Lexeme formation: the familiar

Lexeme formation: the familiar 39

3. Some speakers will fi nd the forms in (3b) odd, and will question their acceptability, but they are all attested

in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and discussed in Bauer, Lieber, and Plag ( 2013 ).

goes on. This morpheme (an a for the verb ‘love’ and an i for the verb ‘say’)

doesn’t mean anything, but still must be added before the inflectional

ending can be attached. The root plus this extra morpheme is the stem .

Thought of another way, the stem is usually the base that is left when the

inflectional endings are removed. We will look further at roots and stems

in Chapter 6 , when we discuss inflection more fully.

3.3 Affixation

3.3.1 Word formation rules Let’s look more carefully at words derived by affixation . Prefixes and suf-

fixes usually have special requirements for the sorts of bases they can

attach to. Some of these requirements concern the phonology (sounds) of

their bases, and others concern the semantics (meaning) of their bases –

we will return to these shortly – but the most basic requirements are often

the syntactic part of speech or category of their bases. For example, the

suffix -ness attaches freely to adjectives, as the examples in (3a) show and

sometimes to nouns (as in (3b) ), but not to verbs (3c) :

(3) a. – ness on adjectives: redness, happiness, wholeness, commonness,

niceness

b. – ness on nouns: appleness, babeness, couch-potatoness 3

c. – ness on verbs: *runness, *wiggleness, *yawnness

The prefix un- attaches to adjectives (where it means ‘not’) and to verbs

(where it means ‘reverse action’), but not to nouns:

(4) a. un – on adjectives: unhappy, uncommon, unkind, unserious

b. un- on verbs: untie, untwist, undress, unsnap

c. un- on nouns: *unchair, *unidea, *ungiraffe

We might begin to build some of the rules that native speakers of English use

for making words with -ness or un- by stating their categorial requirements:

(5) Rule for -ness (first version): Attach – ness to an adjective or to a noun.

Rule for un- (first version): Attach un- to an adjective or to a verb.

Of course, if we want to be as precise as possible about what native speak-

ers know about forming words with these affixes, we should also indicate

what category of word results from using these affixes, and what the

resulting word means. So a more complete version of our – ness and un-

rules might look like (6) :

(6) Rule for – ness (second version): – ness attaches to adjectives or nouns

‘X’ and produces nouns meaning ‘the quality of X’.

Rule for un- (second version): un- attaches to adjectives meaning ‘X’

and produces adjectives meaning ‘not X’; un – attaches to verbs

meaning ‘X’ and produces verbs meaning ‘reverse the action X’.

40 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY

If we’re really trying to model what native speakers of English know about

these affixes, we might try to be even more precise. For example, un- does

not attach to all adjectives or verbs, as you can discover by looking at the

next Challenge box.

Challenge

Look at the following words and try to work out more details of the

rule for un- in English. The (a) list contains some adjectives to which

negative un- can be attached and others which seem impossible or at

least somewhat odd. The (b) list contains some verbs to which

reversative un- can attach and others which seem impossible. See if

you can discern some patterns:

(a) unhappy, *unsad, unlovely, *unugly, unintelligent, *unstupid

(b) untie, unwind, unhinge, unknot, *undance, *unyawn, *unexplode,

*unpush

What the (a) examples in the Challenge box seem to show is that the negative

prefix un- in English prefers to attach to bases that do not themselves have

negative connotations. This is not true all of the time – adjectives like unself-

ish or unhostile are attested in English – but it’s at least a significant tendency.

As for the (b) examples, they suggest that the un- that attaches to verbs pre-

fers verbal bases that imply some sort of result, and moreover that the result

is not permanent. Verbs like dance, push, and yawn denote actions that have

no results, and although explode implies a result (i.e., something is blown up),

it’s a result that is permanent. In contrast, a verb like tie implies a result

(something is in a bow or knot) which is temporary (you can take it apart).

We have just constructed what morphologists call a word formation

rule , a rule which makes explicit all the categorial, semantic, and phono-

logical information that native speakers know about the kind of base that

an affix attaches to and about the kind of word it creates. We might now

state the full word formation rules for negative un- as in (7) :

(7) Rule for negative un- (final version): un- attaches to adjectives,

preferably those with neutral or positive connotations, and creates

negative adjectives. It has no phonological restrictions.

