3.2　考研真題與典型題詳解

I. Fill in the blanks.

1．As the lexical words carry the main content of a language while the grammatical ones serve to link its different parts together, the lexical words are also known as content words and grammatical ones ______. (中山大學2008研)

【答案】function words

【解析】詞可分為詞匯詞和語法詞。具有詞匯意義的詞稱為詞匯詞，例如名詞、動詞、形容詞和副詞。表達語法意義的詞是語法詞，例如連詞、介詞和代詞。

2．In traditional grammar, ______ is the only word class which can function as a substitute for another item. (中山大學2006研)

【答案】pronoun

【解析】在傳統語法中，代詞是唯一一種可用來代替其他語言項目的詞性。

3．In terms of the meaning expressed by words, they can be classified into ______ words and ______ words. (南開大學2007研)

【答案】lexical, grammatical

【解析】從詞所表達的意義劃分，詞可分為詞匯詞和語法詞。

4．The ______ is the minimal distinctive unit in grammar, a unit which cannot be divided without destroying or drastically altering the meaning, whether lexical or grammatical. (北二外2008研)

【答案】morpheme

【解析】語素是最小的語義單位，是語法中的最小單位。它不能被分割成更小的單位而不改變它的意義。

5．There are two fields of morphology: the study of ______ and the study of ______. (人大2006研)

【答案】inflectional; derivational

【解析】粘著語素指不能單獨出現，必須跟至少一個其他語素共同出現的語素。

6．A _____ morpheme is one that cannot constitute a word by itself. (北二外2003研)

【答案】bound

【解析】在形態學中，有兩大主要研究方面，一是詞的屈折變化，一是詞的派生。

7．______ is a branch of linguistics that studies the interrelationship between phonology and morphology. (南開大學2007研)

【答案】Morphophonology

【解析】形態音系學是語言學的一個分支，主要研究形態學與音系學的關系。

8．______ is a relatively complex form of compounding in which a new word is formed by joining the initial part of one word and the final part of another word. For example, the English word smog is made from ______ and ______. (人大2006研)

【答案】Blending；smoke；fog

【解析】混成法是指一個詞由兩個單詞混合而成，一般把第一個單詞的開頭部分和第二個單詞的最后部分連接起來，或者是把兩個單詞的開頭部分連接起來。

9．Back-formation refers to an abnormal type of word-formation where a shorter word is derived by deleting an ______ affix from a longer form already in the language. (中山大學2006研)

【答案】imagined

【解析】逆構詞法是一種不規則的構詞類型，即把一個語言中已經存在的較長單詞刪去想象中的詞綴，由此造出一個較短的單詞。

10．______ is a unit of expression that has universal intuitive recognition by native speakers, whether it is expressed in spoken or written form. It is the minimum free form. (中山大學2005研)

【答案】Word

【解析】詞是個語言表達單位，無論是在口語還是在書面語中，說母語的人都能夠憑直覺識別這個語言單位。它是最小的自由形式詞，是能夠獨立構成一個完整語句的最小單位。

11．Affix is the collective term for the type of formative that call be used only when added to another morpheme. Affixes are limited in number in a language, and are generally classified into three subtypes, namely, prefix, suffix, and______. (北京郵電大學2010研)

【答案】infix

【解析】詞綴是那些只能附著于另一個語素(詞根或詞干) 上的一類語素的總稱。詞綴都是粘著語素，可分為前綴、中綴和后綴三種。

12．Words can be classified into variable words and invariable words. As for variable words, they may have ______ changes. That is, the same word my have different grammatical forms but part of the word remains relatively constant. (中山大學2011年研)

【答案】inflective

【解析】可變詞有曲折變化。

13．Bound morphemes are classified into two types: ______ and ______ root.

【答案】affix ; bound

【解析】粘著語素指不能單獨出現，必須跟至少一個其他語素共同出現的語素。詞綴和粘著詞根都是粘著語素。

14．A word formed by derivation is called a______, and a word formed by compounding is called a ______.

