Making Words In English 2o3w3b

Magnus Ljung

Making Words in English

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Art. No 31008 eISBN 91-44-02481-9 © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003 Printed in Sweden Studentlitteratur, Lund Web-address: www.studentlitteratur.se Printing/year 1

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Contents

Preface 7 1

Words 9 The linguistic sign 9 The structure of complex words 16 Defining ‘word’ 19 Reference, denotation, sense 25 The origins of English words 26 Exercises 29

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The English Word Classes 31 Criteria for word class hip 33 The closed word classes 43 Exercises 46

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Outline of English Word-formation 49 Defining word-formation 49 The output of word-formation rules 51 Exercises 59

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Prefixation 61 Characteristics of prefixes 61 Common English prefixes 67 Exercises 77

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Suffixation 79 General characteristics of suffixes 79 Noun-forming suffixes 85 Adjective-forming suffixes 96 Verb-forming suffixes 103

© Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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Adverb-forming suffixes 104 Exercises 106 6

Conversion 109 General characteristics of conversion 109 Productive English conversion patterns 111 Partial conversion 117 Exercises 119

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Compounding 121 General characteristics of compounding 121 Noun compounds: general characteristics 129 Adjective compounds 134 Compound verbs 138 Compound adverbs 139 Exercises 140

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Combining forms and neo-classical compounds 143 General characteristics 143 Neo-classical compounding compared with affixation 145 Productivity of the neo-classical compounds 148 Common combining forms 149 Exercises 151

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Irregular Word-formation 153 Characteristics and types of irregular word-formation 153 Borrowing 154 Meaning extension 156 Initialisms: abbreviations and acronyms 157 Clipping 159 Back-formation 161 Blends and blending 163 Reduplicative compounds 164 Rhyming slang 166

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References 169 Notes 173 Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9

173 175 177 178 179 181 182 183 184

Discussion of exercises 187 Index and lists 201 Index 201 List of prefixes 204 List of suffixes 206


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Preface

Preface

This book provides an introduction to modern English word-formation, i.e. the principles that lie behind the explosive production of new English words. It is primarily intended as a textbook for firstyear university students in English with little or no experience of linguistics. However, it should also be rewarding reading for the general public interested in the vocabulary of today’s English. The book has a fairly long prehistory and has profited a great deal from the advice and insights of friends, colleagues and students. I would particularly like to thank Gunnel Melchers, Dave Minugh and Philip Shaw, who read parts of the manuscript and offered helpful criticism. I am grateful for comments and advice from Dieter Kastovsky, Vincent Petti, Peter Sundkvist, Ann-Marie Vinde, the of the English seminars at the universities of Stockholm and Göteborg, and my students at the universities of Stockholm and Zurich in 2001 and 2002. Finally I would like to express my gratitude to Kerstin, who went to the trouble of reading all the versions of the manuscript and was a source of constant encouragement. Stockholm, May 2003 Magnus Ljung


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Preface

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1 Words

The linguistic sign Since the early 1970s, we have been living in the information age, an era characterised by ‘the abundant publication, consumption and manipulation of information, especially by computers and computer networks’ according to a recently published dictionary of American English.1 The dictionary is of course right: nobody would dispute that there has been a marked increase in the speed and ease with which humans exchange information in the course of the past thirty- odd years. At the same time it is important to realise that the need for information and information exchange is as old as humanity itself, and that both humans and animals have always been crucially dependent on information of some kind. In view of this, it is not surprising that humans and animals alike have developed ‘information systems’ that allow them to send and receive information. Information can only be conveyed when a certain meaning is associated with a certain physical representation like for instance sound. When a dog growls, for example, the most likely interpretation is that it is angry: the growl and the meaning ‘anger’ are linked in a way that is immediately understood by both humans and other animals (especially if the dog bares its teeth at the same time). Together, the meaning and the sound used to express it make up a ‘chunk of information’ often called a sign. In the case of the growling dog, the physical representation used to express the meaning ‘anger’ is a type of sound, i.e. the dog’s growl. The growl serves as a vehicle for the meaning. Meanings can also be expressed in many other ways; in fact, there is no limit to what can serve as a vehicle for meaning. Consequently, it is useful to have a common term for all meaning representations: the term normally used is form. Sound—like e.g. growling—is one type of form, other types are gestures and facial expressions. © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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In signs like the dog’s growl, there is a ‘natural’ relation between meaning and form, because regardless of their linguistic or cultural background, most people would regard the growl as a natural way to express anger, particularly for animals. Such universally understood signs are called motivated signs and can be described in the following way: The motivated sign Meaning: ‘anger’ natural connection Form: growl

There are also non-motivated or arbitrary signs. These are the signs we find in more complicated information systems like human languages, typically—but not exclusively—represented by the words in those languages. Such linguistic signs are not universally understood and the meaning of each sign has to be learnt separately, because there is no natural relation between form and meaning.2 There is for example no particular reason why the letter combinations cow and dog and the corresponding sound sequences [kau] and [dɒg] are tied to the meanings ‘a fully bred female animal of a domesticated breed of ox, used a a source of milk or beef’ and ‘a domesticated carnivorous mammal that typically has a long snout, an acute sense of smell … and a barking … voice’ as one dictionary puts it rather than the other way round.3 Unlike the dog’s growling, the words cow and dog mean nothing to those who don’t already know the code. Everybody understands the meaning of a growl, but in order to understand the meanings of cow and dog, you have to know English. Non-motivated signs like cow etc. must accordingly be described in the following way: The non-motivated sign Meaning: ‘cow’ no natural connection Form: [kau]/c+o+w/

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A further consequence of the absence of a natural connection between meaning and form in these signs is that it would be meaningless to ask questions like ‘Why is a cow called cow?, Why is a dog called dog?’ There simply are no answers to such questions. It might seem that you can in fact provide answers to questions like theses by providing the etymology for the words involved. The etymology of a word explains its historical development in the language. In the case of cow, for example, it is easy to show that present-day cow can be traced back to Old English c¯u. We could also point out that cu has so-called cognates in other languages, like for instance German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian. The term cognate is used about words in different but related languages which are assumed to have the same origin in some earlier common language, in this case the group of Germanic languages. It is possible to go back even further, and trace the Germanic word for cow back to a postulated earlier common language called Indo-European. But no matter how far back we trace the history of a word, there is still no explanation why—at a certain point in time— a certain meaning happened to be expressed by means of a certain combination of sounds rather than another one4. The absence of a natural connection between meaning and form in words like cow, dog has led certain linguists to describe the vocabulary of a language as an unsystematic list, and to contrast it with the grammar or syntax of the language, which consists of a set of rules. A typical syntactic rule for English, for instance, is the one regulating word order: if we change Tony will do it again into Will Tony do it again, there is a predictable change in meaning from ‘statement’ to ‘question’. In such a rule, the correspondence between form and meaning is close to 100%. Vocabulary typically lacks such predictability: in principle, every sound:meaning combination is unique and must be learnt as an individual item by the language learner. With a certain amount of exaggeration we could say that grammar is the intelligent part of language, while the vocabulary is the stupid part. And certainly, in the experience of most language-learners, it is easier to learn a rule than to memorize long lists of words.


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Apparent exceptions to the arbitrariness of the sign There are two categories of words that seem to contradict the claim that vocabulary items in English—and other human languages—are non-motivated, or arbitrary. The words in the first of these categories are sound-imitating: they imitate sounds connected with the phenomena they are used to refer to. (Another name for the sound-imitating words is the Greek term onomatopoeic [ɒnəmtə pi k] words, from onomatopoeia [ɒnəmtə pi ə], literally ‘sound-imitating’). Typical sound-imitating words are imitations of the calls of certain animals, for example English miaow for the sound typically made by cats, cock-a-doodle-do for cocks, bow-wow or arf arf for dogs, moo for cows etc. There are also a number of other sound-imitating words that are not connected with animal calls, but imitate other sounds, like e.g. clash, roar, bang, plop, plod, buzz, hiss, murmur, zoom. (Note also the written sound-imitating words used in cartoons and comic strips like chomp, kadunk, ke-rack, ke-rash, sploosh, splash, vr-o-o-m and the names of cereals like crunchies and puffs.) The other category challenging the view that words are nonmotivated consists of words that are instances of so-called sound symbolism. Sound symbolism rests on the assumption that certain sounds or sound combinations are associated with certain—usually rather vague—meanings. A well-known English instance of sound symbolism is the wordinitial consonant combination sl- found in many words suggesting something unpleasant, the unpleasantness often involving wetness of some kind: slime, slush, sloppy, slaver, slither, slug, slobber. It has also been suggested that there is a tendency for the English vowel sound [] to occur in words associated with dullness or indistinctness, like e.g. dull, thud, thunder, dusk and many others. A third claim is that the vowels [] and [i:] are characteristically found in many words associated with smallness, like e.g., bit, thin, little, wee, teeny, lean, meagre. What, then, is our final verdict on these exceptions from the traditional view of the nature of the linguistic sign? Starting with the sound-imitating words, there is no denying that words like miaow, bow wow, arf arf, etc. are intended as imitations of the typical calls of certain animals. However, there are several reasons why the importance of these words should not be exaggerated. 12


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To begin with, the sound-imitating words are quite few in number. Secondly, and more importantly, different languages represent what must be the same animal call in ways that are sometimes quite different. It is true that many languages represent the sound made by cats in more or less the same way, i.e. as something like miaow. But as the following list shows, the barking of dogs is represented quite differently in many languages.5 Afrikaans: woef Albanian: ham ham/hum hum Arabic (Algeria): haw haw Bengali: ghaue-ghaue Catalan: bup bup Chinese (Mandarin): wang wang Croatian: vau-vau Danish: vov Dutch: woef English: bow wow, arf, woof, ruff ruff Esperanto: boj Estonian: auh Finnish: hau hau/vuh vuh French: ouah ouah German: wau wau, wuff wuff Greek: gav Hebrew: haw haw (/hav hav) Hindi: bho-bho Hungarian: vau-vau Icelandic: voff Indonesian: gonggong Italian: bau bau Japanese: wanwan, kyankyan Korean: mung-mung (/wang-wang) Norwegian: voff/vov-vov Polish: hau hau Portuguese (Portugal): au au au (nasal diphtong) Portuguese (Brazil): au-au Russian: gav-gav Slovene: hov-hov Spanish (Spain, Argentina): guau guau © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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Swedish: vov vov Thai: hoang hoang (with falling tone) Turkish: hav hav Ukrainian: haf-haf Vietnamese: wau wau We could of course try to explain away the differences in the list by claiming that dogs sound different in different countries. However, a more plausible explanation would seem to be that animal calls are perceived and represented differently by speakers of different languages. This is an indication that even in words imitating animal calls, the relation between meaning and form is less than ‘natural’. Let us turn now to the category of sound symbolism. In the presentation above, three well-known claims concerning sound symbolism in English were mentioned, i.e.the claim that words with an initial sound sequence sl- denote something unpleasant, the claim that words that contain the vowel [] are associated with dullness and indistinctness, and the claim that words containing the vowels [] and [i:] have meanings to do with small size. Claims like these cannot be rejected out of hand: there is no doubt that there is a tendency for certain sounds and sequences of sounds to turn up in words with certain meanings so often that it cannot be due to mere chance. This is particularly true of the initial sequence sl- as in slime, slush, sloppy etc. However, in all these cases there are far too many counter-examples for the sound-meaning associations to be anything else than a tendency. To take just a few examples: there is no suggestion of dullness or indistinctness in the words but, putt, mutt, luck, duck, sun and hundreds of other words with the same [] sound. Nor is there anything particularly unpleasant about the words slow, slight, slim, slope, sling, slender. As for the claim that the i-sounds suggest meanings connected with small size, there are vast numbers of words with that vowel sound whose meanings have nothing to do with smallness, for instance finger, sing, thing, tip, nifty, dish, lift, sick, inside, ill. Clearly the meanings of these words have no connection with smallness, and at least one i-word has the opposite meaning, viz. big.

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A real exception to the arbitrariness of the sign: word-formation In the preceding section we found that although there seems to be some truth in the claims made for onomatopoeia and sound-symbolism in English, these phenomena are so limited and inconsistent that they cannot be said to pose a serious threat to the generally accepted view of English words as non-motivated signs. However, if we return for a moment to the words like e.g. cow, dog, etc. used earlier as evidence of the non-motivated nature of English words, we will find that they are all simple words: they cannot be further analysed into smaller meaning-carrying chunks. Linguistic forms that cannot be further analysed into smaller meaningcarrying elements are called morphemes.6 Simple words are one type of morphemes. Simple words play a prominent part in the English vocabulary: a 1974 study7 showed that of the 10, 000 most frequent words in written English, roughly half were simple. Of the remaining 50 per cent, the majority were complex words created by the addition of prefixes or suffixes to a simple word, as in e.g. rewrite and speaker. The English vocabulary also contains many compound words like e.g. blackbird and washing-machine, in which two shorter words are combined to make up a longer one. Compounds and prefixed/suffixed words are created by different processes of English word-formation (cf. Chapter 3). What has been said above about English words may be summarized in the following manner: simple words consist of a single morpheme, complex words contain a prefix or a suffix (or several prefixes and/or suffixes), compound words are made up of two or more other words. In what follows I will focus on the complex words. Complex words are partly motivated, i.e. their form does offer a certain amount of guidance to their meaning. This is because such words have been formed in accordance with the principles of English word-formation. More precisely, they have been created by the addition of affixes, either a prefix like e.g. un- or re- in unfair and rewrite, or a suffix like -er or -y in speaker and snowy.The affixes are so few that the speakers of the language know them all. That knowledge allows them to make educated guesses about the meaning of a complex word, even if they don’t know the meaning © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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of the stem, i.e. the part of a complex word to which the affix is added. They know, for instance that words ending in e.g. -ous or -able like dangerous or readable are in all likelihood adjectives with certain characteristic meanings. They also know that words ending in e.g. -er like runner and dish-washer tend to be nouns describing a person or machine carrying out a certain activity, and that words that are verbs and begin with un- or re- like untie and recount denote, respectively, the reversal and the repetition of a process or an action. They have similar detailed knowledge of most other affixes.

The structure of complex words A study of the English affixes will show that the great majority cannot be further analysed into smaller, meaningful units. This means that most affixes are morphemes, linguistic forms that cannot be further subdivided into meaningful units. In a way, this makes affixes similar to simple words, words that consist of a single morpheme. But there is a very important difference: forms that are both words and morphemes can occur on their own in sentences: they are free morphemes or base morphemes. Affixes, on the other hand, are bound morphemes: they can only be used as parts of complex words, never on their own. Dog, eat, slow are all free morphemes (base morphemes), but re-, pre-, in-, -able, -er, -ish are all bound. It is important not to confuse morphemes with syllables: although there are many base morphemes that contain a single syllable, others may consist of several syllables, for instance stupid, mahogany, karaoke, rendez-vous. Base morphemes and affix morphemes are sharply different in number: there are tens of thousands of base morphemes in English, but less than a hundred affixes. They also differ in the kind of meaning they have: base morphemes denote phenomena in the real or some imagined world, like objects, ideas, substances, properties, qualities, actions and processes. Affix morphemes have a limited range of rather special meanings. The suffixes, which are the largest group, have meanings/functions like ‘manner’ (-ly), ‘agent’ (-er), ‘nominalization’ (-ing), ‘verbalization’ (-ize). The prefixes have 16


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meanings like ‘repetition’ (re-), ‘opposition’ (anti-), ‘reversal’ (un-), ‘sequence’ (pre- and post-). The majority of complex words consist of a single base morpheme and an affix. At the top of the list we find words consisting of a base morpheme and a single suffix, words like speaker, talking, slowly. The next most common type is made up of prefix+base morpheme combinations like rewrite, unfair and anti-American. Complex words may also contain more than one bound morpheme, as for example. unbelievable with the base believe, the prefix morpheme un-, and the suffix morpheme -able, and the word untruthfulness, which is made up of the base truth and the affixes un, -ful, and -ness. There is in theory no upper limit to the number of morphemes a word may contain, witness the word antidisestablishmentarianism, allegedly the longest English word in of morphemes (it contains at least six morphemes). But in actual practice it is unusual to find English words made up of more than four or possibly five morphemes. Complex words have an inner structure or morphology determined by the order in which the morphemes have been put together. In a word like unreadable, for example, the base read and the suffix -able must have been combined to form the adjective readable before the prefix un- could be added, so the analysis of the word would procede as in the diagram below: LEVEL 1 LEVEL 2 LEVEL 3

unreadable un-

readable read

-able

Such an analysis rests on the common linguistic assumption that multimorphemic words (words containing more than one morpheme) may be analysed on a binary basis. In such an analysis the word is first divided into two and only two parts or constituents, which in their turn may be split up into further pairs of constituents. As soon as there are more than two morphemes in the word being analysed, the analysis takes place on different levels: on the first level, the entire word is divided into two constituents. These constituents are then further divided into two meaningful parts on © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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the next lower level.8 The analysis goes on until the entire word has been divided into morphemes, in this case un-, read and -able. The two parts isolated on each level are called the immediate constituents of the unit on the level immediately above. Thus the immediate constituents of the word unreadable, as analysed above, are the prefix un- and the adjective readable, and the immediate constituents of readable are read and -able. But why is such an analysis of the word considered to be ‘the right one’? Why not analyse unreadable as consisting of unread and able, and then analyse unread into un- and read as in the figure below? unreadable unreadun-

able

read

The answer has to do with what we know about the meanings and combining habits of the bits isolated by the analysis. We know that there is a prefix un- combining with verbs, found in for instance unwind, unzip, untie. We are also aware that there is another un- prefix combining with adjectives, in for instance unkind, untrue, unwise. The two un- prefixes have different meanings: the one found with verbs means ‘reverse the activity described by the verb’, while the prefix combining with adjectives simply has negative meaning: it means ‘not’. It follows that to unwind something is to reverse the result of a previous winding process, to untie a knot is to reverse the previous process of tying that resulted in a knot. This is not a meaning that makes sense together with the verb read: to unread a book would have to mean something like ‘to make a book one has previously read unread’. Meanings like that are impossible in the world as we know it (but cf. the comments on e.g. unmurder on p. 68) and for that reason we must reject the analysis in the second figure. In the analysis in the first figure, on the other hand, we postulate an adjective readable to which we add negative un-, an operation resulting in the word unreadable meaning ‘not readable’, a meaning that makes perfect sense. 18


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Defining ‘word’ So far I have been using the term ‘word’ as if it were a well-defined entity with a single meaning. But the word word is a slippery customer and without wishing to complicate matters more than necessary, I must now point to some of the different meanings of the term. My discussion will focus on the written word and will avoid as far as possible the problems raised by words in the stream of speech.