Now let’s look at two more affixes. In English we can form new verbs by

using the suffixes -ize or -ify . Both of these suffixes attach to either nouns

or adjectives, resulting in verbs:

(8) -ize on adjectives: civilize, idealize, finalize, romanticize,

tranquillize

-ize on nouns: unionize, crystallize, hospitalize, caramelize,

animalize

-ify on adjectives: purify, glorify, uglify, moistify, diversify

– ify on nouns: mummify, speechify, classify, brutify, scarify,

bourgeoisify

Lexeme formation: the familiar 41

We might state the word formation rules for -ize and -ify as in (9) :

(9) Rule for -ize (first version): -ize attaches to adjectives or nouns that

mean ‘X’ and produces verbs that mean ‘make/put into X’.

Rule for -ify (first version): -ify attaches to adjectives or nouns that

mean ‘X’ and produces verbs that mean ‘make/put into X’.

But again, we can be a bit more precise about these rules. Although -ize

and -ify have almost identical requirements for the category of base they

attach to and produce words with roughly the same meaning, they have

somewhat different requirements on the phonological form of the stem

they attach to. As the examples in (8) show, -ize prefers words with two or

more syllables where the final syllable doesn’t bear primary stress (e.g.,

trá nquil, hó spital ). The suffix -ify , on the other hand, prefers monosyllabic

bases ( pure, brute, scar ), although it also attaches to bases that end in a – y

( mummy, ugly ) or bases whose final syllables are stressed ( divé rse, bourgé ois ).

Since we want to be as precise as possible about our word formation rules

for these suffixes, we will state their phonological restrictions along with

their categorial needs:

(10) Rule for -ize (final version): -ize attaches to adjectives or nouns of

two or more syllables where the final syllable does not bear

primary stress. For a base ‘X’ it produces verbs that mean ‘make/put

into X’.

I leave it to you to come up with the final version of the word formation

rule for – ify.

3.3.2 Word structure When you divide up a complex word into its morphemes, as in (11) , it’s

easy to get the impression that words are put together like the beads that

make up a necklace – one after the other in a line:

(11) unhappiness = un + happy + ness

But morphologists believe that words are more like onions than like neck-

laces: onions are made up of layers from innermost to outermost. Consider

a word like unhappiness . We can break this down into its component mor-

phemes un + happy + ness , but given what we learned above about the

properties of the prefix un- and the suffix – ness we know something more

about the way in which this word is constructed beyond just its constitu-

ent parts. We know that un- must first go on the base happy . Happy is an

adjective, and un- attaches to adjectives but does not change their catego-

ry. The suffix -ness attaches only to adjectives and makes them into nouns.

So if un- attaches first to happy and -ness attaches next, the requirements

of both affixes are met. But if we were to do it the other way around, -ness

would have first created a noun, and then un- would be unable to attach.

We could represent the order of attachment as if words really were

onions, with the base in the innermost layer, and each affix in its own

succeeding layer: see Figure 3.2 .

42 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY

But linguists, not generally being particularly artistic, prefer to show

these relationships as ‘trees’ that look like this :

(12)

N

A

A

un happy ness

Similarly, we might represent the structure of a word like repurify as in (13) :

(13)

V

V

A

re pure ify

In order to draw this structure, we must first know that the prefix re-

attaches to verbs (e.g., reheat, rewash , or redo ) but not to adjectives ( *repure,

*rehappy ) or to nouns ( *rechair, *retruth ). Once we know this, we can say that

the adjective pure must first be made into a verb by suffixing -ify , and only

then can re- attach to it.

FIGURE 3.2 Words are like onions

Challenge

In English, the suffix -ize attaches to nouns or adjectives to form

verbs. The suffix -ation attaches to verbs to form nouns. And the suffix

-al attaches to nouns to form adjectives. Interestingly, these suffixes

Lexeme formation: the familiar 43

3.3.3 What do affixes mean? When we made the distinction between affixes and bound bases above, we

did so on the basis of a rather vague notion of semantic robustness; bound

bases in some sense had more meat to them than affixes did. Let us now

attempt to make that idea a bit more precise by looking at typical mean-

ings of affixes.