【答案】derivative ; compound

【解析】詞匯的變化方式主要有復合和派生兩種。派生而成的詞叫派生詞，復合而成的詞叫合成詞。

II. Multiple Choice

1．Words like pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, articles are ______ items. (北二外2003研)

A. open-class

B. closed-class

C. neither open-class nor closed-class

【答案】B

【解析】封閉類詞的成員數目固定，數量有限，像代詞、介詞、連詞和冠詞都屬于封閉類詞。

2．Nouns, verbs and adjectives can be classified as_____. (西安交大2008研)

A. lexical words

B. grammatical words

C. function words

D. form words

【答案】A

【解析】具有詞匯意義（指代物質，動作和性質）的詞稱為詞匯詞，例如名詞，動詞，形容詞和副詞。

3．Bound morphemes do not include. (西安交大2008研)

A. roots

B. prefixes

C. suffixes

D. words

【答案】D

【解析】粘著語素指不能單獨出現，必須跟至少一個其他語素共同出現的語素。詞根，詞綴都可能是粘著詞素。

4．______other than compounds may be divided into roots and affixes. (大連外國語學院2008研)

A. Polymorphemic words

B. Bound morphemes

C. Free morphemes

【答案】A

【解析】多語素詞可被分為詞根和詞綴，而合成詞是不可以被這樣分的。

5．______ refers to the way in which a particular verb changes for tense, person, or number. (西安外國語學院2006研)

A. Affixation

B. Inflection

C. Derivation

D. Conjugation

【答案】B

【解析】屈折變化是通過附加屈折詞綴表現語法關系，如數、人稱、有定性、體和格。它并不改變所附加詞干的語法類別。

6．Which two terms can best describe the following pairs of words: table—tables, day ＋ break—daybreak. (大連外國語學院2008研)

A. inflection and compound

B. compound and derivation

C. inflection and derivation

【答案】A

【解析】屈折變化是通過附加屈折詞綴表現語法關系，如tables。合成詞是由詞根語素按一定的規則組合起來構成的，如daybreak。

7．Compound words consist ofmorphemes. (北二外2003研)

A. bound

B. free

C. both bound and free

【答案】B

【解析】合成詞是由自由詞素組合而成的。

8．Which of the following words is formed by the process of blending? (對外經貿2006研)

A. WTO

B. Motel

C. Bookshelf

D. red-faced

【答案】B

【解析】混成法是指一個詞由兩個單詞混合而成，一般把第一個單詞的開頭部分和第二個單詞的最后部分連接起來，或者是把兩個單詞的開頭部分連接起來。Motel是由motor與hotel二詞的縮合。

9．Which of the following words are formed by blending? (對外經貿2005研)

A. girlfriend

B. television

C. smog

D. bunch

【答案】C

【解析】smog 是由smoke 和fog二詞縮合而成的。

10．The word UN is formed in the way of     . (西安交大2008研)

A. acronymy

B. clipping

C. initialism

D. blending

【答案】A

【解析】縮略語是由組織機構的首字母組成的，UN來源于United Nations。

11．Which of the following is NOT a process of the lexical change? (大連外國語學院2008研)

A. INVENTION.

B. ACRONYM.

C. LEXICON.

【答案】C

【解析】詞的變化方式很多，新創詞和縮略語都屬于其中，而選項C不屬于。

12．Language has been changing, but such changes are not so obvious at all linguistic aspects except that of______. (西安外國語學院2006研)

A. phonology

B. lexicon

C. syntax

D. semantics

【答案】B

【解析】語言總在不斷的變化，其在詞匯方面的發展和變化尤為明顯。

13．“Wife”, which used to refer to any woman, stands for “a married woman” in modern English. This phenomenon is known as. (西安交大2008研)

A. semantic shift

B. semantic broadening

C. semantic elevation

D. semantic narrowing

【答案】D

【解析】詞義縮小是指原來的詞義縮小或被限制到某個明確的意義上。

14．It is true that words may shift in meaning, i.e. semantic change. The semantic change of the word tail belongs to     .

A. narrowing of meaning

B. meaning shift

C. loss of meaning

D. widening of meaning

【答案】D

【解析】“tail”它曾經表示馬的尾巴，現在可表示任何動物的尾巴，屬于詞義的擴大。

15．A suffix is an affix which appears ______.