Words as types and tokens9 Written words may be viewed in basically two ways: as physical entities—for example on a printed page—and as more abstract entities. The physical entities that we see when looking at a printed page or a hand-written letter are known as word-forms or orthographic words. Such words may be defined as unbroken combinations of letters preceded and followed by empty spaces and linked to a meaning. The very fact that words are bounded by spaces indicates that they are free units, i.e. they can stand alone in a sentence. This ability to occur on their own is one of the main characteristics of words in English. Let us now make use of the above definition of the word to determine the number of words in the following short text: (1) The cook was a good cook as cooks go, and as cooks go, she went10. The total number of letter combinations surrounded by spaces (and/or punctuation marks) in the text above is 15. If by ‘word’ we mean ‘word form’ or ‘orthographic word’, there are 15 words in the text. Some of them occur twice (cook, cooks, go, as) but since we are counting actually occurring word-forms, that’s not relevant. We count all occurrences, even if they are repetitions. However, there is also another way of counting word-forms: we may feel that each word-form should only be counted once, i.e. that repetitions of the same letter-combination should not count. In this approach to word-definition, what we wish to find out is © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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how many different word-forms there are in the text above. Counting like that, we find that four of the word-forms are used twice, i.e. cook, cooks, go, and as. Since we are now interested in different wordforms, we count each of these four word-forms only once. That gives us a total of 11 words (= different word-forms) in (1). The words found in the first count—the one in which all repetitions were counted—are called tokens, while the ones found in the second count—the different words—are known as types. The distinction between tokens and types is made use of in frequency word-lists from different texts, like the list below. Such lists are made up of two columns, one containing the word types, the other indicating the number of tokens each type has in the text. The number of tokens for each type is known as the frequency (of occurrence) of that type. Tabell 1.1 Word frequency list for the text in (1). Types

Frequency (Tokens)

as

2

cook

2

cooks

2

go

2

a

1

and

1

good

1

she

1

the

1

was

1

went

1

In the list above, the types as, cook, cooks, go have two tokens each, while the types a, and, good, she, the, was, went, only have one token each. The total number of tokens (15) is higher than the number of types (11). This is the situation in all normal texts, where the number of tokens is usually much higher than the number of types.11 There is a simple reason for that, of course, i.e. the fact that some words—in particular ‘grammatical’ words like the, a, an and

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others in the ‘closed word-classes’ (see pp. 43–46)—have meanings or functions that make it necessary to repeat them often. In fact, in large texts, the most common word is the definite article the, which makes up ca 6% of the total number of tokens. The type: token distinction is sometimes used as an instrument to measure how difficult a certain text is to read from the vocabulary point of view. The underlying idea is that the greater the number of individual types the reader has to know, the more difficult is the text. The degree of difficulty is measured by computing the socalled type:token ratio for the text, a ratio which is obtained by dividing the number of types in the text by the number of tokens. The higher the type:token ratio, the more difficult the text. We can illustrate the way the type:token ratio works by assuming that there are three texts A, B and C, each containing 100,000 tokens each. The number of types in A is 11, 253, in B 6998, and in C 9541. The type:token ratios for the three texts will then be as follows: A = 0.11, B = 0.07, C = 0.09. According to this method of measuring text difficulty, A is clearly the most difficult text, C the next most difficult one, and B the easiest. When used as an indicator of text difficulty, the type:token ratio as presented here also has certain shortcomings, one of which is that it is sensitive to text length: the longer the text, the lower its type:token ratio. In order to overcome such weaknesses of the method, several refinements have been introduced; there are also alternative methods for measuring overall text difficulty. One wellknown alternative method measures the lexical density of the text. This is obtained by dividing the number of content words like nouns, verbs and adjectives by the number of function words like prepositions, articles and pronouns. (The content word and function word are defined and discussed in Chapter 2).

The word as an abstract entity—the lexeme The identification of word-forms and the counts of tokens and types described in the previous section has so far been quite uncomplicated. It is based on the assumption that a word-form can be defined as an unbroken string of letters, bounded on both sides by spaces and linked to a certain meaning. In such an approach it is © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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the physical shape of the items that determines what is a word: if two strings of letters are even minimally different, as in the case of cook and cooks, they are by definition ‘different words’. Such an approach has its uses, but there are cases where it seems reasonable to argue that certain formal differences among words are less important than others, in particular differences caused by the choice of inflectional suffix, like the plural -s, the third person singular -s, the regular past tense -ed etc., which are added to words with almost total regularity. This regularity means that inflectional suffixes add nothing new to the basic—or ‘lexical’—meaning of words. As a result, words that differ only with regard to inflection have the same basic meaning, and can be counted as instances of ‘one and the same word’ in a more abstract sense of ‘word’. The term used for this abstract notion of word is lexeme12. It is lexemes that we have in mind when we say e.g. What’s the meaning of that word?, I don’t know that word or This is a new word. Most lexemes differ from other lexemes both in form and meaning: that’s how pull differs from full, grouse from mouse, and wizard from horse. However, words may be different lexemes but have the same spelling and/or pronunciation. In such cases it is the difference in meaning that keeps them apart. Thus for instance there are two lexemes bank, both of which are nouns but with quite different meanings:bank (1) means ‘institution that handles money’, and bank (2) means ‘riverside’. Lexemes with the same form are said to be homonyms13. The two lexemes bank above belong to the same word class. However, in many cases, homonymous lexemes belong to different word classes. Thus the noun lexeme bank ‘institution handling money’ has a parallel verb lexeme bank, meaning among other things ‘deposit money in a bank’ and ‘regularly use as a bank’. Although the meanings of the noun bank and the verb bank may be said to be rather similar, the fact that they belong to different word classes automatically makes them different lexemes. English has a huge number of such formally identical noun:verb lexemes, a fact to do with the facility with which the language creates verbs from nouns and nouns from verbs by the process of conversion (cf. Chapters 3 and 6).

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It is sometimes said that lexemes are the same as ‘dictionary words’ i.e. the entries (or ‘headwords’) found in dictionaries. This is correct to the extent that the ‘words’ found in dictionaries are all lexemes—no dictionary worth its salt would have three different entries for e.g. laugh, laughed and laughs. However, the reverse does not hold: it is certainly not true that in order to be a lexeme, a word has to be found in a dictionary. To begin with, not even the most compendious dictionary lists all the words in a language. Secondly the principles of English word-formation—the subject matter of the present book—are constantly used to create new lexemes. Some of these will eventually make their way to the dictionary, but for a number of reasons, many of them will not14. Naturally, a word count in which ‘word’ is defined as ‘lexeme’ will yield quite different results than our previous counts of types and tokens. If for example we count the number of lexemes in text (1), we will find that it contains only nine words ( = lexemes): the, go, cook, be, a, good, as, and, she. Here cook stands for both the singular cook and the plural cooks, go stands for both go and went and be is represented by was. As pointed out a few paragrahs ago, words from different word-classes cannot represent the same lexeme:it is all right to include both the singular cook and the plural cooks under one noun lexeme cook, but although they are formally identical, we can not include the inflected verb cooks and the noun plural cooks under one and the same lexeme.

Lexemes and multi-word units As we saw earlier, a lexeme is a kind of abstract word that incorporates all the inflected forms of ‘the same word’. There is a clear commonsensical basis for this definition of the lexeme: after all we feel strongly that inflected forms are just some sort of variants of ‘the same word’. There are also other good reasons to believe that the notion of lexeme is a reasonable one, for instance the fact that speakers seem to store their vocabulary knowledge in of lexemes or something like them.15 But the notion of lexeme not only permits us to regard inflected forms as variants of the same word, it also helps solve another linguistic problem, i.e. what to do with so-called multi-word units. © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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These are combinations of separately written words considered to form semantic units, i.e. to represent somehow ‘a single idea’. The notion of lexeme permits us to give these combinations lexeme status, i.e. to count them as single words. As an exemple, consider the following sentence: (2) We looked at the ashtray in front of our wine glasses. This text contains seven lexemes, four of which are multi-word units, i.e. look at, ashtray, in front of and wine glass. The reason why we regard these combinations as lexemes is above all their semantic specialisation. The ashtray, for instance, is a particular object whose only function is to provide a place where smokers may deposit the ash from cigarettes, cigars and pipes. The same logic applies to wine glass. Even if it is perfectly possible to drink wine from a beer glass, that doesn’t make it a wine glass. A wine glass has a characteristic shape that distinguishes it from a beer glass, etc. Both combinations are non-motivated signs that must be learnt in the same way as single words. Counting look at and in front of as units is made easy by the fact that they may be replaced by single words with the same meanings, i.e. regard and before. English is a language rich in multi-word units. It has thousands of such combinations with lexeme status, for instance clichés, complex prepositions, compounds, idioms, phrasal verbs, prepositional verbs. The following list illustrates some of the variety found in this area: Clichés: call it a day, call a spade a spade, the devil take the hindmost, famous last words, go through the roof, go missing, the show ain’t over till the fat lady sings, beggars can’t be choosers, you are the cream in my coffee! Complex prepositions: because of, except for, owing to, in front of, in back of, in place of, in spite of, as a result of Compounds: blackbird, teapot16, power plant, steamboat, English teacher (‘person who teaches English’); awe-inspiring, mind-boggling, self-styled, sun-tanned, -friendly; crash-land, downgrade

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1 Words

Idioms: in the doghouse ‘in disgrace’, up shit creek without a paddle ‘in serious trouble’ (US slang), come a cropper ‘fail’, kick the bucket ‘die’, as sober as a judge, as pissed as a newt (British slang for ‘dead drunk’). Phrasal verbs: touch down, fall out (‘quarrel’), give in, come in, go on, set up, bring up, call off, take in (‘deceive’), turn off, switch on Prepositional verbs: look at, care for, think of, call on, succumb to, die of, suffer from, talk about, shudder at, ask for, believe in The categories above are often difficult to tell apart, in particular ‘clichés’ and ‘idioms’ 17. Both belong to a more comprehensive class that we may call set expressions or set phrases. Many of them involve the phenomenon metaphor18 It is an open question how to treat certain other multiword-word units, for example many of the interjections like e.g. Over my dead body!, Fat chance! and the many obscene and vulgar interjections found in swearing like Fuck you!, Up yours! and Shit a brick! If they are lexemes, what are their meanings?

Reference, denotation, sense

19

Before the discussion of lexemes is brought to a close, something needs to be said about lexemes and meaning. There are at least three aspects of the word ‘meaning’ that need to be considered. To begin with, it is obvious that lexemes are used in utterances to call attention to individual phenomena in a real or imagined world. Suppose Bruce says to Irvin ‘Sorry I’m late, but I was attacked by a cobra.’ Regardless of whether he is right in classifying the attacking animal as a cobra or not, he has used the word to ‘stand for’ or ‘represent’ an animal, i.e. a phenomenon in the ‘real world’ also known as an extralinguistic phenomenon. In linguistic he has used cobra to refer to that animal. The function that cobra has in his utterance is known as reference and the animal itself is known as the referent of the word. Reference is linked to individual utterances. But in order for the reference function to work, the word cobra must have denotation (also called extension), i.e. there has to be a class consisting of all the animals that the word cobra may be used about20 This raises the © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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1 Words

interesting question of how such a class is defined, a question to which we return in Chapter 2. There is also a third aspect of meaning known as sense. The sense of a word is basically its definition in of other words in the same language. The fact that lexemes have sense means that we can relate them to each other by means of so-called sense relations, for example the relation of synonymy: synonyms are words that have the same sense21.

The origins of English words In the discussion of the linguistic sign at the beginning of the present chapter, there was a brief reference to the etymology of English words. English was categorised as a Germanic language, among which we also find e.g. Dutch, German, and the Scandinavian languages. The Germanic languages were furthermore shown to be one of the many subcategories of the Indo-European language family (cf. end note 4 to this chapter). However, the characterisation of English as a Germanic language needs qualifying in several respects. In particular, it is important in a study of word-formation to point to the special nature of the English vocabulary, which differs from the vocabularies of the other Germanic languages in having a much larger proportion of words in common with Latin, Greek and the Romance languages. The history of English begins around 449, when Britain was invaded by three Germanic tribes from the mainland, i.e. the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. The of these tribes— who eventually became known as the Anglo-Saxons—became settlers and eventually took possession of most of what is now England. The original Celtic inhabitants were either killed, assimilated or forced to take refuge in the extreme west of Britain. The invading tribes spoke Germanic dialects that appear to have been quite similar and which eventually merged into a fairly uniform Germanic language called Englisc, a word derived from the name of the Angles. The invasion and settling down of these tribes mark the beginning of a stage in the development of English known by linguists as the period of Old English. Although, like all languages, Old English changed in the course of time and also 26


1 Words

developed a number of different dialects, it remained basically the same language for 700 years—from 450 to 1150. The Germanic nature of English was further strengthened by a number of Scandinavian (Danish) invasions, which extended over more than two centuries. Eventually large settlements of Scandinavians arose and the settlers became part of the population of England. The languages of the invaders and of the native inhabitants were obviously related and sometimes mutually intelligible. From around 1150, both the grammar and the vocabulary of Old English started to undergo important changes that led to the development of what is known as Middle English, a second stage in the development of English generally considered to have lasted from 1150 to about 1500. At the beginning of the16th century, new changes ushered in the still ongoing period of Modern English. Naturally these ‘periods’ are merely useful fictions: language change does not procede in such regular fashion and not all changes take place at the same time. Neverthless, the Old English, Middle English and Modern English are useful labels for stages in the development of English during which the language had certain identifiable characteristics. Thus from the point of view of the vocabulary, Old English was a clearly Germanic language with cognates in other Germanic languages. Many of the Old English words have since been replaced by borrowings, but many—e.g. child, cow, live, man, wife—remained in the language and now belong to the core vocabulary of Modern English. Old English also had a powerful word-formation system, and many of the Old English word-formation elements are still used, for instance the suffixes -hood, -ness and -er and the prefix un-. There was also a small but noticeable influx of loans from Latin into Old English. Some of the loans—like e.g. wall, street, wine—had been borrowed into the language of the invading tribes while they were still living on the continent. Others were borrowed from Latin into Old English, especially after the introduction of Christianity in 597. Many of the new words introduced after this date had to do with the Church and with Church-related activities like education and learning, for instance priest, martyr, mass and master, meter, school. These Latin loans constitute the first of several foreign enrichments of the English vocabulary.


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1 Words

The second and much more important wave of borrowing into English came about as the result of the conquest and occupation of Britain by the Normans, who spoke a variety of French. The actual conquest took place in 1066. For roughly 200 years after that, French was the language of the court, the ruling classes, the law courts, the military, etc. However, from 1250 onwards, English started to come into its own again as the ruling classes gradually adopted English as their language. Used as they were to speaking French, they liberally sprinkled their English with French words, a habit that led to a massive influx of French words into English. The extent of borrowing from French was such that it had vast and permanent consequences for English. It has been estimated that by the end of the Middle English period, the total number of French loans into English was approximately 10, 00022, most of which are still in use, including words as different as office, paralytic, debility, innumerable, incumbent, nervous, testify, reject. From a wordformation perspective, the loans from French were also important by bringing into the language a vast number of new suffixes like -ice, -ic, -ity, -able, -ent, -ify, -ous and -ify and prefixes like de-, in- and re-. A third wave of borrowing took place during the Renaissance, i.e. in the early Modern English period (1500-1650). This was a time of linguistic experiment marked by a desire to embellish English by the introduction of foreign—mostly Greek and Latin—words. Much of the borrowing was not triggered by the need for new , but by a desire to incorporate as many Latin words as possible into English. Among the permanent borrowings from this period we find e.g. education, expensive, emancipate, harass, benefit. The fourth and most recent wave of borrowing involves so-called ‘combining forms’ from both Greek and Latin, which are used to build neo-classical compounds in learned, scientific and technical language. Although this type of word-formation has been available in English for centuries, the rapid rise in importance of the sciences in the 19th century triggered a tremendous increase in the productivity of this word-formation pattern. It is now one of the most productive English word-formation patterns in the language, although, ittedly, much of its output is understood by only a limited number of specialists in each field.

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As the discussion in this section has shown, English has been exposed to four major infusions of non-Germanic vocabulary in the course of its history, mainly from French and Latin, but to some extent also from Greek23. The extent of this influence has been so strong that from the point of view of its vocabulary, English now occupies a position mid-way between the Germanic languages and the Romance languages that developed out of Latin, like French, Italian and Spanish.

Exercises 1 Explain the difference between motivated and non-motivated (arbitrary) signs. In which category would you put e.g. flag signals, human sign language and and the way(s) many animals mark their territory? 2 What is the difference between grammar/syntax and vocabulary discussed on p. 11? 3 On pp. 12–14, there is a discussion of onomatepoiea and sound synbolism. Explain what the difference is between these two categories. Can you suggest additional of each category? 4 Why do you think is it claimed on p. 15 that word-formation is an exception to the principle that words are non-motivated, and why is word-formation said to be ‘partly motivated’? 5 Pp. 15–16: What is a morpheme? What is the difference between morpheme and a stem? What different kinds of morphemes are there? 6 Try to show the internal structure of the complex words below, using the kind of diagrams found on pp. 17–18: representative, recalling, untruthfulness. 7 Explain the type:token distinction and the meaning of the typetoken ratio. 8 Calculate the type-token ratios for the two texts below


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(A) When Chomsky’s ideas spread across into the field of psychology in the early 1960s, they made an immediate impact. Psychologists at once started to test the relevance of a transformational grammar to the way we process sentences. Predictably, their first instinct was to test whether there was a direct relationship between the two. Jean Aitchison The Articulate Mammal p. 183.