In some cases, affixes seem to have not much meaning at all. Consider

the suffixes in (14) :

(14) a. -(a)tion examination, taxation, realization, construction

– ment agreement, placement, advancement, postponement

-al refusal, arousal, disposal

b. -ity purity, density, diversity, complexity

-ness happiness, thickness, rudeness, sadness

Beyond turning verbs into nouns with meanings like ‘process of X-ing’ or

‘result of X-ing’, where X is the meaning of the verb, it’s not clear that the

suffixes -(a)tion, -ment , and -al add much of any meaning at all. Similarly

with -ity and -ness , these don’t carry much semantic weight of their own,

aside from what comes with turning adjectives into nouns that mean

something like ‘the abstract quality of X’, where X is the base adjective.

Affixes like these are sometimes called transpositional affixes , meaning

that their primary function is to change the category of their base with-

out adding any extra meaning.

Contrast these, however, with affixes like those in (15) :

(15) a. -ee employee, recruitee, deportee, inductee

b. -less shoeless, treeless, rainless, supperless

c. re- reheat, reread, rewash

These affixes seem to have more semantic meat on their bones, so to

speak: -ee on a verb indicates a person who undergoes an action; -less

means something like ‘without’; and re- means something like ‘again’.

Languages frequently have affixes (or other morphological processes, as

we’ll see in Chapter 5 ) that fall into common semantic categories. Among

those categories are:

• personal or participant affixes: These are affixes that create ‘people nouns’ either from verbs or from nouns. Among the personal affixes

in English are the suffix -er which forms agent nouns (the ‘doer’ of

can be attached in a recursive fashion: convene → convention →

conventional → conventionalize → conventionalization .

First draw a word tree for conventionalization . Then see if you can

find other bases on which you can attach these suffixes recursively.

What is the most complex word you can create from a single base

that still makes sense to you? Are there any limits to the complexity

of words derived in this way?

44 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY

the action) like writer or runner and the suffix -ee which forms patient

nouns (the person the action is done to). Also among this class of

affixes are ones that create other ‘people nouns’ other than the agent

or the patient in an event, for example, inhabitants of a place (like

Manhattanite or Bostonian ).

• locative affixes: These are affixes that designate a place. For example, in English we can use the suffix – ery or – age to denote a place where

something is done or gathered (like eatery or orphanage ).

• abstract affixes: These are affixes that create abstract nouns that denote qualities (like happiness or purity ) or statuses ( puppydom, advisor-

ship, daddyhood ) or even aspects of behavior ( buffoonery ).

• negative and privative affixes: Negative affixes add the meaning ‘not’ to their base; examples in English are the prefixes un- , in- , and non-

( unhappy, inattentive, non-functional ). Privative affixes mean something

like ‘without X’; in English, the suffix -less ( shoeless, hopeless ) is a priva-

tive suffix, and the prefix de- has a privative flavor as well (e.g., words

like debug or debone mean something like ‘cause to be without bugs/

bones’).

• prepositional and relational affixes: Prepositional and relational affixes often convey notions of space and/or time. Examples in

English might be prefixes like over- and out- or pre – and post – ( overfill,

overcoat, outrun, outhouse, preschool, preheat, postwar, postdate ).

• quantitative affixes: These are affixes that have something to do with amount. In English we have affixes like -ful ( handful, helpful )

and multi – ( multifaceted ). Another example might be the prefix re-

that means ‘repeated’ action ( reread ), which we can consider quan-

titative if we conceive of a repeated action as being done more

than once. Other quantitative affixes that we have in English

denote collectives or aggregates of individuals (e.g., acreage or

knickknackery ).

• evaluative affixes: Evaluative affixes consist of diminutives , affixes that signal a smaller version of the base (e.g., in English -let as in

booklet or droplet ) and augmentatives , affixes that signal a bigger ver-

sion of the base. The closest we come to augmentative affixes in

English are prefixes like mega- ( megastore , megabite ). The Native

American language Tuscarora (Iroquoian family) has an augmenta-

tive suffix – ʔ o ʔ y that can be added to nouns to mean ‘a big X’; for

example, takó:θ- ʔ o ʔ y means ‘a big cat’ (Williams 1976 : 233). Diminutives and augmentatives frequently bear other nuances of

meaning. For example, diminutives often convey affection, or

endearment, as we find in some words with – y or – ie in English (e.g.,

sweetie, kitty ). Augmentatives sometimes have pejorative overtones

(the Niger-Congo language Fula has a pejorative diminutive, for

example).

Note that some semantically contentful affixes change syntactic category

as well; for example, the suffixes -er and -ee change verbs to nouns, and the

prefix de- changes nouns to verbs. But semantically contentful affixes

Lexeme formation: the familiar 45

need not change syntactic category. The suffixes – hood and -dom , for

example, do not ( childhood, kingdom ), and by and large prefixes in English

do not change syntactic category.