A. after the stem

B. before the stem

C. in the middle of the stem

D. below the stem

【答案】B

【解析】詞綴根據它們與詞干的位置可分為前綴、中綴和后綴三種。前綴指出現在詞干前面的詞綴。

III. True or False

1．Some linguists maintain that a word group is an extension of word of a particular class. (清華2001研)

【答案】T

【解析】詞組是指一組具有一定詞性的詞的組合擴展，且此過程并不改變詞原來的詞性。

2．Words are the most stable of all linguistic units in respect of their internal structure. (大連外國語學院2008研)

【答案】T

【解析】就詞的內部結構而言，詞是所有語言單位中最穩定的。

3．Nouns, verbs, adjectives and many adverbs are content words. (北二外2008研)

【答案】T

【解析】具有詞匯意義(指代物質、動作和性質)的詞稱為詞匯詞，例如名詞、動詞、形容詞和副詞。

4．Pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions and articles are all open class items. (清華2001研)

【答案】F

【解析】封閉類詞的成員數目固定，數量有限。像代詞、介詞、連詞和冠詞都屬于封閉類詞。

5．The words “loose” and “books” have a common phoneme and a common morpheme as well. (北二外2007研)

【答案】F

【解析】這兩個詞中的/z/和/s/是同一個音位[z]的不同變體，所以有共同的音位，但loose中的語素是se，books中的語素是s。

6．Free morpheme may constitute words by themselves. (大連外國語學院2008研)

【答案】T

【解析】自由語素指是能夠單獨出現或獨立成詞的語素。

7．Root also falls into two categories: free and bound. (北二外2006研)

【答案】T

【解析】詞根是構成詞的基礎成分，它可以是自由語素或粘著語素。

8．A stem is the base form of a word which cannot be further analyzed without total loss of identity. (對外經貿2006研)

【答案】T

【解析】詞干指能加屈折詞綴的語素(組合)，它相當于詞根或詞根加派生詞綴。

9．The words “water” and “teacher” have a common phoneme and a common morpheme as well.(北二外2006研)

【答案】F

【解析】有共同的音位，但語素不同，前者是ter，后者是er。

10．The words “boys” and “raise” have a common phoneme and a common morpheme as well. (北二外2008研)

【答案】F

【解析】有共同的音位，但音位/z/在前者中表示復數，而在后者中沒有任何意義。

11．Analogic change refers to the reduction of the number of exceptional or irregular morphemes. (對外經貿2005研)

【答案】T

【解析】依據類推構詞的原理，人們往往更容易記住規則的變化形式，所以那些比較例外的不規則的形式就會被人遺忘。

12．The smallest meaningful unit of language is allomorph.

【答案】F

【解析】語言最小的有意義的單位是語素不是語素變體。

IV. Explain the following terms.

1．Open-class words (浙江大學2007研)

【答案】Open-class words refer to words whose membership is in principle infinite or unlimited and with the emergence of new ideas, inventions, and so on; new expressions are continually and constantly being added to the lexicon. For example, nouns, verbs, and adjectives all belong to this class.

2．Lexical word (武漢大學2005研)

【答案】Lexical word. lexical words are also called content words, referring to those which have lexical meanings，that is, those which refer to substance, action and quality, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.

3．Morpheme (武漢大學2008研)

【答案】Morpheme is the smallest unit of language in terms of relationship between expression and content, a unit that cannot be divided into further smaller units without destroying or drastically altering the meaning, whether it is lexical or grammatical. For example, in boys, there are two morphemes: “boy” and “-s”; in international, there are three morphemes: “inter-” “nation” and “-al”.

4．Stem (四川大學2007研)

【答案】A stem is a morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an inflectional affix can be added. For example, “friend-” in friends, and “friendship-” in friendships are both stems. The former shows that a stem can be equivalent to a root, whereas the latter shows that a stem may contain a root and a derivational affix.

5．inflectional morpheme (南開大學2004研)

【答案】Inflectional morpheme: It is also called inflectional affixes, which attaches to the end of words. Inflectional affixes only add a minute or delicate grammatical meaning to the stem. The plural suffix is a typical example of this kind.

6．Free morphemes (西安交大2008研)

【答案】Free morpheme is an element of meaning which takes the form of an independent word. They may occur alone, that is, they may make up words by themselves. For example, “dog”, “nation” and “close” are free morphemes. And such words are called mono-morphemic words. Thus all mono-morphemic words are free morphemes.

7．Bound morpheme (上海交大2007研)

【答案】Bound morphemes refer to those morphemes that can not occur alone and must appear with at least another morpheme. For example, in the word “careless”, “-less” is a bound morpheme since it could not occur by itself as a word.