(B) Advice for delegates to next week’s United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannisburg: if someone approaches your car, pushes a gun in your face, and shouts “Hijack!” don’t reply “My name’s not Jack.” The good news is there will be 8000 extra police for protection at the biggest conference ever held in South Africa’s biggest and baddest city. TIME Magazine, Aug. 26, 2002, p. 29.

9 What are the lexemes in texts (A) and (B) above? Are there cases in which several answers are possible? 10 What non-Germanic languages have had the greatest impact on the vocabulary of English?

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2 The English Word Classes


If you look up a word—i.e. a lexeme—in a dictionary of English, you will find that in addition to having meaning, it is also assigned to a certain word class. Word classes are made up of words sharing certain important characteristics, about which more will be said presently. An understanding of the word classes—in particular the ‘open’ classes—and the criteria for inclusion in them is essential for an understanding of word-formation processes. There is some variation among dictionaries and grammars in what word classes they recognise, but by and large the following is a representative selection1: nouns (minister, tree, idea, confusion), verbs (walk, write, realise), adjectives (big, thoughtful, economic), adverbs (slowly, moneywise, yesterday), auxiliaries (can, have, will), conjunctions (and, because, while), prepositions (on, during, like), determiners (the, a/an, some), pronouns (it, she, this). A tenth class that is also often included is the interjections (Oh!, Really?!, Yuk!, Yum-yum!). In the rest of this book, the following abbreviations will be used to indicate word class hip: (n) for noun, (v) for verb, (adj) for adjective, (adv) for adverb, (aux) for auxiliary, (pron) for pronoun, (conj) for conjunction, (prep) for preposition, (det) for determiner, and (int) for interjection. The word classes above fall into two broad subcategories known as content words and function words (the latter sometimes also called grammatical words or form words.) The word classes containing content words are the nouns, the verbs, the adjectives, and—partly— the adverbs. The word classes made up of function words are the auxiliaries, the pronouns, the conjunctions, the prepositions and the determiners. The interjections are sometimes included among the function words, but are really a category of their own. © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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Content words describe the content or meaning of sentences and are used to refer to what earlier we called extralinguistic phenomena or ‘things’ in the ‘real world’; of course they can just as well be ‘things’ in an imagined world, as in the case of science fiction and similar genres. The word classes they belong to are known as ‘open classes’, since new words can be added to them by means of borrowing or word-formation. In fact, new words are constantly being added to these classes, which explains why it is impossible to give an exact figure for the number of words in English or any other language2. In the present chapter, the focus will be on the open classes, i.e. on the content words. The function words differ from the content words in not being used to refer to phenomena in the ‘real world’ (or some imagined world). Instead most of them serve chiefly to link content words to each other in more or less intricate patterns. In fact we often find the term ‘bricks and mortar’ applied to content words and function words. The underlying metaphor here is the notion that the function words keep the content words in place in the same way as mortar keeps the bricks in place. The word classes made up of function words are ‘closed classes’ in the sense that it is rare or extremely rare for new to be added to them. The closed word classes differ among themselves in this respect, however. Some of them, like the prepositions and the conjunctions, are not particularly hostile to the addition of new . The class of personal pronouns, on the other hand, has been closed to new for roughly 1000 years. The last time new personal pronouns were added to English was during the Old English period, when the pronouns they, their and them were borrowed from Scandinavian and replaced the older forms. It was hinted above that the interjections are really a category of their own. They are neither content words nor function words, but words used as conventional representations for the speaker’s or writer’s feelings or reactions: Wow! is the conventional expression for surprise and iration, Hell! and many other swearwords express irritation etc. Although the interjections are traditionally included among the word classes, their status as words is uncertain and it has been argued that they are really a (minor) type of sentences3.

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The occurrence of function words is often so predictable that (with the exception of most prepositions and conjunctions) they may be left out without loss of meaning. This happens especially in texts using simplified language, like recipes, manuals, and newspaper headlines. The space available for such texts is often limited and, on of that, the authors of such texts tend to keep only those words that are necessary for the message to be understood. The words they keep are the content words, and the words they omit are function words. This can be seen in the following examples of simplified English, the first one from a recipe, the second taken from a computer manual, and the third from a newspaper headline. RECIPE If old, place spinach in 2 cups rapidly boiling water. Reduce heat and simmer, covered, until tender, for about fifteen minutes.4 COMPUTER MANUAL When ready to quit, click on Disconnect icon HEADLINE Prince to wed page three girl

Criteria for word class hip As noted earlier, the words in a language fall into word classes whose share certain important characteristics. In order to be a member of a certain word class, a word has to have all or most of these characteristics: the characteristics function as criteria for hip in the class. At least for the open classes, the most obvious shared characteristic is probably meaning, and there have been many attempts to define the word classes in of a semantic criterion, i.e. in of the meanings of the of the different classes. Thus a time-honoured—but still popular—definition of ‘noun’ says that nouns are words used to identify ‘people, places and things’. There is no doubt that many nouns will be captured by such a semantic, or notional, definition, for example teacher (people), city (place), book (thing). Presumably we can also add names like e.g. Susan and Sydney to the noun class, since the first refers to a person, the second to a place. © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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However, many words identified as nouns by grammars and dictionaries will be left out of the noun class, if meaning is our only criterion for hip. Examples of such words are easily found, for instance idea, salt, anger, departure, none of which denotes people, places or things. We may wish to stretch a point and argue that idea can be squeezed into the ‘thing’ category, although it is a somewhat peculiar ‘thing’, being an abstract noun. But it is difficult to regard salt, anger and departure as being about ‘things’, let alone about people and places. Clearly, if we wish to set up a list of conditions that words have to meet in order to be included in a certain word class, the semantic criterion on its own is inadequate. We have to add other conditions—or ‘criteria’—for inclusion in the different word-classes. The following three additional criteria are often used, particularly for the open classes: (1) the functional criterion: words in a certain word class must be able to have certain syntactic functions like e.g. the subject function, the predicate function, the predicate complement function, the modifier function, etc. (2) the combining criterion: words in a certain word class must be able to combine with certain function words like e.g. determiners or auxiliaries (for which see Chapter 2). (3) the grammatical category criterion: words in a certain word class must be able to—and in most cases have to—express certain grammatical categories, like e.g. tense (for verbs) and number (for nouns), comparison for adjectives and adverbs, etc. If a word satisfies all the criteria for a certain word class, it is by definition a member of that class. However, even a superficial study of the English word classes reveals that words differ in this respect. For every word class that we consider, there are words that meet all the criteria demanded for inclusion in that class, there are others that meet some but not all of them, and there are words that meet just one of these criteria. Word class hip is thus not an all-or-nothing affair but a matter of degree: some words are much more typical representa34



tives of a certain word class than others. The words that meet all the criteria for inclusion in a given word class are central of the class, while those meeting only one or a few criteria are marginal of that class.5

Criteria for the noun category In the previous section we noted that, although the semantic definition of ‘noun’ went part of the way towards defining that class, it still left out many words that were also felt to qualify as nouns and that the semantic definition must be supplemented by definitions using syntactic function, combining habits, and grammatical categories as criteria. Adding these supplementary criteria to the semantic one, we arrive at a total of four criteria for the noun class6: 1 Function: a noun can function as subject. 2 Combining habits: A noun can be preceded by the and other determiners and/or by an adjective. 3 Grammatical categories: A noun can express number i.e. be singular or plural. 4 Meaning: A noun denotes a person, place or thing. There is also morphological evidence of noun status: English possesses a set of suffixes typically only found in nouns, for instance -age, -ation, -tion, -sion, -ion, -er, -ity, -ment, -ness, -ist. Many nouns also typically take the apostrophe genitive (‘s). The presence of one of the above suffixes or the apostrophe genitive may be taken as ive evidence that a word is a noun. However, neither suffixation nor genitive may be used as a general criterion for noun status since there are words identified as nouns by all other criteria that don’t take them.7 Let us now return to the nine words used in the discussion of the semantic criterion on pp. 33–34 and see how they fare with regard to the four criteria for noun status listed above. The results are presented in the table below:


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teacher city book idea departure anger salt Susan Sydney

Subject Function Combines with determiners

Number

Meaning

+ + + + + + + + +

+ + + + + – – – –

+ + + (+) + – – + +

+ + + + + + + – –

As the table shows, all nine words meet the subject function criterion: they can all replace X in constructions like ‘X is interesting’, ‘X impressed us’, etc. However, the first five words have to be accompanied by determiners like the, their: we cannot say e.g. *Teacher (city) impressed us but have to say The teacher (city etc) or Their teacher (city etc.) (Here and in the rest of the book the asterisk sign * will be used to identify constructions that are impossible). Anger and salt may occur both with and without determiners, but cannot express number. Only Susan and Sydney refuse determiners altogether and also lack the ability to express number. The distribution of the different nouns in the table above shows that the class of nouns is made up of several sub-categories. The first column is not distinctive in this respect, since all nouns may have subject function. However, if we move to the second column we find a clear difference between teacher, city, book, idea, departure, anger on the one hand, and Susan, Sydney on the other. All the of the first group take determiners but neither of the of the second group do. That distinction is the most fundamental one for the noun class. It divides it into common nouns—which all take determiners—and proper nouns which do not. Proper nouns, whose special status is marked in writing by the initial capital, are used as names and normally take neither articles nor the plural. On the other hand, proper nouns are certainly used to identify people and places, respectively, so they would seem to satisfy the semantic criterion in the same way as the common nouns. However, on closer inspection, the way proper nouns like Susan and Sydney identify people and places turns out to be different from 36



the way common nouns like teacher, city, etc. identify the people, places and things they are used to refer to. Proper nouns like Susan or Sydney are used as names: they have no sense or denotation as those notions were explained in Chapter 1, but simply refer directly to a specific individual person, place or thing. A personal name like Susan, for instance, identifies a single individual known to both speaker and hearer. Accordingly, there is no need to further define the referent of Susan by means of the definite article the, nor is it possible to use the indefinite article or the plural. Within the category of common nouns, a further distinction needs to be drawn between on the one hand teacher, city, book, idea, departure, which may occur in both the singular and the plural, and on the other salt and anger, to which the number category doesn’t apply. The of the first group are called count(able) nouns or countables for short. As the name indicates, these nouns denote phenomena that can be counted—they denote entities. But salt and anger are uncountable: salt denotes a type of substance or concrete mass—nouns like this are often called mass nouns—while anger denotes a state of mind. We can sum up our discussion above of the different kinds of noun as in the following figure: NOUNS PROPER NOUNS no definite article, no indefinite article, no plural; unique denotation

COMMON NOUNS take the definite article, denote classes of phenomena

COUNTABLE NOUNS take indefinite article, have plurals, denote class of entities Susan, Sydney

teacher, city, book, idea, departure


UNCOUNTABLE NOUNS no indefinite article, no plurals, denote non-entities salt, anger

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Recategorisation The classification above needs qualifying in two respects. To begin with, it is possible to find constructions in which anger and salt have plurals or are preceded by the indefinite article, for instance: On those occasions I felt quite different angers. The mine produces two different salts. I experienced an anger I had never felt before. Such a salt has the following properties.

In these examples, we have ‘forced’ words normally belonging to the uncountables to behave as if they belonged to the countables. The point of doing that is that it allows us to express a special meaning: when uncountables are forced to behave like countables, they take on the meaning ‘type of -‘, ‘kind of - ‘. Therefore salts and angers in the first two examples mean ‘types/kinds of salt/anger’, and a salt and an anger in the last two examples mean ‘a type/kind of anger/salt’. This recategorisation of uncountables as countables is a useful device, saving us the trouble of writing out type of salt, kind of anger. The discussion above had to do with the re-categorisation of uncountable nouns as countable nouns. Noun re-categorisation can also go in the opposite direction, i.e. countable nouns—in particular concrete ones—may be turned into uncountables, a process involving a semantic change from ‘entity’ to ‘mass’. Thus if for instance a lot of candles (a count noun) are left burning on a table, the result may be that there is candle (uncountable noun) all over the table. A more special meaning change may accompany the recategorisation of count nouns as uncountables when the count nouns denote living beings, above all animals. In such cases the new uncountable tends to acquire the meaning ‘food’. This kind of recategorisation and the semantic change it triggers is illustrated in the examples below: Would you like a duck? Would you like a little/some duck? I like the duck (in the cartoon) I like duck

The first and third lines above contain the word duck referring to an animal; in the second and fourth lines the interpretation is ‘food’. 38



In principle this semantic change is open to all animal-denoting count nouns. However, different cultures have different views on what animals are edible and what are not. Exchanges like Would you like some more dog (horse)? No thanks, but I’ll have a little more fox (snake).

are linguistically well-formed, but from the point of view of eating habits, they would be strange in, say, Britain or the US, where dogs, horses, foxes and snakes are not, as a rule, considered to be food. In a culture with different eating habits, however, the two examples above would be both linguistically and culturally perfectly normal. In a few cases this correspondence between ‘animal’ count nouns and ‘food’ uncountable nouns does not hold. Meat from calves, pigs and sheep, for instance, is always referred to as veal, pork and mutton: nobody says Could I have some calf (pig, sheep) please. The second qualification of the proposed noun classification concerns proper nouns. As we have seen, they differ from the common nouns in taking neither articles nor plural. However, there are circumstances in which proper nouns are reclassified as common nouns. When that happens, these words take both the articles and the plural as in e.g. This is not the Sydney I once knew. The Smiths of this world have a tough time. I know several Susans. Which Susan do you mean?

In the examples above, the normally proper nouns Sydney, Smith and Susan have been reclassified as common count nouns and have acquired new meanings in the process. Thus Sydney here means ‘city called Sydney’, Smiths means ‘people called Smith’, and Susan means ‘a person called Susan’. In a similar manner, family names in the plural preceded by the definite article are used as common nouns to denote an entire family: Has anyone told the Wilsons? We’re going to the Browns tonight.

On the last few pages we have discussed recategorisations within the class of nouns that are quite regular and accompanied by a cer© Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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tain change in meaning. Thus uncountables may be turned into countables with meanings like ‘type of’, countables can be turned into uncountables, often with the meaning ‘food’, and proper nouns like Susan and Sydney may be transformed into common count nouns meaning ‘person called Susan’, ‘city called Sydney’. These changes sound remarkably like the type of word-formation known as conversion discussed in Chapter 6. However, in this book– as in most other word-formation studies—conversion is regarded as a process that is by definition word-class-changing. For this reason, recategorisations within the same word-class like the ones discussed above are regarded as belonging to syntax rather than to word-formation.

Criteria for verbs The verbs to be discussed here are the so-called lexical verbs (also labelled full verbs or main verbs). There is also the closed class of auxiliary verbs which do not play a part in word-formation but will be listed for recognition purposes in a later section. The lexical verbs form an open class. In order to be included in the class, a word must have the following characteristics: 1 Function: verbs are words able to function alone as predicates in a clause as in e.g. They left 2 Grammatical categories: regular verbs have finite forms which inflect for the present tense by adding the inflectional suffix -(e)s and for past tense by adding -ed. They also have three non-finite forms: the infintive (to chatter), the present participle (chattering), and the past participle (chattered). Some 200 irregular verbs have other tense forms. 3 Combining habits: lexical verbs fall into two main classes depending on whether they can take a direct object or not. Those that can (e.g. see, kill, contain) belong to the transitive class while those that cannot (e.g. chatter, die, participate) belong to the intransitive class. There is also a small number of lexical verbs that are always followed by predicate complements (predicatives), for example be, become, turn as in She was a genius, He became/turned angry. 40



4 Meaning: the majority of the lexical verbs denote acts, actions, activities, event and processes. A minority denote states and relations. From a word-formation perspective, the most interesting features of the verb are the participles in -ed and –ing, which have both adjectival and verbal functions. Thus amusing and frightened are participles—and consequently have verbal function—in e.g. Jean was amusing us with her imitations of the mad professor and James was frightened by his friends, but function as adjectives in e.g. her performance was very amusing, it was an amusing performance, I was beginning to feel extremely frightened, and There was a frightened silence. Certain forms in -ed and -ing are mainly or exclusively used as adjectives, for example interesting, appalling, concerned, and flabbergasted. When forms in -ed and -ing meet all criteria for adjective status, they are regarded adjectives converted from verbs (cf. Chapter 6). A useful test to find out whether a form in -ed or- ing is adjectival or participial is to insert an intensifier like very or extremely immediately before it. If the insertion produces an acceptable result, then the -ed and -ing forms in question are indeed adjectival. In addition to the characteristics above, some verbs are also formally distinctive by ending in certain suffixes like -ate, -en, -ify, -ise/ ize, e.g. originate, soften, gentrify, internalise/internalize. Note however that the distinctive verb suffixes are far fewer than the distinctive noun suffixes. Another formal characteristic of English verbs is that the language has a vast and growing number of multi-word verbs (cf. also Chapter 1 p. 25). The majority of these are either phrasal verbs or prepositional verbs, both of which involve verbs followed by particles. Phrasal verbs are lexemes in which a verb and a following adverb form a unit. Phonologically, the phrasal verbs have a distinctive stress pattern with the main—so-called primary—stress on the adverb: put ón, slow dówn, look úp. Phrasal verbs may be both transitive and intransitive and often the same item belongs to both categories, cf. e.g. The train slowed down (intransitive)—The bad weather slowed down the train (transitive). Prepositional verbs are lexemes in which a verb and a preposition form a unit. In typical prepositional verbs, the main stress is on the verb: lóok at, thínk of, appl´y for. © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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Criteria for adjectives There are two syntactic criteria for adjectives and one semantic or notional one. (1) Adjectives can function as so-called predicatives or predicate complements i.e. after verbs like be, become, seem, turn and certain others. The adjective angry is a predicate complement in e.g. The crowd was/became/seemed/turned angry8. (2) Adjectives can be used attributively i.e. they can function as socalled premodifiers before nouns, as in the angry crowd. (3) Adjectives usually denote states or qualities that are gradable. Most adjectives meet the first two criteria. Among the exceptions we find words like e.g. former, naval, utmost, sheer, which are used only attributively, and words with initial a- like afraid, aghast, aware, which are used only predicatively. The majority of the adjectives also meet the third criterion, i.e. they have gradable meaning and can accordingly be modified by intensifiers (cf. next section) like e.g. very, incredibly, extremely, and be compared by means of the suffixes -er and -est, or the adverbs more and most. Certain other adjectives are non-gradable and normally take neither intensifiers nor comparison, for example the colour adjectives and words like atomic, linear, lunar, naval, nuclear. The bulk of the adjectives may also be turned into adverbs in -ly, for instance quick-quickly, incredible-incredibly, surprising-surprisingly. In addition, quite a number of adjectives are morphologically marked: it can be fairly safely assumed that words ending in e.g. -able, -ed, -ful, -ic, -ish, -ive, -less, -y will also meet the other criteria for adjectivehood. (However, note the comments on suffixation and conversion in Chapter 6).

