topic, and so far I have already seen some conflicting information on what terms Shakespeare created or did not. Thus, I will have to go into a deeper research, to his very work, and see if there has been use of them before, so that I can confirm that he did indeed coin the terms. Another issue that I will probably run into is staying on topic and being organized in my paper. With a topic like this, there are so many different parts of it to explore, so as I write my paper I want to make sure that I go in depth on what is important rather than mentioning everything that I find. 

1. Pineapple- exocentric, [[pine]N [apple]N]N
2. Hamburger- endocentric, [[ham]N [burger]N]N
3. Sweet potato- endocentric, [[sweet]A [potato]N]N
4. French fry- endocentric, [[french]A [fry]N]N
5. Green pea- endocentric, [[green]A [pea]N]N

• -or, [[X]V or]N
• Verb to Noun examples: terminate → terminator, illustrate → illustrator, navigate → navigator

 

• -ify, [[X]N,A ify]V where Y=N,A
• Noun to verb examples: fortitude → fortify, glory → glorify, terror → terrify
• (Also can change adjective to verb: false → falsify, beauty → beautify, simple→ simplify)

 

• terminator → terminatorify, illustrator → illustratorify, navigator → nagivatorify.
• The resulting words do not seem to be well-formed in my opinion, perhaps because I know that they are not already-existing words used in English. However, aside from that fact, these words do not appear to follow a comprehensible or logical pattern. For instance, the affixes that I used in my examples are “-or,” which means “one who ____” and “-ify,” which means “to make/cause ____.” In this case, if we look at the word illustrator, it means “one who illustrates.” If we were to add on the “-ify” prefix to it, it would mean something like “to make or cause an illustrator,” which does not really make any sense, so this process does not work. 

I can see both ways of these verbs being simplex and complex. As evidence for these verbs being complex, there are words that have the morpheme “for” which in these examples means “away” or “against” or “without”. So forbid, forget, forgive, forgo, and foreseer seem to be systematically related in some way as they all follow a similar pattern in meaning. However, “for” in the beginning of all words does not always mean this; for example, in “forward,” “fort,” and “foreign,” are all simplex because they cannot be broken up into constituents. However, I think that this specific group of given verbs would be complex, because “for” and the other half of the words are morphemes that have their own meaning. As an example: “forgo” can be broken down into “for” and “go.” When adding “for” as a prefix to “go,” it means “to go without.” Similarly, “forswear” can be broken down into “for” and “swear,” and together they mean to swear against, or wrongly.