8．Inflection (四川大學2007研)

【答案】 Inflection is the manifestation of grammatical relationship through the addition of inflectional affixes, such as number, person, finiteness, aspect and case, which do not change the grammatical class of the stems to which they are attached. For example, the past form of the verb work is realized by the addition of the inflectional suffix: “-ed”; the plural form of the noun child is realized by the inflectional suffix: “-ren”.

9．Compound (四川大學2007研)

【答案】Compound refers to those words that consist of more than one lexical morpheme, or the way to join two separate words to produce a single form, such as the compound words “blackboard” and “well-known”.

10．Allomorph (四川大學2006研)

【答案】A morpheme may take various shapes or forms, and an allomorph is any of the variant forms of a morpheme as conditioned by position or adjoining sounds. For instance, the morpheme of plurality {-s} has a number of allomorphs in different sound context, as in “cats” /s/, in “bags” /z/, in “matches” /iz/.

11．Back-formation (四川大學2008研；北外2010研)

【答案】Back formation refers to an abnormal type of word formation where a shorter word is derived by deleting an imagined affix from a longer form already in the language. For example, the word “television” appeared before “televise”, and so does “editor” to “edit”.

12．Prefix (北外2010研)

【答案】In linguistics, a prefix is a type of affix that precedes the morphemes to which it can attach. Prefixes are bound morphemes (they cannot occur as independent words). While most languages employ both prefixes and suffixes, prefixes are less common. Some languages employ mostly suffixes and almost no prefixes at all. The use of prefixes has been found to correlate statistically with other linguistic features, such as a verb-object word order and the use of prepositions.

13．cognate(南開大學2011年研)

【答案】Cognate: cognates are words that have a common etymological origin. For example,length, height, width, breadth and depth, are cognates of the cover terms.

V. Short answer questions

1．What is the distinction between inflectional affixes and derivational affixes? (四川大學2007研)

【答案】

The distinction between inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes could be illustrated in the following four aspects.

Inflectional affixes very often only add a minute or delicate grammatical meaning to the stem, for instance, those inflectional affixes in words such as toys, walks, John’s, etc. Therefore, they serve to produce different forms of a single word. In contrast, derivational affixes often change the lexical meaning, e.g. cite, citation；generate, generation.

Inflectional affixes do not change the word class of the word they attach to, such as flower, flowers; whereas derivational affixes might or might not, such as the relation between small and smallness for the former, and that between brother and brotherhood for the latter.

Very often inflectional affixes are conditioned by non-semantic linguistic factors outside the word they attach to but within the phrase or sentence. Whereas, derivational affixes are more often based on simple meaning distinctions.

In English, inflectional affixes are mostly suffixes, which are always word final. But derivational affixes can be prefixes or suffixes.

2．What does the concept morphophoneme mean? What is the relationship between phoneme and morphophoneme? (南開大學2004研)

【答案】

Morphophoneme refers to the phoneme (or string of phonemes) that constitutes the various allomorphs of a morpheme.

Relationship between phoneme and morphophoneme: Generally speaking, the concept of morphophoneme adds a grammatical meaning to the concept of phoneme. For example, as to the phoneme /s/, it is in fact a configuration of allomorphs of different morphemes, such as the plural morpheme and the 3rd person present simple morpheme. Therefore, we would regard this phoneme as a morphophoneme, represented as /s/.

3．What are phonologically conditioned and morphologically conditioned form of morphemes? (武漢大學2005研)

【答案】

Some phonological factors can affect the appearance of morphemes, namely, the form of a morpheme; and there could be assimilation, and dissmilation. For example, the negative morpheme could be realized as “in-” or “im-” followed by different phonological environments, as in “inefficient” and “imperfect”, as a result of assimilation.

Morphemes can also be conditioned by morphological factors; for example, the allomorphs of the plural morpheme, as could be seen in “oxen”, “cows”, and “feet”.

4．How are affixes classified? (四川大學2008研)

【答案】

Considering the free and bound morpheme, affix is the collective term for the type of formative that can be used only when added to another morpheme, so it is naturally bound.

Depending on their position with reference to the root or stem of the word, affixes are generally classified into three subtypes, namely, prefix, suffix, and infix. For examples, “para-” as prefix, “-tion” as suffix, and “-bloomingly-” in word “abso-bloomingly-luty” as infix.

Affix can also be classified depending on the distinction between inflectional affixes and derivational affixes. The former often only add a minute grammatical function to the stem and do not change the word class of the word they attach to; while the latter are very productive in making new words and often change the lexical meaning. For instances, “-s” in words “toys”, “walks” and “John’s” is inflectional affixes, while “-tion” is a derivational affix in word “recitation”.

5．A number interesting word-formation processes can be discerned in the following examples. Can you identify what is going on in these?

(a) The deceased’s cremains were scattered over the hill.

(b) He’s always taking pills, either uppers or downers. (上海交通大學2007研)

【答案】The words “deceased” “upper” and “downer” have undergone a process of class shift. By shifting the word class one can change the meaning of a word from a concrete entity or notion to a process or attribution. This process of word formation is also known as zero-derivation，or conversion. In the sentences above, “deceased”, “upper” and “downer” are originally adjectives, meaning “dead”, “higher” and “lower” respectively; in the sentences above, however, they mean “dead people”, “a drug used as a stimulant.” and “a depressant or sedative drug”, which are nouns.

6．How to distinguish root and stem?

【答案】Root is that part of a word-form that remains when all the inflectional and derivational affixes have been removed. Thus in the word undesirables, the root is desire. Stem is the part of a word-form that remains when all inflectional affixes have been removed. So in the word undesirables, the stem is undesirable. The stem of a word may be: a) a simple stem consisting of only one morpheme or root, e.g. work; b) a root plus a derivational affix, e.g. worker; c) two or more roots, e.g. workshop.

7．Illustrate the relationship between morpheme and allomorph by examples.

【答案】Morpheme is the smallest meaningful linguistic unit of language, not divisible or analyzable into smaller forms. What is usually considered a single word in English may be composed of one or more morphemes. Take disagreeable for example, it contains three morphemes, dis-, agree and -able. A morpheme may take various shapes or forms. For instance, -ion, -tion, -sion and -ation are the positional variants of the same suffix. They do not differ in meaning or function but show a slight difference in sound depending on the final phoneme of the preceding verb. They are called allomorphs. So an allomorph is any of the variant forms of a morpheme as conditioned by position or adjoining sounds.

8．What are closed-class words and open-class words?

【答案】

A word that belongs to the closed-class is one whose membership is fixed or limited. New members are not regularly added. Therefore, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, articles, etc., are all closed items.

The open-class is one whose membership is in principle infinite or unlimited. With the emergence of new ideas, inventions, etc., new expressions are continually and constantly being added to the lexicon. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and many adverbs are all open-class items.

However, the distinction between closed-class words and open-class words is not quiet as clear-cut as it seems. Preposition, though a closed-class, is relatively open one in English. Expressions such as “regarding”, “throughout”, “out of” are now recognized as prepositions or complex prepositions. In respect of open-class items, auxiliary verbs, which used to be ranked as open-class words, are relatively closed in number.

VI. Essay questions

1．Illustrate lexical change proper with the latest examples in English, covering at least four aspects. (大連外國語學院2008研)

【答案】

New words or expressions are created through the following processes except compound and derivation, which are called lexical change proper.

(1) Invention

Technological and economic activities are the most important and dynamic in modern human life, many new lexical items come directly from them, such as Kodak, Coke, nylon, etc.

(2) Abbreviation

Many English words have come into being through abbreviation. This phenomenon is also called clipping: a new word can be created by:

①cutting the final part, for example, ad for advertisement.

②cutting the initial part, for example, plane for aeroplane.

③cutting both the initial and final parts accordingly, for instance, fridge for refrigerator.

(3) Blending is a relatively complex form of compounding, in which two words are blended by joining together the initial part of the first word and the final part of the second word, or by only joining the initial parts of the two words, for example, emotion ＋ icon → emoticon; car ＋ hijacking→carjacking.

(4) Acronym is made up from the first letters of the name of an organization, which has heavily modified headword; an example is EU for European Union. This process is also widely used in shortening extremely long words of word groups in science, technology and other special fields, for example, SARS is short for “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome”. What’s more, people also use this process in internet chatting or e-mail communication, such as BTW for “by the way”, ASAP for “as soon as possible”.

2．Semantic change plays a very important role in widening the vocabulary of a language. (中山大學2008研)

【答案】

Semantic change plays a very important role in widening the vocabulary of a language. Since language is symbolic, each word serves as a symbol in relation to a specific meaning. In this sense, we need infinite numbers of words or symbols to code the physical entities and our experiential concepts. But this is impossible for communication．Therefore, users give a new concept to an old form, thus the meaning of a form is multiplied. There are three kinds of semantic changes, namely, broadening, narrowing, and meaning shift．Class shift and folk etymology also contribute to change in meaning.

Semantic broadening refers to the process in which the meaning of a word becomes more general or inclusive than its historically earlier denotation. For example, the word holiday used to mean “holy day” in religious English. It means “a day for rest” today regardless of its religious nature, and hence its meaning is widened.

Semantic narrowing is a process in which the meaning of a word becomes less general or inclusive than its historically earlier meaning. For example, the Old English word “hund” (“hound”) was once used for any breed of dog; whereas in Modem English its meaning has been narrowed to a particular kind of dog.

Semantic shift is a process of semantic change in which a word loses its former meaning and acquires a new, sometimes related, meaning. For example, the word “silly” meant “happy” in Old English, and “naive” in Middle English, but “foolish” in Modem English.

3．Illustrate the ways of lexical change. (武漢大學2005研)

【答案】

Lexical change includes invention, blending, abbreviation, acronym, back-formation, analogical creation, borrowing, compound and derivation.

a. Coinage: it is the invention of totally new terms. The most typical sources are invented trade names of one company’s product that become general terms for any version of that product. Such as Kleenex, Teflon and Xerox.

b. Borrowing: it is the taking over of words from other languages. The English language has adopted a vast number of words from other languages, such as encore, which is borrowed from French.

c. Compounding: it is the process of a joining of two separate words to produce a single form. For example, “fingerprint” is composed of “finger” and “print”.

d. Blending: blending is typically accomplished by jointing part of one word to the other whole word or other part of the word. For example, the word smog is formed by combing parts of two words “smoke” and “fog”.

e. Clipping: it occurs when a word of more than one syllable is reduced to a shorter form. Common example is like ad (“advertisement”).

f. Backformation: it is a specialized type of word formation in which new words are coined from already existing words by “subtracting” an affix thought to be part of the old word. For example, the noun television first came into use and then the verb televise was created from it.

g. Analogical creation. It refers to the phenomenon that a new word or a new phrase is coined by analogy between a newly created one and an existing one. For example, “marathon” appeared at the First Olympic Games and by analogy modern English created such words as “telethon”, “talkthon”.

h. Acronyms: some new words, known as acronyms, are formed form the initial letters of a set of other words. These can remain essentially “alphabetisims” such as CD (“compact disk”) where the pronunciation consists of the set of letters. More typically, acronyms are pronounced as single words, as in NATO (“North Atlantic Treaty Organization”).

i. Derivation: it is the process of forming new words by adding prefixes, infixes or suffixes to the root. For example, the prefix un- is added to pleasant to form “unpleasant”; the suffix -able-is used to form “predictable”.

4．What are the major types of semantic Changes? (人大2006研)

【答案】

There are mainly three kinds of semantic changes, namely, broadening, narrowing, and meaning shift. Class shift and folk etymology also contribute to change in meaning.

(1) Broadening

Broadening is a process to extend or elevate the meaning from its originally specific sense to a relatively general one. For instance, the word holiday used to mean “holy day” in religious English. Today it means “a day for rest”regardless of its religious nature.

(2) Narrowing

Contrary to broadening, the original meaning of a word can be narrowed or restricted to a specific sense. A typical example is the word meat which originally meant “food”. In the course of time, the range of meaning was narrowed to mean specifically “the flesh of animals used as food”.

(3) Meaning shift

All semantic changes involve meaning shift. Yet, in its narrow sense, meaning shift refers to the change of meaning, which has nothing to do with generalization or restriction. What makes the meaning of a word different is its departure from its original domain as a result of its metaphorical usage. For instance, the word bead originally means “prayer”, but later it refers to “the prayer bead”, the visible manifestation of a prayer, finally “small, ball-shaped piece of glass, metal or wood”.

(4) Class shift

By shifting the word class one can change the meaning of a word from a concrete entity or notion to a process or attribution. This process of word formation is also known as zero-derivation, or conversion. The word engineer as a noun means “a person trained in a branch of engineering”, but it means “to act as an engineer” or “to plan, to maneuver” when used as a verb.

(5) Folk etymology

It refers to a change in form of a word or phrase resulting from an incorrect popular notion of the origin or meaning of the term or from the influence of more familiar terms mistakenly taken to be analogous. As a result of this modification, the word sparrowgrass in English derived from asparagus; the Spanish cucaracha changed into English cockroach.