Criteria for adverbs Adverbs are unlike the other open9 word-classes in that it is impossible to set up a number of common characteristics shared by all of the class. Not surprisingly, the adverb category has sometimes been called the grammarian’s waste paper basket. However, a certain amount of order can be brought into the adverb class 42



if we focus on functions and meanings. Such an approach allows us to set up the following simplified classification of English adverbs. ENGLISH ADVERBS INTENSIFIERS (Modifying function) very (large) highly (intelligent) somewhat (old) a little (boring)

NON-INTENSIFIERS (No modifying function) MANNER

LOCATION

angrily slowly

here, there, often skywards seldom

TIME

SPEAKER ATTITUDE

Fortunately Regrettably

The intensifiers may be used to modify all gradable adjectives and adverbs. They usually heighten the degree of the characteristic denoted by the adjective/adverb: very large is larger than just large, doing something terribly badly is decidely worse than just doing it badly, etc. More rarely the intensifier has a degree-lowering effect, as in somewhat old and a little tediously (a little is counted as a complex adverb). Among the non-intensifiers, the most interesting category for our purposes is that of Manner. Manner adverbs are regularly formed by means of word-formation: as pointed out in Chapter 5, we can form a manner adverb from almost any adjective by adding the suffix -ly, a suffix that may also be used to form adverbs expressing the speaker’s attitude to what he/she is saying as in Fortunately (Regrettably), there was nobody else around. Other adverb suffixes are described in Chapter 5.

The closed word classes In comparison with the open word-classes, the closed classes have little to offer the student of word-formation. However, some of the arguments about word-formation in the book presuppose familiar© Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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ity with certain aspects of the closed classes. The following brief comments will hopefully facilitate the reader’s understanding of those ages.

Auxiliaries Formally, the auxiliaries as a group differ from lexical verbs in three important respects: (1) They don’t take the do-construction in negative or interrogative sentences, and as a consequence they are moved to the beginning of the sentence in direct questions (2) They contract with a following not (as in shouldn’t, can’t) (3) They cannot stand alone as predicate verbs in a sentence (except in cases like e.g. [Can she come?]—Yes, she can/No she can’t, where the lexical verb come has been left out). From a functional point of view it is worth noting that the term ‘auxiliary’ means ‘helping verb’, i.e. the auxiliaries are verbs which ‘help’ the lexical verbs form certain complex constructions. There are two broad categories of auxiliaries: the modal auxiliaries or modals, on the one hand, and the non-modals be, do and have, on the other. There are nine modals, or modal auxiliaries, i.e. can, could, may, might, will, would, shall, should and must. In addition there are three verbs that may be treated formally either as auxiliaries or as main verbs: dare, need and ought to. The modals have only finite forms, add no -s in third person singular form, and can only be combined with lexical verbs in the infinitive (without to). Among the non-modals, be and have express different kinds of aspect. Be is followed by a present participle to express progressive aspect as in You are/were/have been comparing apples and oranges, it seems. Have is used to express perfect aspect and is followed by the past participle form of a lexical verb as in e.g. She has/had promised to attend. The third non-modal auxiliary—do—combines with a following to-less infinitive in direct questions and in negative clauses containing the negative adverb not. Auxiliaries occasionally take part in the word-formation process known as conversion (cf. Chapter 6). A has-been is a person who is 44



no longer capable of doing what he/she used to be good at, a must is something regarded as necessary, and a wanna-be (want to be) is somebody who aspires to be somebody he/she is not.

Determiners10 As we saw in the previous discussion of the noun, one of the characteristics of nouns in English is the fact that they may be preceded by determiners. The determiners give information about definiteness and indefiniteness, quantity and proportion. The basic determiners are the definite and indefinite articles a/an and the, but certain other words and constructions may also function as determiners, chiefly possessive and demonstrative pronouns like my, your, this, those, and quantifiers like some and any. Nouns with an apostrophe genitive also function as determiners, as in Jessica’s coat, London’s underground.

Prepositions Prepositions are words that typically occur before a noun, like beside in beside Henry, beside the building, beside the new building. Certain prepositions are part of prepositional verbs, like e.g. on in decide on something, while others are not, for example on in stay on the ground. Prepositions are simple or complex. Common simple prepositions are about, after, against, before, beside, between, by, in, near, on, to, with. Certain simple prepositions have homonyms that are conjunctions, for instance after and before which are prepositions in after/before her departure but conjunctions in after/before she had left. Many simple prepositions also have homonyms that are adverbs, for example around and in: in We walked around the house, and They dropped it in the water, around and in are prepositions, but in We walked around, They just dropped in, they are adverbs. Complex prepositions are multi-word constructions that have fused to form units with prepositional function by means of a process known as grammaticalization11, for instance according to, in addition to, in case of, out of, with regard to, in front of, (in) back of. Occasionally new prepositions are also formed from single participles, for example considering and given, both of which have prepo© Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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sitional force in constructions like e.g. I have nothing to add considering your request and Given his interest in expensive cars, it comes as no surprise that he has bought a Mercedes SUV.

Conjunctions Conjunctions are of two kinds: co-ordinating and subordinating. Coordinators are used to link any two (occasionally more) units that have the same syntactic status. There are three main co-ordinators: and, or and but. The subordinating conjunctions introduce subordinate clauses with different syntactic functions. Many conjunctions consist of a single word, but many are made up of several words, for instance as if, so that, in order that. These complex conjunctions obviously have their origin in the same grammaticalization process that was responsible for the formation of complex prepositions. Grammaticalization is like meaning extension (cf. p. 156) in being a slow process that may take hundreds of years to be completed. As a result, speakers are usually unaware of the origin of complex units and of the fact that on-going change is forever present in the language of today. However, sometimes we can see the beginnings of the formation of a complex unit. A fairly recent change of this type in English concerns the prepositional phrases on the basis (of) and in of in sentences like He’s asked for special treatment on the basis he’s been with the firm over twenty years and They’re a general nuisance in of they harass people trying to enjoy the park12

Exercises 1 What is a word class? What kinds of criteria are used when words are assigned to different word classes? Why is the semantic—or ‘notional’- criterion a problem? 2 What is the difference between content words and function words? Why is it possible to leave out function words in simplified language? What would happen to a text if the content words were left out, but the function words were kept? 46



3 In this chapter it is claimed that there is a difference between the central and the peripheral of a word class. If that is correct, certain nouns should be ‘nounier’ than others. Can you think of any examples of this? 4 Explain the difference between proper nouns and common nouns, countables and uncountables. 5 In the table on p. 36, the nouns anger and salt both have plusses in the column ‘Combines with determiners’. However, there is one determiner they cannot combine with—which one? 6 What different recategorisations are found among the English nouns? What regular meaning changes are they accompanied by? 7 Try to think of arguments for and against counting recategorisation as a kind of word-formation. 8 Given the criteria for adjectives given here, how do you suggest that we handle items like upper class (upper-class), Sydney and 1930s in phrases like e.g. a very upper-class accent, a Sydney street, a 1930s atmosphere. How many of the criteria for adjectives do they meet? 9 Why are the adverbs so difficult to characterise in of a set of common characteristics? What different kinds of adverbs are there? 10 Explain what is meant by grammaticalization. The examples given in the text all concern phrases made up of prepositions and content words which have ‘fused’ to become linguistic units treated as prepositions and in some cases, conjunctions. Can you think of cases where a content word on its own has turned into a function word?


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3 Outline of English Word-formation


Defining word-formation As we noted in Chapter 1, many English words are simple, i.e. they consist of a single base morpheme: dog, door, smile, mahogany. Others contain two or more morphemes, for instance, uncertain, rider, teapot. Of these three, the first two words are complex. Such words are formed by the addition of an affix—a prefix or a suffix— to a stem which is itself a word. In the first word, the prefix un- has been added to the stem certain, and in the second the suffix -er has been added to the stem ride. The third word—teapot—consists of two words combined to form a third—a so-called compound. The three words above have been formed in accordance with present-day English word-formation rules, principles for the production of new words. They represent three types of regular English word-formation, i.e. prefixation, suffixation and compounding. There are also a number of less regular types of English word-formation, among them initialisms (FBI, asap), clippings (para, demo), blends (Bollywood, edutainment), back-formations (to backpack, from backpacker, to laze from lazy), rhyming slang and reduplicative formations (argy-bargy, higgedly-piggedly). These latter will be dealt with in the final chapter of the book. Although both prefixes and suffixes belong to the family of affixes, they have different functions and produce different results. Prefixes modify the meaning of a word from a certain word class, but don’t normally change its word class hip: we may add unto the adjective certain to create the new word uncertain, but the new word is still an adjective1. Suffixes, on the other hand, usually change the word class of the word they are added to: ride is a verb, but rider is a noun. © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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Suffixes and prefixes that can be used to form new words are called derivational affixes, the words produced in this manner are known as derived words, and the process of forming new words by the addition of prefixes and suffixes is called derivation. Derivational suffixes should be distinguished from the inflectional suffixes discussed in Chapter 1 (p. 22), for instance the -s and the -ed in She lives here and She lived here two years ago and the -s in The dogs barked. The inflectional suffixes don’t form new words, but merely add grammatical categories like tense, number, person to existing words2. The inflectional suffixes also differ from the derivational ones in being used with great regularity: there are few exceptions to the rule that the past tense of verbs is formed by adding the suffix -ed, that third person singular forms end in -s, and that plural nouns also end in -s. The majority of the derivational suffixes do not show the same regularity, although individual derivational suffixes may show almost the same regularity as the inflectional ones, in particular the adverb-forming suffix -ly (cf. Chapter 7). Compounding differs from affixation in involving the combination of (usually two) words to form a new word. However, compounding has one thing in common with prefixation: the first element is a modifier: it modifies the second element, also known as the head. In a word like teapot, for example, tea modifies the head pot, just as e.g. re- in rewrite modifies the meaning of write. In neither case is there a change in the word-class of the head/stem: like pot, teapot is still a noun, and like write, rewrite is still a verb. Prefixation, suffixation and compounding can be characterised as ‘additive’ types of word-formation, since their output is the result of the addition of something to an already existing word. English also has another highly productive type of regular word-formation, one that forms new words without formal change. This type of wordformation is known as conversion (alternative names are functional shift and zero derivation). Conversion is very common in English, especially in the case of the noun and verb categories; according to one source3, ‘there is no English noun that can’t be verbed’, i.e. in principle all nouns can be transformed into verbs. Thus we can carpet a room, doctor a drink and cash a cheque. We can even steamroller others into accepting what they don’t want, and we can audition for a role in a play. 50



In all these cases of conversion it is easy to see that it is the nouns that are the basic forms from which the verbs have been derived. In other cases the conversion has clearly worked in the other direction: a jump is the result of or an instance of jumping, etc. However, there are also many words that seem to be equally at home in two or more word classes, which makes it difficult to tell which is the basic form and which the derived. Examples of such words are love, hate and fear. Affixation, compounding and conversion are all regular word-formation processes in the sense that it is generally possible to write rules for them and to predict the nature of the output of the rules fairly adequately. It is not always possible, on the other hand, to specify what restrictions have to be placed on the rules to prevent them from producing non-acceptable output forms. Nor is it always possible to predict what kind of prefix or suffix a given individual output word will use. We can sum up the above outline of regular modern English word-formation like this: REGULAR ENGLISH WORD-FORMATION ADDITIVE DERIVATION PREFIX

SUFFIX

uncertain

composer

NON-ADDITIVE COMPOUNDING

teapot

CONVERSION

doctor(v), carpet(v), steamroller(v)

The output of word-formation rules An important thing to grasp about word-formation rules is how they relate to the words that make up their output. To illustrate this point let us consider an example involving suffixation. I suggested above that by adding the suffix -er to the verb ride, we produce ‘a new noun rider’. This is a fairly accurate description of the workings of the rule for creating so-called agent nouns in -er, i.e. nouns identi© Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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fying the ‘doer’ of a verbal action or process. (The -er suffix may also be used to form words denoting instruments like e.g. washer ‘washing machine’ and silencer). On the other hand, the noun rider is obviously not new in the sense ‘never produced before’. It has been in the vocabulary of English for hundreds of years. What the rule does is to provide a description of the internal structure of derived words that may or may not have been formed already. If the word resulting from the application of the rule has been stored in the dictionary, then the rule can be used to analyse that word. Thus word-formation has both a productive and an analytic function. The productive and analytic functions of word-formation are of equal importance; it might even be argued that we have occasion to analyse existing complex and compound words more often than we have occasion to create new words. At the same time analytic knowledge helps us both to create and to understand new formations created on a familiar pattern. Once we know that e.g. refusal, bewilderment and readable are formed by the addition of the suffixes -al, -ment, and -able to the verbs refuse, bewilder and read, we also know how to analyse other words containing these suffixes.

Word-formation vs. word manufacture The presentation above emphasised the rule-governed nature of word-formation. However, certain types of word-formation are clearly more rule-governed than others. It is only fair to say that the word-formation rules form a hierarchy, with some very productive and reliable rules at the top, and certain rather unpredictable rules at the bottom. What they all have in common, though, is that they use already existing words as input and produce ‘new’ words as their output. This makes word-formation fundamentally different from word manufacture. Word manufacture does not operate on already existing words, but invents new words from scratch. The only rules that word manufacture has to follow are the principles for permitted sound/letter combinations in English (sometimes called the phonotactic rules of the language)4. 52



Thus if you are planning to market some new technical gadget and are wondering what to call it, you will be well advised to avoid e.g. *srink, * thlang, and *mitr, which all contain phoneme combinations that are not allowed in English, i.e. sr-, thl- and -tr. The alternatives srink, thang and mirt may not bring immediate economic success, but at least they are phonotactically correct. Probably a fair number of manufactured words have been and are being created by speakers and writers all the time. But the sheer amount of work involved in ‘marketing’ new words is so forbidding that the majority never get into a dictionary. Below you will find a few of the manufactured English words that did make it to the dictionary. Quite a few names of products are—or appear to be—manufactured, for example Kodak, claimed to have been invented from scratch by George Eastman in 18885, and Prozac from the 1990s. Among the common nouns there is the mathematical term googol, defined as ‘a cardinal number equivalent to ten raised to a hundred’6. Slang has its fair share of manufactured words, for instance the words dweeb and nerd used especially in US English to denote a foolish or contemptible person. Determining what is and what is not a manufactured word is not always easy. In a few cases we know that someone expressly decided to invent a new word. This is the case with the verb grok ‘understand intuitively’ invented by the writer Robert Heinlein, who used it (about a Martian) in his novel Strangers in a Strange Land, and the scientific term quark ‘very small unit of matter’, which first appeared in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. In other cases it is hard distinguish between manufactured words and different types of shortening, such as abbreviation and clipping (cf. Chapter 9). A case in point is the recent word pharm ‘a place where genetically modified plants or animals are grown or reared’, which is perhaps best regarded as a case of back-clipping from pharmacology. It is also an instance of rather clever word-play on the established word farm—a place that is also connected with growing and rearing. British English has a long word-manufacturing tradition, particularly manifested in so-called ‘nonsense verse’ made popular by 19th-century poets like Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. One of the best known nonsense poems is the Jabberwocky, which first © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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appeared in Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass in 1871. Here is the beginning: The Jabberwocky Twas brillig and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe All mimsy were the borogroves And the mome raths outgabe

In this poem, Carroll cuts a few corners by retaining function words like was, were, and, the, and by using certain well-known English affixes like out- and -y, but the rest of the vocabulary is all ‘nonsense’, i.e. word manufacture: brillig, slithy, tove, gyre, gimble, wabe, mimsy, borogrove, mome, rath, outgabe. (Twas is an older short form for ‘it was’).

