WORD FORMATION IN ENGLISH AND GERMAN: SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES
Abstract
One essential way that languages develop and arrange their lexicon systems is through word creation. It represents a language's typological, cognitive, and usage-based characteristics in addition to its morphological structure. The word production processes of English and German, two closely related Germanic languages with different morphological techniques, are compared and contrasted in this article. With an emphasis on their productivity and structural limitations, the study examines the main methods of word construction, such as derivation, compounding, and prefixation. The paper emphasizes how English depends more on derivational patterns and lexical borrowing, whereas German demonstrates a high degree of morphological productivity, particularly in compound creation, by combining evidence from peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, and theoretical works. According to the investigation, English compounds are more constrained in length and frequency, whereas German compounds are typically semantically compositional and structurally transparent. Additionally, there are differences in the usage of prefixes and suffixes, which are more important in German grammar than in English.