Clipping as a Productive Word-Formation Process in Contemporary English

This paper explores the phenomenon of clipping, a dynamic word-formation process in modern English, using a corpus-based approach. A corpus of 150 clipped patterns was collected systematically in the context of three types of communication: informal communication, electronic communication, and professional communication. This phenomenon is categorized using four structural patterns: back-clipping, fore-clipping, mid-clipping, and complex clipping. The data indicate that back-clipping is the most dominant form, which accounts for 68%, showing significant variation in productivity depending on the type of communication. Phonological analysis shows that 87% of the back-clipped words preserve the major stress pattern of the source word, which is in line with the principles of prosodic optimization. There is a unique pattern of clipping in electronic communication, where a few instances, such as app, pic, blog, have gained cross-register acceptability and institutional acceptance. This paper proposes that the productivity of clipping is determined by the interaction of the phonological structure, usage, semantic transparency, and sociolinguistic factors.