Word-formation rules and the dictionary Before bringing this presentation of English word-formation to an end, we need to take a look at the relation between word-formation rules and the dictionary. Dictionaries contain many—but certainly not all—the words in a language. Since the basic function of the word-formation rules is the ‘production of new words’, it may seem natural to view them exclusively as devices for adding new words to the dictionary. But in actual fact it is often difficult to predict which complex or compound words are going to end up in the dictionary and which ones are not7. However, it is possible to point to certain factors that seem to be involved in such matters. To begin with, the question whether a word should be listed in the dictionary or not obviously has something to do with how common that word is: by and large, a complex or compound word that is frequently used is more likely to end up in the dictionary than one that is used seldom. That notwithstanding, frequency cannot be the only explanation: manner adverbs like e.g. angrily, beautifully, slowly, nouns in -ness formed from adjectives like e.g. slowness, gentleness, commonness, and compounds like food scare, story-telling, rebel-ed are seldom if ever found as head words in dictionaries. Yet all three types of word are common enough in all kinds of texts. 54



We can go some way towards explaining the absence of such words from the dictionary by adding a second explanatory factor, i.e. predictability of meaning. Complex words like angrily and slowness, and compounds like food scare, whose meanings are predictable because they can be worked out from a knowledge of their component parts, and of the word-formation rule involved, tend not to be found in dictionaries. It would be uneconomical to put such words in the dictionary, since once we know the meaning of their parts, we can work out the meanings of the full complex/compound words.8 On the other hand, complex/compound words whose meanings we cannot figure out on the basis of their component parts and the word-formation rules involved have to be entered as headwords in dictionaries. Two examples among many of such words are propeller and wheelchair. As we know, there is an English verb propel meaning ‘drive forwards’, as in e.g. the canoe was propelled by a paddle. There is also a suffix -er that can be added to verbs to form nouns denoting both agents and instruments. On the basis of that knowledge we might be tempted to conclude that a propeller is any device or person driving something forward. But as the dictionary definitions of propeller in The New Oxford Dictionary of English and The American Heritage Dictionary indicate, that conclusion would be wrong. The word propeller is defined as ‘a mechanical device for propelling a boat … consisting of a revolving shaft with two or more broad, angled blades attached to it.’ In other words, propeller is the label for a very special category of objects and such a labelling function is characteristic of complex words entered as headwords in dictionaries. There is no way we could have figured out the meaning of such a word simply by looking at its parts. The same lesson can be learnt from the compound wheelchair. Just like propeller, wheelchair contains a lot of information that is not available if all we know is the meanings of the parts of the complex word. Given the meanings of wheel and chair and the common compounding pattern used to form it, we might be forgiven for believing that a wheelchair is just any chair on wheels, like e.g. an office chair. But as we know, that is incorrect: a wheelchair is ‘a chair built on wheels for an invalid or disabled person, either pushed by another person or propelled by the occupant’ © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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The non-predictability of meaning in words like propeller and wheelchair is sometimes ed for in of the concept of lexicalization: words with non-predictable meanings are said to be (semantically)lexicalized.9 However, the lexicalize and lexicalization have been used with a number of different meanings and will not be used in this book. The distinction between those complex words that have predictable meaning and those that do not is complicated by the fact that what appears to be the same word may turn up in either category. A case in point is the agent (and instrument) nouns formed from verbs by the addition of the suffix -er like e.g. walker, singer, climber. Basically, these nouns mean simply ‘person who walks’, person who sings’, ‘person who climbs’. These meanings are predictable: if we know the meanings of walk, sing, climb and -er and the word-formation rule for agent nouns, we can figure out the meanings of the full complex words without help from the dictionary. However, the same nouns in -er may also have additional meanings indicating habit, profession, hobby and the like. Thus if we say e.g. She is a singer, the noun singer does not mean merely ‘person who sings’ but ‘professional singer’, and in the same way He is a walker means ‘He is in the habit of walking’, and They are climbers means ‘They climb (mountains/tall buildings) as a hobby/professionally’. With such extra semantic features, the meanings of these nouns are unpredictable, which leads to their being listed in dictionaries. The distinction between words with predictable and unpredictable meanings is often accompanied by a distinction having to do with function. Words with unpredictable meanings are by and large used with the function of labels: they label categories of phenomena that are regarded as essential in society, for instance propellers and wheelchairs. Words with predictable meanings, on the other hand, are often used with the function of syntactic repackaging10 As such they do not label categories at all, but are used to simplify texts by replacing longer and more complex syntactic phrases, often a noun followed by a relative clause. This function is best illustrated by an example. Let us assume that there is a text that runs like this: In the house next door, someone was singing. The person who was singing was our neighbour’s daughter.

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This text could be made simpler and easier to read by syntactically repackaging the noun phrase the person who was singing in the second sentence as the singer. As a result, the text would be changed to In the house next door, someone was singing. The singer was our neighbour’s daughter.

Most agent nouns in -er (and other agentive suffixes) can be used both in labelling and in syntactic repackaging, for instance driver, which is found both in He works as a driver (labelling) and The driver of the car was Harry Smith (syntactic repackaging). However, some of the agentive (instrumental) nouns can only be used in syntactic repackaging, presumably because there is no natural category that they could be used to label. It is, for example, perfectly possible to turn the verbs assert, nod and pat into the agentive nouns asserter, nodder and patter, but they will never appear in the dictionary for the simple reason that we have no use for them as category lables. There are no categories of people that need to be labelled by such nouns: that is why the following exchange sounds extremely strange: A: What does your sister do? B: She is an asserter/a nodder/a patter

But as the three examples below indicate, these nouns work perfectly well in syntactic repackaging: Some people asserted that the problem could easily be solved. The asserters were all males from the south. When I asked my question, several people in the audience nodded. The most enthusiastic nodder was Peter Wright. There used to be people patting my back after my talks. But this time there wasn’t a single back-patter.

The three sentences above demonstrate the workings of syntactic repackaging with agentive nouns in -er. Syntactic repackaging can also be brought about out by means of other types of word-formation, for example the words in -ly and -ness mentioned earlier. Thus manner adverbs in -ly, like calmly in e.g. He spoke calmly, are used instead of longer constructions like He spoke in a calm manner. Nouns in -ness, like e.g. stubbornness in e.g. Her stubbornness sur© Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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prised us, are used instead of longer expressions like The fact that she was stubborn surprised us or The degree to which she was stubborn surprised us. The syntactic repackaging function is also open to words formed by means of prefixation, compounding and conversion. Thus preschool in e.g. preschool teacher refers to a particular stage in the education of children and is an instance of labelling. But in e.g. preschool activities, the likely interpretation is that this is a case of syntactic repackaging meaning for instance ‘activities that take place before school starts’. As for compounds, the noun show-stopper is common as a label and is defined in The New Oxford Dictionary of English as ‘a performance or item receiving prolonged applause’ (referred to below as show-stopper (1)). However, if on a given occasion somebody actually stops an on-going show, the syntactic repackaging show-stopper (show-stopper (2)) could perfectly well be used with reference to that person (The show-stopper turned out to be a tall, side-whiskered Australian youth’). It is less easy to find convincing examples of the labelling-syntactic repackaging contrast with regard to conversion. However, something like syntactic repackaging is found with a verb like carpet (‘provide with a carpet’), for example in an exchange like The room’s got a new carpet.– Really, who carpeted it? This should be contrasted with the verb carpet meaning ‘reprimand severely’ as in Sidney was severely carpeted by his boss, obviously a kind of labelling. In the rather long discussion above, I have suggested that the question whether a complex, compound or converted word has to be memorised and accordingly listed in the dictionary or not, is mainly decided by the word’s predictability of meaning and its function (labelling vs. syntactic repackaging). The argument is summed up in the following figure:

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COMPLEX/COMPOUND/CONVERTED WORDS IN ENGLISH Meaning predictable

Meaning unpredictable

Used in syntactic repackaging

Used to label categories

Usually not in the dictionary

In the dictionary

Examples Slowly, gentleness, singer (‘person who is singing’) asserter, nodder, patter pre-school (activities) carpet(v) ‘provide with a carpet’

propeller, wheelchair singer (‘person who sings professionally’) preschool (teacher) carpet(v) ‘reprimand’

Exercises 1 Which of the following words are complex and which are compound?: reclassify, unbelievable, water crisis, Londoner, sun-tanned, (the) Bushies, arms cache, Clintonian, Clintonomics, steamroller. 2 Conversion from noun to verb may affect a wide range of nouns, even nouns with suffixes that are clearly noun-indicating, like steamroller and audition. What does that tell us about the relative strength of conversion and suffixation? 3 Mention is made here of words like love, hate, fear for which it is difficult to indicate which word class is the original one and which the converted. Can you think of other words for which this is also true? 4 p. 51: The tree diagram indicates that English has two kinds of affixation: prefixation and suffixation. Logically, there is a third type, i.e. infixation, the insertion of a morpheme inside a word. Does English have any infixed words? 5 On p. 53 in this chapter there are examples of sound/letter sequences that are not allowed in English words, like word-initial sr- and thl-, and word-final -tr. Can you think of other such © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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‘forbidden’ sequences? What would a rule for permitted wordinitial consonant combinations look like? 6 What are the ‘productive and analytic functions’ of word-formation mentioned on p. 52? 7 Pp. 53–54: Do you know any other manufactured English words besides the ones mentioned here? Does the Jabberwocky poem suggest any particular thoughts or feelings to you? 8 What factors determine whether a ‘new word’ will turn up in the dictionary or will be used and forgotten? Can you think of other factors in addition to the ones mentioned here? 9 What is the point of discussion of propeller and wheelchair on p. 55? 10 Explain the notions labelling and syntactic repackaging and try to find additional examples of these phenomena.

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4 Prefixation

Characteristics of prefixes As their name indicates, prefixes are bound affix morphemes occurring word-initially, i.e. at the beginning of words. In addition to their initial position, prefixes have certain additional defining characteristics. One of these is that they are semantically special, expressing a fairly narrow range of clear meanings of which the main ones are: NEGATION, REVERSAL, REMOVAL, MANNER, DEGREE/SIZE, ATTITUDE, LOCATION/DIRECTION, and TIME/SEQUENCE.

Prefix meanings With the noticeable exception of DEGREE/SIZE, each of the meaning categories above is represented by a fairly limited number of prefixes. In addition it is often the case that one or two of the prefixes linked to each meaning are dominant and occur more or less freely with stems with certain characteristics, while the remaining ones are infrequent and of unpredictable occurrence. The following list shows the distribution of prefixes across the prefix meanings listed above. Meanings

Prefixes

NEGATION REVERSAL REMOVAL MANNER DEGREE/SIZE ATTITUDE LOCATION/DIRECTION TIME/SEQUENCE

5 3 3 2 14 2 4 5


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The table above does not claim to present the total number of prefixes or prefix meanings in English. What it does contain, arguably, are those prefixes and prefix meanings that are often found in texts of a general kind. Texts of a more specialised nature like e.g. scientific/ technical texts use many prefixes not ed for here. There are three important cases of homonymy among the English prefixes discussed here, i.e. cases where the same spelling and pronunciation represents separate prefixes with clearly different meanings, namely un- expressing the meanings negation, reversal (of the action of the following verb), and removal, dis- with the same three meanings, and de- which may express both reversal and removal. The table below summarises this information and provides examples of how the prefixes are used. un-

dis-

de-

Negation

unkind

disbelieve, dishonest

–

Reversal

untie

disaffirm

decentralise

Removal

uncork

discourage

defrost

As the table indicates, negative un- combines only with adjectives, negative dis- with both adjectives and verbs. (The prefix de- does not express negative meaning). Reversal meaning is expressed by both un-, de- and dis-. It is a meaning that is possible only in combination with a following verb (and nouns formed from such verbs, like decentralisation). Verbs with such reversal prefixes express the reverse of the process or action they normally denote. Thus, if you untie a knot, disaffirm a previous decision, or decentralise the running of an office, you reverse the actions of tying, affirming and centralising. Prefixes that express removal are attached to a following noun and indicate that the referent of the noun is removed: when you uncork a bottle you remove the cork from it, when you defrost the fridge you take away the ice in it. Dis- is less productive than the other two prefixes but can be found in certain genuinely English formations like e.g. disburden1

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Prefix function Prefixes typically have a modifying function: they serve to modify the following stem rather than change it radically. Unlike the suffixes (cf. Chapter 5), prefixes as a rule don’t change the word class of the stem they are attached to, nor the general semantic category to which it belongs. Thus if we add the prefix re- to the verb stem fill, the resulting combination refill is still a verb, and still represents the semantic category of filling. There are certain exceptions to this rule, however, cases where prefixes do not have purely modifying function, but actually change the word class of their stems. Among these we find the removal prefixes de- and un- discussed in the previous section, which are added to nouns and turn them into verbs meaning ‘remove whatever the noun stem refers to’. Accordingly, defrost and delouse mean ‘remove frost/lice from’ and unroof and unsaddle mean, respectively, ‘remove the roof (from a house)’ and ‘remove the saddle from’(usually a horse). Unsaddle may also mean ‘remove (the rider) from the saddle’ and is usually used about horses that throw their rider. Another exception is the prefix out- in combinations like outclass, outdistance, outwit. Here the addition of out- to the nouns class, distance and wit results in new words that are verbs. The modifying function of most prefixes makes them similar to the first element in the so-called neo-classical compounds like e.g. biography, economy and technology (see Chapter 8 for a presentation of these). Bio-, eco- and techno- are so-called initial combining forms, i.e. bound Latin and Greek base morphemes that are unlike prefixes in that they usually only combine with other bound Latin/Greek morphemes, i.e. the so-called word-final combining forms like -graph(y), -nomy and -logy. But in certain cases bio-, eco- and technocombine with ordinary English words, as in e.g. bio-terrorist, ecocrime and technopeasant. On of this similarity in both function and combining habits it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between initial combining forms and prefixes: certain of the forms listed as prefixes below may arguably also be regarded as initial combining forms. However, it is normally possible to distinguish between prefixes and initial combining forms in of meaning. As has already been pointed out, the meanings of prefixes belong to a restricted set © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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to do with matters like negation, time, attitude, size, degree and a few others. The initial combining forms, on the other hand, may be about anything: life (bio-), the stars (astro-), the environment (eco-), etc. The neo-classical compounds are not the only constructions that may complicate the delimitation of prefixes from other forms. On occasion, it is also difficult to distinguish prefixed words from ordinary English compounds in which the first element is a particle—a preposition or adverb that has been preposed, i.e. placed in initial position, as in verbs like back-date, , input, outsource, overwrite, update, adjectives like ongoing and uplifting, and nouns like downslide, input and uptake. Are these words derived words made up of a prefix and a stem, or are they compounds (cf. Chapter 7) made up of a particle and another word? There is no obvious answer to that question. However, it has been suggested2 that certain constructions with preposed particles are more prefix-like than others, i.e. those in which the particles have meanings far removed from their usual meanings. This happens in particular with the particles out-, over- and under-, for example in constructions like e.g. outrun, outgun ‘run faster than’, ‘have more guns/troops than’, overeat and overachieve ‘eat too much’, ‘achieve too much’ and underachieve, underpaid ‘achieve too little’, ‘paid too little’. In this book, out-, over- and under- with such meanings have been regarded as prefixes.

Prefixes in English and in Latin The majority of the English prefixes come from Latin, sometimes as direct borrowings, sometimes via the intermediary of Old or Middle French3. Certain prefixes have been borrowed from Greek (and some of the Latin forms ultimately represent borrowings from Greek). Only a minority of the prefixes are native—i.e. Germanic— in origin. The following list contains all the prefixes of foreign origin discussed in the present chapter: a-, anti-, arch-, co-, de-, dis-, ex-, extra-, hyper-, in-, inter-, macro-, mal-, mini-, non-, post- pre-, pro-, re-, semi-, sub-, super-, trans-, ultra. The list of native prefixes is quite short and consists of mis- (as in e.g. mismanage), over-, out-, un-, under- (Note that the lists above do not reflect the existence of 64


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homonymous prefixes: un- stands for both negative, reversative and removal un-, etc.). Despite their foreign origin, the prefixes borrowed from Latin and Greek are now part and parcel of English; they are bound English morphemes with clear meanings and combine with stems that are English words. It is important not to confuse these forms with forms with the same spelling that only exist in Latin words imported wholesale into English. Usually the difference is clear from the form’s meaning and ability to combine with English words as stems: if we compare e.g. amoral and anomaly, anti-American and antipathy, ex-emperor and except in these two respects, it is obvious that only the first word in each pair contains an English prefix: a- in amoral has the meaning ‘negative’ and combines with the English word moral, while a- in anomaly has no clear meaning and does not combine with an English word. Likewise, anti- in anti-American and ex- in ex-emperor have clear meanings and combine with the stems American and emperor, both of which are words, while antipathy and except meet neither the semantic nor the combining requirement. In many cases the English prefixes and the Latin initial forms are also distinguished by a third factor, i.e. a difference in pronunciation and stress. The distribution of stress in English is a highly complicated matter, which will not be gone into here4. All we need to know is that a distinction is made between the heaviest stress in a word, known as primary stress and the next heaviest which is called secondary stress. Many of the English prefixes with Latin look-alikes are set apart from the Latin forms by the fact that the the English prefixes carry secondary or even primary stress, while the Latin look-alikes are unstressed. Thus the forms a-, anti-, and ex- discussed above tend to have secondary (sometimes even primary) stress when used as English prefixes and to be pronounced [e], [nt] ([nta]) and [eks], as for example in amoral, anti-American and ex-emperor. The corresponding Latin strings, on the other hand, are unstressed and are pronounced [ə], [n t] and [ks] for instance in anomaly [ə nɒməli], antipathy [n tpəθi], and except [k sept]. The same type of distinction can be made for e.g. de-, pre-, re-: compare the pronunciation of e.g. delouse [di las], pre-fabricate [pri fbrket] and refill [ri fl] with that of deceive [d si v] prepare © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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[pr peə], and regret [r ret]. In the first three examples—which contain the English prefixes de-, pre- and re- —the letter e is pronounced [i ] and has secondary stress, but in the last three examples—which do not contain English prefixes—e is unstressed and has the pronunciation [] or even [ə] (as when regret is pronounced [rə ret]).

