Lexeme formation: the familiar 39

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?