So far we have been looking at suffixes and prefixes whose meanings

seem to be relatively clear. Things are not always so simple, though. Let’s

look more closely at the suffix -er in English, which we said above formed

agent nouns. Consider the following words:

(16) a. writer

skater

b. printer

freighter

c. loaner

fryer (i.e., a kind of chicken)

d. diner

All of these words seem to be formed with the same suffix. Look at each

group of words and try to characterize what their meanings are. Does -er

seem to have a consistent meaning?

It’s rather hard to see what all of these have in common. The words in

(16a) are indeed all agent nouns, but the (b) words are instruments; in

other words, things that do an action. In American English the (c) words

are things as well, but things that undergo the action rather than

doing the action (like the patient -ee words discussed above): a loaner is

something which is loaned (often a car, in the US), and a fryer is some-

thing (a chicken) which is fried. And the word diner in (d) denotes a loca-

tion (a diner in the US is a specific sort of restaurant). Some morphologists

would argue that there are four separate suffixes in English, all with the

form -er . But others think that there’s enough similarity among the

meanings of -er words in all these cases to merit calling -er a single affix,

but one with a cluster of related meanings. All of the forms derived with

-er denote concrete nouns, either persons or things, related to their base

verbs by participating in the action denoted by the verb, although some-

times in different ways. This cluster of related meanings is called affixal

polysemy .

Affixal polysemy is not unusual in the languages of the world. For

example, it is not unusual for agents and instruments to be designated by

the same suffix. This occurs in Dutch , as the examples in (17a) show (Booij

and Lieber 2004 ), but also in Yoruba (Niger-Congo family), as the examples

in (17b) show (Pulleyblank 1987 : 978):

(17) a. Dutch

spel-er ‘player’ ( spelen ‘play’)

Maai-er ‘mower’ ( maaien ‘mow’)

b. Yoruba

a-pànìà ‘murderer’ ( pa ‘kill’, ènìà ‘people’)

a-bẹ ‘razor, penknife’ ( bẹ ‘cut’)

46 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY

The Dutch suffix -er is in fact quite similar to the -er suffix in English in

the range of meanings it can express. The Yoruba prefix a- also forms both

agents and instruments.

3.3.4 To divide or not to divide? A foray into extenders , formatives , crans , and other messy bits In Chapter 1 we defined a morpheme as the smallest unit of language that

has its own meaning. We have now looked at affixes and bases, both free

and bound, and considered their meanings and how they combine into

complex structures. For the most part, the examples we have looked at are

simple and their analysis has been relatively clear. But often the closer we

look at the morphology of a language, the more complex it becomes.

There are many ways we can illustrate this with the morphology of

English , but we will choose just a few points in this section that compli-

cate our initial picture. I should point out in advance that my examples

here will come from English, but we should expect to find similar twists

and turns in any language whose morphology we examine in detail.

Consider the words in (18) :

(18) a. report, import, transport, deport, comport, export

b. cranberry, huckleberry, raspberry

c. Platonic, tobacconist, spasmodic, egotist

d. sniffle, snort, snot, snout

e. eggitarian, pizzatarian, pastatarian, fruitarian, flexitarian

Let’s start with the ones in (18a) . We have assumed so far that words can

be broken down into morphemes, which are pieces that have meaning.

The words in (18a) certainly look like they might be broken down because

they have recurrent parts, but if they are, what do the pieces mean? In

fact, English has dozens of words that are similar to what we might call

the – port family. See how many cells of Table 3.1 you can fill in.

Table 3.1

in- ex- con- re- trans- de-

-port

-mit

-ceive

-duce

-cede

-fer

-scribe

-gress

-sist

Lexeme formation: the familiar 47

One reason for our dilemma in analyzing these forms is that they are

not native to English. They were borrowed from Latin (or from French ,

which in turn is descended from Latin), where they did have clear mean-

ings: -port comes from the verb portare ‘to carry’, – mit from the verb mittere

‘to send’, -scribe from the verb scribere ‘to write’, and so on. But English

speakers (unless they’ve studied Latin!) don’t know this. Morphologists are

left with an unsatisfying sense that the words above somehow ought to be

treated as complex, but are nevertheless reluctant to give up the strict

definition of morpheme. One way of dealing with these pieces is to

acknowledge that they seem to be independent and recombinable in some

way, but that they are not morphemes in the normal sense. Bauer, Lieber,

and Plag ( 2013 : 16) call elements like these formatives , which they define

as “elements contributing to the construction of words whose semantic

unity or function is obscure or dubious.”

The items in (18b) illustrate a different type of formative that are some-

times called cran morphs , from the first bit of the word cranberry . The

second part of the word cranberry is clearly a free morpheme. But when we

break it off, what’s left is a piece that doesn’t seem to occur in other words

(except in recent years, words like cranapple that are part of product

names), and doesn’t seem to mean anything independently. There are

quite a few of these cran morphs in the names of other types of berries:

rasp- in raspberry , huckle- in huckleberry . In cases such as these we are even

more tempted than we were with – port, -ceive , and the like to divide words

into morphemes, even though we know that one part of the word isn’t

meaningful in the way morphemes usually are.

The examples in (18c) also display a puzzling characteristic. If we try to

break these words down into their component morphemes, what we find

is that each one consists of two obvious morphemes plus an extra sound

or two:

(19) Plato + n + ic (compare icon+ic )

tobacco + n + ist (compare accordian+ist )

spasm + od + ic (compare Celt+ic )

ego + t+ ist (compare clarinet+ist )

The question is what the extra bit is. Is it part of the base of the word or part

of the affix or part of neither? It seems pretty clear that it doesn’t mean

anything. And why do we get an / n / in Platonic , but / od / in spasmodic , and noth-

ing between the base and the suffix in heroic , or an /n/ in tobacconist , but a /t/

in egotist ? Morphologists don’t have a clear answer to these questions – part

Challenge

Do you think that units like -port, -mit, -ceive , and the like should be

considered morphemes? If so, what problems do they present for our

definition of morpheme ? If not, what should we do about the

intuition that native speakers of English have that such words are

complex?

48 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY

of the fun of doing morphology is that we can argue about the possibilities,

after all! – but we can at least give these puzzling bits a name. Following

Bauer, Lieber, and Plag ( 2013 ), we will call them extenders .

Next, let’s look at the examples in (18d) . These exhibit what is called

sound symbolism . All of the words begin with the consonant cluster /sn/

and seem to have something to do with the nose, but the sequence of

sounds /sn/ doesn’t mean anything by itself. Here morphologists are rela-

tively agreed that sound symbolic words cannot be broken into parts. For

one thing, the sequence /sn/ doesn’t refer to ‘nose’ everywhere it occurs

(consider words like snail, snap , or snit ), and for another, if we were to seg-

ment /sn/ in the words in (18) , what would be left over would neither have

meaning by itself nor recur elsewhere in English.

Our final group of odd bits is illustrated in (18e) . In these examples, the

first part of each word is clearly a free morpheme, but the second part is

not. Rather, it is what Bauer, Lieber, and Plag ( 2013 ) call a splinter ,

something which is split off from an original word, but which is not

really (yet!) a true suffix. In the examples in (18e) , the splinter is tarian ,

which is a bit broken off from the word vegetarian , and then used to create

new words meaning ‘one who eats X’. English has lots of splinters, among

them tastic , as in funktastic or fishtastic , which is used to form mostly ironic

words meaning ‘excellent or great in reference to X’, originally from fan-

tastic , or licious , as in bagelicious or bootielicious , which is used to form words

meaning ‘appealing in reference to X’, originally from the word delicious .

The difference between a splinter and a true suffix is that speakers under-

stand splinters in relation to the original word from which the ending

splits off. If these bits survive and continue to give rise to new forms,

though, they might someday be real suffixes!

3.4 Compounding

So far we have concentrated on complex words formed by derivation, spe-

cifically by affixation. Derivation is not the only way of forming new

words, of course. Many languages also form words by a process called

compounding. Compounds are words that are composed of two (or more)

bases, roots, or stems. In English we generally use free bases to compose

compounds, as the examples in (20) show:

(20) English compounds

compounds of two nouns: windmill, dog bed, book store

compounds of two adjectives: icy cold, blue-green, red hot

compounds of an adjective and a noun: greenhouse, blackboard,

hard hat

compounds of a noun and an adjective: sky blue, cherry red, rock hard

3.4.1 When do we have a compound? How do we know that a sequence of words is a compound? Surprisingly,

it’s not that easy to come up with a single criterion that works in all cases.