Degrees of productivity among prefixes In the preceding discussion, certain characteristics of English prefixes have been mentioned. In particular it was pointed out that in order to be counted as a prefix, a word-initial form must have a clear meaning from among a rather narrow set of meanings. Typically it should also have clearly modifying function with regard to the following stem, which must be an English word i.e. not a bound morpheme. Obviously, it must also recur with the same meaning often enough to make us want to regard it as a prefix at all. As we have seen, these criteria help us establish a substantial number of English prefixes. However, nothing has been said so far about the productivity of these prefixes. Defining ‘productivity’ is not an easy matter. The approach adopted in the present work is close to that recommended in the recent Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, and operates in of relative degrees of productivity like ‘highly productive’, ‘fairly productive’ and ‘of low productivity’5 A highly productive prefix is one that combines more or less freely with a large class of well-defined stems. Such classes of stems are usually defined both in of word class and meaning, for instance the class of stems to which we can add the prefixes anti-, pro- and ex-. The first two may be added freely to nouns denoting something to which it is possible to have a negative or positive attitude (which is, basically, any noun). Obvious of this group are nouns like abortion, war, Bush, EU, prohibition. The prefix ex- ‘former(ly)’ is also attached to nouns, but in this case the nouns must denote a position, status or condition that may be terminated, for example king, husband, wife, President, alcoholic, cancer patient. Compare also the stylistic effect that can be achieved by violating the rule, for instance the famous ex-parrot of Monty Python fame.6

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The claim made for the highly productive prefixes is that they may be attached to all or at least the majority of stems with certain characteristics. However, for the majority of prefixes it is indeed possible to characterise the stems they prefer, but it is impossible to claim that they combine with all or even the better part of such stems. Reversative de- is a good example of this. It combines fairly freely with verbs from Latin, especially those ending in -ate, -ify, -ise as for example in decentralise, decontaminate. But it certainly doesn’t combine with all such verbs; thus we find neither *detranslate, *deglorify or *desymbolise. Prefixes like reversative de- may be called ‘fairly productive’. Although it is a distinction difficult if not impossible to maintain, we may want to establish a further category of weakly productive prefixes that combine on an occasional basis with a certain type of stem. A likely candidate for this group would be negative in-, which sometimes combines with ultimately Latin stems as in inaudible, incomplete (and with variation impossible, irregular but are impossible in others. Thus only e.g. unable, will do, never *inable, despite the fact that the corresponding noun is inability.

Common English prefixes Negative prefixes: non-, un-, a-, in-, disThere are two highly productive negative prefixes, i.e. non- and un-. The prefix non- combines freely with nouns, adjectives and open-class adverbs: non-smoker, non-starter, non-Muslim; non-Swedish, non-trivial, non-clinical; non-trivially, non-naturally, non-sexually. It implies a distinction between phenomena that are of a class and those that are not. The use of the hyphen with non- varies; thus we find both e.g. non-smoker and nonsmoker. The negative prefix un- combines freely with adjectives and participles (and nouns formed from them, e.g. uncertainty): uncertain, uncommon, uneven, unfair, unkind; undamaged, undefeated, unfinished, unrivalled, unstructured; unconvincing, unsmiling, unyielding. Unlike non-, un- does not combine with nouns not derived from adjectives or participles, and as a result, nouns like e.g. *unbuilding/ © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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un-building, *undog/un-dog, and *un-starter /unstarter etc. are not found.7 With adjectives, un- denotes the opposite of the stem meaning. This makes it different from non-, which merely denies that the meaning of the stem is present. The semantic difference between the two prefixes may be illustrated by means of the pair un-American activities: non-American activities. The former means ‘activities opposed to America and American interests’ while the latter means simply ‘activities that are not American’. (Note that certain very common adjectives have their own opposites and cannot be combined with any of the negative prefixes. Among the most common of these we find good:bad, deep:shallow, big:small, strong:weak)8. There are a number of less productive negative prefixes that sometimes compete with the two above, in particular with un-: the relatively learned a- [ei] combines with adjectives (amoral), and so does in- (variant forms il-, im-, ir-) as in illegal impossible, inaudible, irregular, and dis- as in dishonest, disloyal, dissimilar. Dis- also combines with verbs and nouns as in disobey, disorder, disrespect, distrust.

Reversative prefixes: de-, dis-, unIn addition to having negative meaning, the prefixes dis- and unalso express reversal of the action or process denoted by a following verb; a third reversative prefix is de-. Un-is by far the most common reversative prefix. It combines freely with verbs that denote change of state, and signals the reversal of the action or process denoted by the verb. Familiar examples are undo, untie, unwrap, unzip. The limits to the productivity of reversative un- are normally set by our experiences of what can and what cannot be reversed: it is normally difficult to unread a book, for example. However, in genres like science fiction, such restraint is no longer necessary: in such texts it may turn out that time travel makes it possible both to unmurder, unmarry and uncreate other people9. The reversative prefix de- is claimed to be particularly productive with verbs ending in the suffixes -ate, -ify, -ise/ize, like decentralise, declassify, decontaminate. Reversative dis- is unevenly distributed

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across non-Germanic stems as in e.g. disengage, disinherit, disestablish.

Removal prefixes: de-, dis-, unIn addition to expressing reversal, the prefixes de-, dis-, un- may also express the removal of something. They then combine with nouns to form transitive verbs expressing removal, i.e. they belong to the limited group of prefixes that change the word-class of the stem they are added to. Un- is as usual the most common prefix. With removal meaning, this prefix is word-class-changing: it is added to nouns to form transitive verbs meaning ‘remove what the noun denotes’ as in unleash ‘remove the leash from (a dog)’, unstrap ‘remove the straps from’ unsaddle (a horse), unroof (a house) and many others. But complex words formed by the addition of un- to nouns may also have the meaning ‘remove somebody/something from what the noun denotes’, for instance in unhinge a door ‘remove a door from its hinges’, unsaddle a rider ‘throw a rider’, and unseat the president ‘remove the president from power’. The prefix de- has removal meaning in a limited number of combinations with nouns, as in e.g. debark (‘remove bark from tree’), defrost, de-ice, delouse, debug, descent (a skunk), detick (‘remove ice/ frost/lice/bugs/scent/ticks from refrigerators/animals’). We can notice here one characteristic that all the ‘removal prefixes’ have in common, i.e. that the nouns they are attached to should be somehow naturally (inherently) possessed by their owners: trees naturally have bark, animals naturally have lice, bugs, ticks (cf. discussion of inherent possession in Chapter 5). In of this we may also note that debark can have the additional meaning ‘remove a dog’s bark by disabling its vocal cords’. Very occasionally, de- is found in combinations that are less easy to interpret in that way, as in dedog the premises10 However, we may note in of our hypothesis above that it is found in a phrase like degender a text, where it is in all likelihood assumed that all texts have male gender bias by nature. The removal prefix dis-, finally, is like de- in having limited productivity; it is found in e.g. disambiguate, disinfest, dislodge. © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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Manner prefixes: mal-, misThere are two semantically distinct but not very productive manner prefixes, i.e. mal- ‘badly’ and mis- ‘wrongly’, ‘astray’. They are found in combinations with verbs, past participles and abstract nouns: malcontent, malformed, malfunction, malodorous, malpractice; misdirect, misfire, misconduct, misapprehension. Combinations with mal- and mis- are usually not hyphenated.

Degree/size prefixes: arch-, extra-, hyper-, macro-, mega-, micro-, mini-, out-, over-, semi-, sub-, super-, ultra-, underOf the prefixes in this category, several like e.g. extra-, hyper-, superhave homonyms that are so’called ‘initial combining forms’. As explained in Chapter 8, prefixes and initial combining forms differ both in of meaning and stress assignment. The prefixes have clear meanings and take either primary or secondary stress in all combinations. The initial combining forms lack clear meanings and are stressed in accordance with the stress rules for non-Germanic words (cf. p. 146). Compare for example extramural [ekstə mjυərəl], which contains the prefix extra-, and extravagant [k strvəənt], where extra- is an initial combining form. (The word extramural ‘outside the walls’ is a term used about university courses not aimed at regular students). arch- ‘supreme, out-and-out, of the worst kind’ Combines freely with negative meaning with usually human nouns with meanings permitting of degrees: arch-hypocrite, arch-believer, arch-capitalist, arch-champion arch-conservative, arch-dealer, arch disciple, arch-enemy, arch-Fascist, arch-federalist, arch-fixer, arch rightwinger, arch survivor, arch-theatricality, arch-traditionalist, arch wet; a wet is a ‘conservative with liberal tendencies’). The prefix arch- usually takes primary stress. extra- ‘highly’, ‘unusually’ Combines fairly freely with both Latin and Germanic adjectives as in extra-high, extra-late, extra-long, extra-sensitive. Occasionally it also 70


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combines with nouns: extra-funding, extra-length. The use of the hyphen appears to be optional. See also the section on locative prefixes. hyper- ‘extreme(ly), excessive(ly)’ Hyper- combines fairly freely with gradable adjectives, as in e.g. hyperintelligent, hyperreal, hypersensitive. With the meaning ‘very large, large-scale’, it also combines with nouns, as in hyperinflation, hyperconsumption, hyperintelligence. As a rule combinations with hyper- do not take a hyphen. The prefix hyper- seems to take secondary stress when attached to adjectives—as in hypersensitive, hypercritical—but has variable stress in combinations with a following noun. Thus is e.g. hyperlink, hypermarket it has primary stress, but in forms like hyperinflation and hypertension primary stress falls on the second syllable from the end of the word. macro- ‘large, large-scale’ Macro- is originally a combining form as in e.g. macrocosm (see p. 150) but is treated here as a prefix combining with nouns with a certain amount of productivity. We find it both in technical language (macro-economics, macro-climate) and to a certain extent in ordinary language (macrochange, macrocontract, macroscale). As a prefix, macro- has primary stress and variable use of hyphens. mega-: ‘large, outstanding’; ‘very’ In technical language this prefix means ‘1 million’ for example in megabyte, megahertz, megadeath. In ordinary (particularly informal) English, mega- is a productive prefix meaning ‘(very) large, outstanding’. It combines freely with nouns as in e.g. mega-acquisition, mega-brains (‘very intelligent people’), mega-contributions, megaflop, mega-hit, mega-merger, mega-musical, mega-restaurant. It also combines with adjectives, for instance in mega-rich, mega-strong, megasloshed (‘very drunk’). Most combinations with mega- are hyphenated. Mega- carries primary stress. (Mega may also be used as an independent word, for instance in mega takeover, mega losses and even e.g.: The concert was mega ‘very good’.)


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micro- ‘small, of reduced size’ Like macro-, micro- is originally a combining form (cf. p. 63) which has come to be used also with independent forms, but micro- seems to be more productive than macro-. It is found in e.g. micro-engineering, micro-opera, micro-organism, micro car, micro fault, microwave. Primary stress on the prefix and hyphenation seem to be the rule, but there is variation in this respect. mini- ‘little, minimal’ (informal) combines freely with countable nouns: minibar, minicab, minicomputer, mini-conference, mini-skirt, mini conference. The use of hyphens is variable and the prefix often has primary stress. out- ‘better than’ This is quite a productive prefix that turns intransitive verbs into transitive as in outdo (somebody), outperform (somebody), outrun (somebody), out-think (somebody), outvote (somebody). It also combines with nouns, turning the resulting complex word into a transitive verb taking a personal direct object as in e.g. to outwit somebody, outclass somebody, outdistance somebody (‘leave far behind’). Occasionally it combines with adjectives, as in outsmart (somebody) ‘get the better of somebody’. over- ‘too (much)’ The prefix over- combines freely with verbs and adjectives: overeat, overestimate, overreact, overemphasize, overdo; overconfident, over-ripe, overanxious. As a rule, over- is not followed by a hyphen. semi-: ‘partly’ combines fairly freely with adjectives with gradable meaning, for instance in semi-conscious, semi-naked, semi-open, semi-permanent, semi-predictable, semi-public, semi-rotted, semi-secure, semi-skilled, semi-tough. The prefix is usually hyphenated. In scientific language there is also non-hyphenated semi meaning ‘half’ as in e.g. semivowel, semicircle.

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sub- ‘below’; ‘secondary’; ‘below the norm’; ‘at a lower level’ The prefix sub- has a number of related meanings. It combines fairly freely with nouns when it has one of the meanings ‘below’ (subsoil, subway), ‘secondary’ (sub-editor, subdean), ‘subordinate part (of)’ (subcommittee, subcategory, subclass, subculture, sub-plot). It also combines with adjectives with the meanings ‘below’ (subconscious) and ‘below the norm’ (subhuman, substandard). With nouns, sub- tends to have primary stress, as in e.g. subassembly, subgroup, subsection, subtotal. The prefix sub- also combines with verbs with the meaning ‘at a lower level’, as in e.g. sub-contract, sub-edit, sublet, sub-underwrite, subdivide, sublease. As the examples indicate, the use of hyphenation with sub- varies. super- ‘more than the norm’; ‘highly, extremely’; ‘very large, prominent’ Super- is a very productive suffix that combines with adjectives. In words like e.g. super-confident, super-elevated, super-natural, supersensitive it indicates that the quality denoted by the adjectives is present to a greater extent than is normally the case. In most cases, however, this prefix simply means ‘highly, extremely’, for instance in super-bland, super-civilised, super-clean, super-cool, super-fit, superstrong, super-smart, super-talented. In combination with nouns, super- has meanings like ‘very large, unusually prominent, powerful, etc’ as in e.g. super-G, super-clerk, super-nerd, super-tanker, super-state.(Super may also be used as a word of its own meaning ‘excellent’, ‘very good’ as in It was a super concert, The concert was super.) ultra- ‘extreme(ly)’ combines fairly productively with adjectives (and certain nouns) meaning ‘extreme(ly)’. Examples are ultra-conservative. ultra-fair, ultra-marginal, ultra-modern, ultra-nationalist, ultra-right-winger, ultraslim, ultra-Tory. The use of hyphenation varies. under- ‘insufficiently, too little’ This prefix combines freely with verbs and -ed participles for instance in under-achieve, underbid, undercharge, undercook, underestimate, underexpose, underplay, under-spend, under-staff, understeer, © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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underpaid, under-qualified. Combinations with under- without a hyphen seem to be the most common.

Attitude prefixes: anti-, proThe only two productive attitude prefixes are anti- and pro-. They combine freely with adjectives and nouns, typically names of persons and organizations and nationality adjectives. They are usually hyphenated and carry primary stress. anti- [ nt], [ ntai] ‘against, opposed to’ The most common meaning of anti- is ‘against, opposed to’. With that meaning, the prefix may be attached to adjective stems, as in anti-clerical speech, anti-British attitudes, but it appears to be more common in combination with noun stems, as in e.g. anti-abortion laws, anti-boxing demonstration, anti-hooligan measures, anti-terrorist forces, anti-war pronouncements. When attached to nouns as in the second set of examples above, anti- changes the word class of the stem from noun to adjective. Thus the examples in the second set above may be used in typical adjectival positions, as in e.g. His attitude was very anti-abortion, The mood of the country is highly anti-war. All the anti- words above tend to place the heaviest stress on the second element.11 Anti- may also be used on its own, as in She’s proBush, but he is very anti. pro- ‘in favour of’, ‘for’: combines freely with adjectives and nouns:, pro-boxing, pro-British, pro-Bush, pro-European, pro-family, pro-German, pro-life, pro-Nazi, prosocialist, pro-war. Like anti-, pro- added to a noun stem changes its word class to adjective, cf. very pro-family, extremely pro-war.

Location and direction prefixes: co-, extra-, inter-, transco- ‘t(ly), on equal footing’ This prefix combines fairly freely with agent nouns and with verbs as in e.g. co-pilot, co-drive(r), co-conspirator, co-write(r), cooperate/co74


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operate, co-exist, cohabit. The use of hyphens with co- varies. It tends to take primary stress before nouns. extra- ‘outside’ The prefix extra- combines freely with Latin-based adjectives, particularly those ending in -al, -ial, -ic, -ar, like extracontractual, extracurricular, extragalactic, extragovernmental, extralinguistic, extramarital, extraterrestrial, extraterritorial. inter- ‘between’, ‘among’ Inter- combines freely with Latin-based adjectives ending in -al, -ial, -ic, -ar with or without a hyphen: inter-continental, international, interurban, interstellar. In some cases inter- combines with nouns as in intercity train traffic, interstate highways. trans- ‘across’ The prefix trans- combines with certain adjectives of Latin origin derived from geographical nouns: transatlantic, trans-Siberian, transpacific, trans-pennine. The use of hyphens varies.

Time and sequence prefixes: ex-, post-, pre-, reex- ‘former’ This prefix combines freely with nouns and noun phrases denoting titles, office or status; the following are all recent attested examples: ex-boy friend, ex-cavalry officer, ex-Chief Rabbi, ex-fiancé, ex-husband, ex-king, ex-lover, ex-major of horse, ex-president, ex-wife. The prefix may even occasionally be modified by an adverb, as in e.g. a newly ex-girlfriend12. Ex is also a word in its own right meaning ‘former husband/wife’. Most combinations with ex- use a hyphen. The prefix often takes primary stress. neo- ‘new’, ‘modern’ The prefix neo- is added freely to nouns and adjectives denoting phenomena that may be regarded as variants of earlier phenomena. It is usually combined with words denoting schools of thought and political movements as for instance in neo-Nazism/Nazi, neo-coloni© Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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alism/colonialist, neo-Gothic, neo-conservative, neo-Napoleonic. An exception from this is the term neo-natal ‘new-born’ found in medical language, where it may be a combining-form (cf. Chapter 8). post- ‘after (in time)’ post- combines freely with all kinds of nouns denoting a period or point in time. These combinations are used attributively as in e.g. post-Budget (discussions), post-Christmas (shopping), post-election (period), post-match (analysis), post-privatisation (woes), post-war (period) and also e.g. post-September 11 events, a new post-flotation low for the Argentine currency13 In such combinations, post- is usually followed by a hyphen. The prefix also combines with Latin-based adjectives in -al, -ial, -ic, -ar: post-classical, post-doctoral, post-natal, post-industrial, post-millenial, postimpressionistic. pre- ‘before’; ‘in advance’ Like post-, pre- combines freely with nouns denoting a period of time. The combinations are used attributively, as in pre-war (period), preschool (training), pre-sale (offer), pre-tax (value), pre-cancer (treatment). This prefix is also highly productive with the meaning ‘in advance’ before verbs in technical English: prebuild, precook, prefabricate, preheat, pre-publish, pre-stress. The prefix pre- takes heavy stress in the nouns pre-school ‘nursery school’ and prefab ‘prefabricated building’. Pre- also combines with adjectives of Latin origin as in e.g. pre-colonial, pre-linguistic, pre-conscious, premarital. The use of hyphens with pre- varies. re- ‘once more, again, anew’ The prefix re- combines fairly freely with verbs: rewrite, rebuild, reanalyse, re-enter, re-engineer and with nouns from these: reanalysis, rewriting, re-entry etc. The verbs in re- are usually transitive and/or denote a process ending in a result of some kind. The prefix occasionally has the meaning ‘back’ in e.g. recall. Like most prefixes, redoes not take primary stress. However, verbs in re- may be converted to nouns with accompanying stress shift: thus students are usually given the opportunity to retáke (British English resít) an exam. The corresponding nouns have primary stress on re- as in When is the rétake (résit)? 76


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Exercises 1 In what way are the ‘removal’ prefixes de- and un- different from most other prefixes? 2 Explain how productivity in prefixes is defined. What characteristics should a prefix have to be considered fully productive? How do you define prefixes that are fairly productive and weakly productive? 3 The largest class of prefixes with similar meanings is that of degree/size. Many of these prefixes are highly productive. Search a text—or even better a computer-based corpus of present-day English like e.g. the British National Corpus (BNC)— for instances of the degree/size prefixes mentioned here, and try to form an idea of the productivity of the different prefixes in this group. 4 What is the difference in meaning between negative un- and non-? What would combinations like e.g. non-person, non-dog, non-book mean? 5 What other adjectives besides big, deep, good, strong have opposites not formed by the addition of a prefix? 6 It is claimed in this chapter that the prefixes mega-, mini-, outand overall combine freely with certain classes of stems. Can you think of cases in which such combinations between megaetc. and their respective stem classes would be improbable or even impossible? 7 The prefixes super- and ultra- are both claimed to mean ‘extremely’. Does that mean that they can always replace each other? If not, why not? 8 According to the rule given here, the prefix co- combines fairly freely with agent nouns. However, there is obvious a difference between the common co-pilot, co-driver, co-producer, the less common but possible co-runner, co-singer, co-believer and the highly unlikely *co-liker, co-sitter, co-snore. Try to for these differences.


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9 The examples in Chapter 4 are all words containing a single prefix added to a stem. Try to find examples of prefixed forms that begin with two (or more) prefixes. 10 How do the meanings of prefixes and initial combining forms differ?

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General characteristics of suffixes One of the major types of present-day English word-formation is derivational suffixation, a process that makes it possible to create new words from already existing ones by adding a derivational suffix (cf. Chapter 3). Normally, the word class of the original word (the stem) is changed in the process of suffixation, and the suffix tells us what word class the new word belongs to. Thus there are noun-forming suffixes like -er, -ness and -ity (runner, kindness, formality), adjectiveforming suffixes like -ish, -y and -like (foolish, dirty, doglike), verbforming suffixes like -ize and -ify, (Americanize, simplify), and basically just one adverb-forming suffix, i.e. -ly (slowly). Derivational suffixes are also particular in their choice of stems: with certain exceptions, a given suffix combines only with stems belonging to a certain word-class. Thus a noun-forming suffix like -er meaning ‘agent’ or ‘instrument’ can only be added to verb stems (runner, washer), an adjective-forming suffix like -ish meaning ‘having the characteristics of the stem’ may only be attached to noun stems (foolish), and the adverb-forming suffix -ly accepts only adjectives as stems (slowly). On the other hand, the verb-forming suffix -ize combines both with adjective and noun stems, as the examples legalize and Londonize show. (The suffix -ize has a variant spelling -ise common in British English). In addition to selecting stems along word-class lines, many derivational suffixes are also sensitive to the origins of potential stems. Thus there is a clear tendency for certain suffixes to select stems of Germanic origin, while others equally clearly prefer words of classical origin, i.e. words coming originally from Latin or Greek. The noun suffixes -dom, and -hood, for example, never combine with classical words, nor would -ation, -ity and -ive select Germanic words © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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as stems. Other suffixes are less particular: -able, -er and -ness are found with both kinds of stems.

Suffix meanings Derivational suffixes usually have two kinds of meaning. To begin with, they all signal that the word they are attached to belongs to a certain word class: words ending in e.g. -hood, -ion or -ness are bound to be nouns, words ending in -ize and -ify are verbs etc. (However, as described in Chapter 6, the process of conversion may sometimes override such word-class assignments, cf. verbs like to commission, to position, and to station). In addition to signalling word-class hip, derivational suffixes have other, more or less clear meanings: the -er used to form nouns from verbs as in e.g. runner, reader etc. has the meaning ‘agent’ or ‘instrument’, the -y added to nouns to form adjectives as in e.g. dirty, sandy, snowy carries the meaning ‘full of/covered with’. There is also a fair amount of homonymy among derivational suffixes i.e. suffixes may be formally identical but have different meanings (and different combining habits). Thus in addition to the familiar agent/instrument suffix -er mentioned above that can only be attached to verbs, there is another suffix -er which is added to nouns and has the meaning ‘person associated with what the stem denotes’ as for instance in New Yorker, jet-setter, villager, brat packer. We also have to recognise several different suffixes of the form -y. The y-suffix meaning ‘full of/covered with’ has already been mentioned. Another adjective-forming y-suffix attached to nouns has the meaning ‘resembling’, ‘having the characteristics of’, for example in bossy, catty, powdery. A third carries the meaning ‘characterised by’, as in e.g. ballsy, gutsy ‘characterised by courage’, trafficky ‘characterised by traffic’. (In addition there are -y/-ie suffixes used in nouns like aunty/auntie, lefty/leftie; cf. p. 91 below).

Degrees of productivity among suffixes As in the case of the prefixes (cf. p. 66) the most important characteristic of a productive derivational suffix is the ability to combine 80


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freely with stems of a certain, definable class. A 100 % productive suffix would be one about which we could say that it combines with all the stems of category X and with no other stems. Unfortunately, there are no suffixes like that. One that comes close is the -ly suffix added to adjectives to produce adverbs, as in e.g. gladly, quickly and importantly, but as our discussion later in this chapter will show, not even this suffix is totally dependable in this respect. Other suffixes that come close to the ideal are the nounforming -ness and -er found in e.g. kindness and writer. At the other end of the scale, we find word endings that are still recognisable as suffixes, but which are dead when it comes to the formation of new words. The form -th is an example of a dead suffix in English. This originally Old English suffix—whose meaning is roughly the same as that of modern -ness, —survives only in a handful of words, for example breadth, depth, length, strength, warmth, width. It cannot be added to new stems (although on occasion playful forms like e.g. coolth occur). Between these two extremes, there is a range of levels of productivity that are difficult to pinpoint exactly. As in the case of the prefixes, suffix productivity will be described in of notions like ‘highly productive’, ‘fairly productive’ and ‘weakly productive’. of the first group will be said to combine freely with certain stems, those in the second to combine fairly freely with certain stems, etc.

Suffixation and word stress Derivational suffixation in English often affects the stress pattern and the pronunciation of the new words. In this section, a brief of the interplay between suffixation and word stress will be given1. When said in isolation, each English word has a single heavy or primary stress. In words with a single syllable—monosyllabic words— the stress obviously falls on that syllable. In polysyllabic words— words with more than one syllable—one of the syllables is selected as the bearer of primary stress. Since there are many types of polysyllabic words, it would be highly useful to have a rule or a set of rules predicting the location © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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of primary stress in such words, and there have also been many attempts to establish such rules. This has turned out to be a very challenging task, however, and none of the attempts so far have been entirely successful. Nevertheless, if we restrict our attention to derivational suffixation, certain general principles for stress position may be found. These principles operate in of the type of suffix added. Basically there are three types of suffixes in this respect: those that don’t change the stress pattern at all, those that take primary stress themselves, and those that require primary stress to fall on the syllable immediately preceding the suffix. Examples of these types and how they are used are given below.2 (1) Suffixes that don’t affect the stress pattern (stress-neutral suffixes) The most important of this group are -able, -dom, -er, -ess, -ie, -ing, -ish, -ism, -ist, -ise/-ize, -like, -ly, -ment, -ness and adjectiveforming -y. Examples: understandable, officialdom, researcher, stewardess, auntie, ling, monkeyish, Americanism, Africanist, computerise, statesmanlike, evidently, arrangement, unfriendliness, spidery. In certain words ending in -ess primary stress goes on the suffix. The word stewardess, for instance, may be pronounced both [ stjυədəs] and [stjυə des]. (2) Suffixes that are themselves stressed Representatives of this type include -ation, -ition, -ution, -ee, -eer, -esque, -ette, -ese, (note that -ation, -ition, -ution and -eer count as single suffixes here), -itis. Examples of words with these suffixes are confirmation, definition, resolution, referee, auctioneer, kitchenette, Kiplingesque, Japanese, appendicitis (cf. also nonce formations like creditcarditis). Words ending in -ee like e.g. divorcee sometimes take primary stress on the syllable immediately before the suffix. (3) Suffixes requiring primary stress on the preceding syllable A rather small number of suffixes require that the primary stress go on the syllable immediately preceding the suffix. In stems that already have primary stress on their final syllable, the stress remains where it is (as in e.g. intense: intensity); in other stems it is moved to the syllable preceding the suffix as in rapid:rapidity. 82


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The most common of the of the third group are -ial, -ian, -ic, -ical, -ify, -ity. Examples: atomic, sequential, Clintonian, personify and readability. In many—but not all—of its occurrences, the adjectival suffix -al belongs here too, for instance in fundamental and adjectival. Note that moving the primary stress in words like these often causes radical pronunciation changes: compare Clinton [ klntən] and Clintonian [kln təυnən], and note how -able [əbəl] changes to -abil- [ə bl] before -ity, as in e.g. countability, dependability, readability. Although it is usually attached to bound rather than to free stems, mention should also be made here of the suffix -ion. English has many words ending in -ion, all of which place primary stress on the syllable immediately preceding the suffix, for instance prohibition, invasion, permission, depletion, derision (For the spelling of the words in -ion, cf. p. 84). It should be emphasized again that the above of the interplay between suffixes and stress cannot claim to be comprehensive and is based on general patterns rather than absolute rules. By and large, these principles provide valuable and reliable guidelines for the stress patterns of suffixed words. However, certain complications have been left uned for. In addition, there are sometimes individual exceptions to the principles.

Suffixation and stem change A number of English verbs containing bound Latin base morphemes change their spelling and pronunciation before certain Latin suffixes3. A verb like permit, for example, changes to permisswhen followed by one of the suffixes -ible, -ion, or -ive. What we get is the forms permissible, permission, permissive. Permit is not the only verb subjected to these changes: they affect all English verbs containing the bound Latin base morpheme -mit, for example it, omit, submit, transmit. On of this, these changes are best described in of the bound Latin bases involved, as in the below. (Note that not all verbs combine with all suffixes, however. Note also that the combination of -ssand a following suffix -ion is pronounced [ʃən]).


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(1) Verbs containing -mit change final t to ss before -ible, -ion, -ive, Examples: it, issible, ission, issive; permit, permissible, permission, permissive; omit, omissible, omission. (2) Verbs containing -cede, -ceed, -fend, -hend, -pand, -pend. -spond, -tend change final -d(e) to -(s)s before -ible, -ion, -ive and -or. Examples: concede, concessive, concession; succeed, successive, succession, successor; defend, defensive, defensible; comprehend, comprehensive, comprehension, expand, expansive, expansion; expend, expensive; respond, responsible, responsive; extend, extensive, extensible, extension. (3) Verbs containing -cide, -clude, -lide, -lude, -plode, -ride, -suade, -vade, -vide change the final -de in the spelling to s before -ion and -ive. Examples: decide, decisive, decision; include, inclusive, inclusion; collide, collision; allude, allusive, allusion: explode, explosive, explosion; deride, derisive, derision; persuade, persuasive, persuasion; invade, invasion; divide, divisive, division. Note that the letter sequence -sive in the words in (3) above is pronounced [sv], but that -sion is pronounced [ən]. Decisive, inclusive are accordingly pronounced [d sasv] and [n klu sv], but decision, inclusion are pronounced [d sən] and [n klυ ən]. (4) Verbs containing the stems -solve and -volve change these to solut- and -volut before the suffix -ion. Final -t followed by -ion is pronounced [ʃ] Examples: dissolve, dissolution; resolve, resolution; revolve, revolution (5) Verbs in -ceive change final -ve to -pt before -ible, -ion, -ive, -or. Final -t followed by -ion is pronounced [ʃ] Examples: deceive, deceptible, deceptive, deception, ; receive, receptive, reception; conceive, conception. (6) Verbs in -duce change -duce to -duct before -ible, -ion, -ive, -or. The combination -duction is pronounced [ dkʃən] Examples: reduce, reduction, reductive; produce, production, productive; conduct, conductor

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(7) Verbs in -pel change -pel to -puls before -ive, -ion. The combination -pulsion is pronounced [ plʃən] Examples: compel, compulsive, compulsion; repel, repulsive, repulsion expel, expulsion Changes also occur before the suffixes -ive and -ion in the words repeat, compete, expose, inquire, oppose, recognize as in repetition, repetitive, competition, competitive, exposition, expositive; opposition; inquisitive, inquisition; recognition. In addition, stems ending in the common verb suffix -ify changes -ify to -ific- before the suffix -ation, as in classify:classification, identify:identification, etc.

Noun-forming suffixes Nouns from nouns A number of noun suffixes combine with noun stems, thus violating the principle that suffixation should always be word-classchanging. At least seven types of meaning may be distinguished: AMOUNT, COLLECTIVES, ACTIVITY CONNECTED WITH STEM, STATE OF BEING WHAT THE STEM DENOTES, PERSON CONNECTED WITH STEM, SIZE/SEX/ STATUS, FAMILIARITY. AMOUNT: -ful The suffix -ful is added fully productively to nouns to express the meaning ‘the amount contained in what the stem denotes’. It is attached to nouns denoting containers as in They poured bucketfuls / spoonfuls/glassfuls of water onto the table. While the nouns in these words are all prototypical containers, the notion of what is a container may be extended considerably as the following examples show: fistful, handful, mouthful, plateful, sinkful, shovelful. COLLECTIVES: -ing, -ry Collectives—as defined here—are collections of things of the same type. In English, such nouns are formed by attaching the suffix -ing to the relevant noun stems. Thus from the nouns carpet, , © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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mat, scaffold and tube we form the collectives carpeting, ling, matting, scaffolding and tubing. This is a fairly productive suffixation rule. On a much smaller scale, the suffix -ry may be added to nouns denoting different technical gadgets as in gadgetry itself and also in rocketry, weaponry. The productivity of this suffix is limited. ACTIVITY/STATE CONNECTED WITH WHAT THE NOUN STEM DENOTES: -ing, -age, -(e)ry, -ism, -itis Activity nouns are usually formed from verbs (cf. p. 93–95). However, in certain case, they are formed from nouns, and are used to denote activities somehow connected with the meaning of the noun. Here the suffix -ing is fairly common, as in e.g. black-berrying, , cricketing, tunnelling, back-packing, jet setting which denote, respectively, the activities of playing cricket, digging tunnels, making excursions wearing a back-pack, and being a typical member of the jet set. While the suffix -ing above is used to describe activities in general, the suffix -ism has a more specialized meaning. This suffix is quite productive in connection with nouns denoting doctrines of various kinds: Buddhism, Marxism, cubism, dadaism, capitalism, socialism, and even America-Firstism, me-too-ism, flat-Earthism. (Many such nouns in -ism have a corresponding personal noun/adjective in -ist, but the correspondence is not perfect (cf. discussion on p. 90). The -ismsuffix has recently also come to be used to describe various types of discrimination, as in ableism (‘discrimination against the disabled’), ageism discrimination against the elderly’, racism, sexism. The suffix -ism has also come to be used with a more concrete meaning, i.e. ‘(typical) saying by a public figure’. With this meaning, -ism can apparently be freely added to any personal name, as for instance in Bushism, Blairism, Clintonism, Churchillism, Thatcherism, Brownism, Hitlerism, etc. The suffixes -age and -ery are often added not just to noun stems, but also to verbs and occasionally to adjectives. I comment here only on their use with noun stems. The suffix -age may be added to a noun to denote activity, amount or place. The activity meaning is predominant in e.g. brokerage ‘the activity of acting as a broker, i.e. someone who sells 86


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assets and goods for others’, parentage, patronage ‘the activity of being a parent/a patron’. The amount meaning is found in dosage ‘the amount of medicine to be given to a patient’, mileage ‘the number of miles travelled’, percentage ‘the amount or number in each hundred’, and similarly footage, voltage, wattage. Place meaning occurs in e.g. hermitage and orphanage denoting respectively the dwelling of a hermit and a home for orphans. The suffix -ery alternates in the spelling with -ry. Like -age it is used to form nouns denoting activity and place. Examples of activity meaning are banditry, crookery, dentistry, slavery, thuggery ‘the activity of being a bandit, a crook, a slave and a thug’, respectively. Recent formations are back-stabbery ‘the activity of back-stabbing’ and tycoonery ‘the activity of being a tycoon’4. There are a number of nouns in -(e)ry denoting the place where certain animals are kept, for instance piggery, rookery, snakery. The last item in this group of suffixes is -itis, a suffix with the meaning ‘inflammation or disease of what the stem denotes’, as in e.g. laryngitis ‘inflammation of the larynx’. As the example indicates, this suffix belongs to the language of medicine, and is normally attached only to bound stems. However, the suffix -itis has enjoyed considerable popularity in informal humorous constructions. In such cases it is attached to ordinary English words. In these cases, -itis has the meaning ‘excessive preoccupation with or use of what the stem denotes’ for example in creditcarditis, deadline-itis, jargonitis, televisionitis. The suffix also occurs with related but slightly different meanings: football teams have been accused of suffering from Wembleyitis—nervousness caused by the fact that they are playing at Wembley Stadium (probably in a Cup Final). According to one sports writer in The Independent 1992, teams could even suffer from Manchesteruniteditis, defined as ‘the inability to score easy goals’ The reader may wish to ponder what other attested examples like Englanditis and Westminsteritis mean.5 THE STATE OF BEING WHAT THE STEM DENOTES: -dom, -hood, -ship The suffixes -dom, -hood and -ship are all added to nouns to form new nouns denoting the state of being what the stem noun denotes. Often the very same nouns may also be used to express © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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‘collectivity’, i.e. to refer to the people who are in such a state. Examples of state meaning in -dom words are apedom ‘the state of being (as stupid as) an ape’, billionairedom, hippydom, martyrdom, officialdom and the more unusual topsy turvydom ‘the state of being topsy turvy’, i.e. in a mess. Hippydom and officialdom may also be used with collectivity meanings, and so may e.g. (football) fandom ‘people who are football fans’. In dukedom and earldom the nouns in -dom denote the rank or territory of a duke or an earl. Despite occurring in certain recent words like fandom, the suffix -dom must be said to have low productivity. Like -dom, -hood expresses either ‘state’ or ‘collectivity’. The state meaning is found in a number of established words, for instance childhood, girlhood, manhood, widowhood. This suffix is also been used in more recent formations, for example citizenhood, hermithood, outsiderhood meaning ‘the state of being a citizen, a hermit, an outsider’ It occurs with ‘collectivity’ meaning in e.g. anthood, cousinhood, officerhood6 As is well known, the -hood suffix also occurs in nouns denoting organized collectivity as when brotherhood (Brotherhood) and sisterhood (Sisterhood) are used about organizations, religious orders and the like. In comparison with -dom, -hood is fairly productive. The suffix -ship is found in nouns like e.g. apprenticeship, citizenship, dictatorship, sponsorship partisanship, leadership, friendship in which the suffix has been attached to a noun to denote the state or quality of being what the noun stem stands for. Thus apprenticeship basically means ‘the state/quality of being an apprentice’, etc. However, most of these examples may also denote the activity of being for instance an apprentice or a dictator, and also a period of time. Sometimes, ship-words denote a particular skill, as in e.g. She was praised for her leadership, and on occasion they have ‘collectivity’ meaning, as when we speak of a writer’s readership or a politician’s followership. Finally, words in -ship may also denote status or title: chairmanship, kingship, lordship. The suffix has a certain limited productivity. PERSON SOMEHOW ASSOCIATED WITH WHAT THE STEM DENOTES: -er, -an/ian, -ese, -i, -ite, -ist, -y/ie

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The suffix -er may be added to names of cities and other geographical names to refer to people who live in them. The stems may consist of more than one word. Examples of such combinations are e.g. Londoner, Dubliner, New Englander, New Yorker (but only e.g. Bostonian, San Fransiscan, Roman). The same kind of suffixation may be used with nouns denoting groups of people with certain aims and beliefs, as for example in bratpacker, jetsetter, free marketer, Americafirster. The -an/ian suffix is found in combination with many types of stems forming both nouns and adjectives. In the past, it was frequently used to name persons and things from a certain country, but this type of formation can hardly be regarded as productive in today’s English. In many cases, the suffix was not attached directly to the stem, but alternates with final -a and -ia as in America:American, Algeria:Algerian (but note exceptions like Canada:Canadian). Compare also the use of the suffix with names of cities as in San Fransisco:San Fransiscan, Paris:Parisian, Boston:Bostonian. Note that here and elsewhere, primary stress in -ian words falls on the syllable immediately preceding the suffix, while in -an words it stays in its original place. In today’s English the productive use of -an/ian is largely restricted to combinations with personal surnames and results in words that may be both adjectives and nouns. While -an is found in certain cases like Elisabethan and Lutheran ‘a person who lived at the same time as Queen Elisabeth I’ and ‘person who believes in the ideas of Luther’, the -ian suffix is much more common than -an in combinations with names7. Typical examples of nouns in -ian are Chomskyan and Darwinian ‘person who believes in the ideas of Chomsky or Darwin’, Faustian ‘person who is like Faust’, Machiavellian ‘a person who is like Machiavelli in cunning and ruthlessness’. The -ian suffix seems to be associated with a certain pompousness, which probably s for its use for comic effect in e.g. the recent—obviously rule-breaking-formation Star Warians ‘people who like the Star Wars films by G. Lucas’.8 The suffix -ese is found in many adjectives denoting nationality or other origin such as Japanese, Milanese, etc. It is also a noun suffix attached to names of countries, regions, and the like, to create other nouns denoting the language spoken in that country or region: Do © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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you speak Japanese?, My Vietnamese is a bit rusty. This use of the suffix -ese is only slightly productive. However, the suffix -ese is fairly freely used as a noun suffix to denote the jargon of certain writers, groups or types of text, as in e.g. Johnsonese ‘language typical of Dr Johnson’, bureaucratese ‘the jargon of bureaucrats’, officialese ‘the jargon of officials’, teacherese ‘the jargon of teachers’, headlinese, newspaperese. (Cf. also journalese ‘the language of journalists’, legalese ‘the language found in legal documents’, and translationese ‘the language found in translations’.) Nationality is sometimes also expressed by means of the suffix -i, as in e.g. Israeli, Pakistani, Bengali, Azerbajani, Iraqi, Kashmiri meaning both ‘from Israel, Pakistan’, etc and ‘inhabitant of Israel, Pakistan’ etc. Some of these—like e.g. Bengali, Kashmiri—may also be used with reference to the language spoken in the country. It has been observed that this type of formation seems to be restricted to countries in the East or Near-East. Since the emergence of new nations is a fairly unusual event, it is difficult to have an opinion about its productivity9. The suffix -ist is very productive. It is used to denote people who act in accordance with certain doctrines (Buddhist, socialist, flatEarthist) and people who discriminate against others (ableist, racist). In cases like these, there is commonly a corresponding form in -ism: a Buddhist adheres to Buddhism, an ableist is guilty of ableism, etc. However, there are also many -ist nouns with no corresponding nouns in -ism, for instance those denoting people playing a certain musical instrument (pianist, violinist) or specialising in certain areas of study (physicist, psychologist). As for -ite, it may be found attached to the names of politicians to denote their followers, as for instance in Blairite, Bushite, Clintonite, Thatcherite, Reaganite and also to the names of people who are the originators of a school of thought as in e.g. Chomskyite. The suffix -y (-ie) is used in informal style and may be added to a noun stem to denote somebody who is interested in and/or good at what the noun stem denotes. Thus a foodie is interested in good food and possibly a good cook, a junkie is a drug addict (junk ‘heroin’), a techie/techy is somebody who is an expert on or enthusiastic about technology’, and a winie a person interested in/knowledgeable about wine(s). The suffix can apparently also be used to refer to

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persons working for a politician or other public figure as in e.g. Bushie, Bushies (cf. also also discussion under FAMILIARITY). SEX, SIZE, STATUS: -ee, -ess, -ette, -let Suffixes denoting differences in sex, size and status are on the whole rare in English, but they do exist and their use is sometimes extended playfully to new noun stems. In certain words, female sex is expressed by the addition of the suffix -ess to a noun stem, as for instance in lioness, tigress, actress, duchess. With the exception of actress, duchess and a few others, the use of this suffix with stems denoting humans—as in e.g. authoress—is disfavoured and regarded as politically incorrect. The remaining suffixes -ee, -ette and -let are diminutive suffixes, i.e. they denote small size: a boatee is a small boat, a bootee a small boot, a kitchenette is a small-sized kitchen, a booklet a small book. Like -ess, these suffixes have low productivity: the -ette suffix recurs in e.g. cellarette, luncheonette, tycoonette, undergraduette which all seem to be the result of linguistic playfulness. A recent formation in -ette is the informal British word ladette ‘young woman with the same characteristics as a lad’ i.e. a person who drinks too much alcohol and behaves in a generally uncontrolled way’. Well-known formations in -let besides booklet are piglet and starlet. FAMILIARITY: -y/-ie As shown above, the suffix -y/ie may be added to nouns in informal style to denote people who are associated with what the stem denotes; among the examples were foodie and winie. An identical suffix is attached to nouns as a stylistic marker merely to express familiarity, informality and close community. Thus unlike the previous -y/ie suffix, this one has no definite meaning besides indicating familiarity. It may be added to noun stems as in e.g. doggy (dog), auntie (aunt), froggy (frog), drinky (drink), girlie, and also in many first names like e.g. Charlie, Johnny, Teddy. It often operates in conjunction with so-called clipping (cf. p. 159) as when breakfast becomes brekkie/brekky, television becomes telly, goalkeeper becomes goalie, and nightdress becomes nighty/nightie. © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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Nouns from adjectives: -ity, -ness, -ie, -o There are two competing suffixes here, -ity and -ness, both meaning roughly ‘the state of being what the stem denotes’as in e.g. falsity, density, reality and commonness, kindness, toughness10. The suffix -ness is one of the most productive English suffixes and basically combines with all adjective stems. It is much more productive than -ity11; in the examples above, -ness could have been used in all three -ity examples, but the reverse is not true. This is because -ity generally favours stems with a Latin or French background, while -ness has no such restrictions. The suffix -ity is particularly common after certain other suffixes like -able/-ible/-uble: reliability, reversibility, volubility. It has been pointed out12 that we often find pairs of words in -ness and -ity attached to the same stem whose differ in meaning, for instance sincereness: sincerity, productiveness: productivity, and that the forms in -ity have a more institutionalized meaning than those in -ness. Note also the difference in pronunciation: the addition of -ness to an adjective stem does not change the position of the main stress, while adding -ity moves the main word stress to the syllable immediately before the suffix (cf discussion of suffixes and stress pp. 82–83). While noun to adjective suffixation with -ity and -ness is one of the most important word-formation processes in modern English, suffixation by means of -o is considerably less significant. It has been included here since it is after all a word-formation process with a certain amount of productivity. The suffixes -ie and -o are attached to adjectives in informal English to form nouns meaning ‘person who has the characteristic denoted by the stem’. Well-known examples are cutie, ‘cute person’, smoothie ‘smooth person’, softie ‘emotional person’ dumbo ‘dumb person’, saddo ‘sad person’, fatso ‘fat person’, weirdo, w(h)acko ‘someone who is weird or w(h)acky’. The suffix -o is occasionally also found with noun stems, as in wino ‘wine alcoholic’. (Note that the well-known bimbo is not a suffixed form, but a loan from Italian).

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Nouns from verbs The creation of nouns from verbs—verb nominalization—is a central function of the noun suffixes. Although the only visible result of verb nominalization is the addition of a suffix to a verb, such formations may be regarded as abbreviated versions of a noun with a following relative clause. It is therefore reasonable to paraphrase the meaning of writer and writing syntactically in the following way: writer: a person who writes/is writing writing: activity performed by somebody who writes/is writing Writer and writing represent the two main types of verb nominalizations: those involving the ‘doer’ of the action, i.e. the agent or instrument (writer), and those denoting the activity itself and its results (writing). There is also a third less common but still active type, i.e. nominalizations denoting the ‘receiver of the action’— sometimes referred to as the patient—as in e.g. employee. The types writer and writing are also very common in combinations like letter-writer ‘person who writes/is writing letters’ and letterwriting ‘the activity involving the writing of letters’. The noun letter obviously corresponds to the direct object in the syntactic paraphrases of these nouns: a letter-writer is someone who writes (predicate verb) letters (direct object), and letter-writing is the activity of writing (predicate verb) letters (direct object). Nouns like letter-writer and letter-writing may be analysed in either of two ways On the one hand it could be argued that the suffixes -er and -ing belong to the entire noun-verb combination. In such an analyses we would assume that these words consist of a verb letterwrite and the suffix -er or the suffix -ing. The problem with such an interpretation is obviously the fact that we have to postulate a nonexisting verb *letter-write. The alternative analysis—which is the one adopted here—is to regard letter-writer and letter-writing as noun+noun compounds in which letter is combined with writer and writing, respectively. This is a more plausible analysis of letter-writer and letter-writing in that all the elements involved exist independently of each other: letter, writer and writing are perfectly normal English words. However, the compounding approach does not entirely manage to avoid the difficulties of the first analysis. Thus in words like e.g. © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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grenade-thrower and grenade-throwing, the analysis forces us to assume that there are nouns like thrower and throwing that can be combined with other nouns like grenade. In actual fact such nouns are difficult to imagine on their own: they need to be preceded by nouns like grenade, javelin, rock etc, which denote objects that are ‘throwable’. However, the second analysis is clearly preferable from the point of view that it requires us to postulate far fever ‘odd’ words than the first. Further discussion of constructions of the letter-writer and letter-writing types will be postponed until Chapter 7 which deals with compounding (but cf. the comments on sheep-stealer, book-stealer in the next section.) AGENT/INSTRUMENT NOMINALIZATIONS: -er, -or, -ant/ent The typical and by far most common agent/instrument suffix is -er, as in e.g. writer (agent) and lawn-mower (instrument). This suffix is extremely productive and can be attached to most kinds of verb stems. There are exceptions, however, for instance breathe, eat and start: a breather is not a person who breathes but a brief pause, eater would hardly ever be used on its own, and a starter is normally a small dish eaten before the main meal. Interestingly enough, agentive nouns like breather, eater, etc. become possible when they are combined with an adjective describing the way somebody breathes, eats or starts. We can thus speak of a heavy breather, a big eater and a slow starter. We are not talking here of a breather who is heavy, an eater who is big etc., but about someone who breathes heavily, eats big meals, and starts doing things slowly. Occasionally there is real ambiguity of meaning, for instance in beautiful dancer, which could mean either ‘beautiful person who dances’ or ‘person who dances beautifully’. Occasionally, -er suffixation from verbs is impossible because English already has a word expressing the meaning that the formation in -er would have had—a phenomenon known as blocking and also mentioned elsewhere. A textbook example of this is the impossible noun *stealer ‘person who steals’, whose meaning is already expressed by the word thief. Note, however, that if we specify the kind of goods a particular thief specializes in, the form stealer suddenly becomes possible, for example in compounds like sheep94


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stealer and book-stealer. (See pp. 130–31 for a discussion of the problems this raises for the analysis of compounds). Although -er is the dominant agentive suffix in English, there are cases in which it faces competition from other suffixes with the same meaning, i.e.-ant (assistant, attendant, defendant), -ent (solvent, repellent, dependent) and -or (actor, escalator, governor). The competing suffixes are all from the Latin/French part of the vocabulary and, as the examples indicate, they are generally only found with stems of the same origin. In fact, most of the words in -ant and -ent are early loans from French, and many words in –or are loans from Latin. ACTIVITY/RESULT NOUNS: -ing, -age, -al, -ation, -ion, -ment There is considerable variety among the noun suffixes denoting verbal activity and its results. The only truly productive suffix is -ing, which can be attached to all verbs to form activity nouns, as in e.g. the lowering of the prices, the company’s sacking of Mr Price. Deverbal nouns in -ing also often denote the concrete result of an activity, as in a building, a shooting and a painting but this is a considerably less productive use of the -ing suffix. The remaining suffixes above are by and large limited to Latin and French stems, as in e.g. revival, classification, inhibition, confinement. The only one among them that is fully productive is -ation, which is regularly used with verbs ending in -ise/ize (realize-realization) and also in -ify; the latter changes change -ify to -ific- before -ation (classify-classification). A variant form of -ation is -ition which turns up in certain words like inhibition, prohibition. Neither -age nor -al are productive English suffixes. The verb stems to which they are attached can in almost all cases also be nominalized by means of the suffix -ing. However, there is often a semantic difference between the ing-forms and the forms in -age and -al. Thus a form like wastage denotes loss through decay, leakage, etc, while wasting denotes the activity of wasting in general. Similarly the noun referral (from refer + -al) is often a medical term denoting the referring of a patient to a specialist, while referring is the more general activity term. Like -age and -al, the suffix -ment can hardly be claimed to be productive in modern English, although there are occasional new for-


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mations like staggerment ‘the activity of being staggered13. In most other cases, -ment occurs in established words of French origin: astonishment, accomplishment, achievement, confinement, deferment. RECEIVER OF THE ACTION: -ee In comparison with the agent/instrument meaning and the activity/result meaning, this meaning is formed on a less regular basis. It is also often stylistically deviant and considered artificial by certain speakers. Nevertheless it represents the only other possibility for nominalization and is used fairly frequently in certain written genres. The -ee suffix used to identify the ‘receiver of the action’ is found in a number of established dictionary words like employee ‘person who is employed’, evacuee ‘person who is evacuated’, lessee, nominee, and others. But it may also be fairly freely used to create new words such as the unlikely—but attested—expellees ‘people who have been expelled from a country’. Even far-fetched examples like kissee ‘the receiver of a kiss’, murderee ‘a murder victim’, flirtee, kickee, laughee have been attested.14 Somewhat confusingly, the suffix -ee may also be used with agentive meaning as in absentee, ‘person who is absent’, returnee, referee, escapee, licensee. According to one source15, this is presently its most productive use.

Adjective-forming suffixes Adjectives from nouns Among the adjective suffixes, those combining with noun stems are by far the largest group. The suffixes fall into six relatively clear semantic groups: POSSESSING, LACKING, RESEMBLING, COVERED WITH/ FULL OF, CHARACTERIZED BY, ASSOCIATED WITH/HAVING THE PROPERTIES OF There is a certain overlap among these groups; in particular it is not always easy to distinguish between the last two groups. The first five groups use Germanic suffixes while the final group uses nonGermanic suffixes (cf. Chapter 1 for ‘Germanic’ and ