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language, and which can serve as the basis for secondary
formation.
• Primary formation is quite often spontaneous, whereas
secondary formation is more frequently subject to rules and can be
planned.
The ability to create words and terms is a natural
manifestation of a speaker's linguistic competence. All speakers of
a language are capable of proposing new designations that refer to
new perception of the real world or of proposing alternative names
for a previously named concept. For this purpose speakers use
processes governed by linguistic rules that are part of the lexical
component of a language's grammar. Terminologists must know
the word formation processes of the language. The designations
proposed for new concepts made by terminologists and experts
must be supported by a good knowledge of all the devices a
language offers. This applies both to the first designation proposed
for an original concept and to proposals to change designations
because the existing form is not deemed suitable. In addition, new
designations must also be mindful of the formal tendencies of the
subject field they belong to. For example, in chemistry all enzymes
have the suffix -ases.
Among the formal methods available for creating new terms
we distinguish the following ones:
1. Derivation.
2. Compounding.
3. Clustering
4. Truncation processes, including initialisms, acronymy,
and clipping.

5.2 Derivation.
Derivation consists of the addition of affixes to lexical bases
to form new words. In English three possibilities are known:
prefixing, suffixing, and mixed cases in which both a prefix and a
suffix are added to the same root (or stem):

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