• A back-formation occurs when speakers analyzer the morphological structure
of an existing word and create a new word.
• Language purists often rail against back-formations, but English speakers have
been creating them for as long as the language has been around!
• Ex: peddle, hawk, swindle, edit from peddler, hawker, swindler, editor
• More recent: mentor-mentee, tutor-tutee (by analogy with employer-employee).
• A famous example of a back-formation is flammable. How do you think this
back-formation came about?
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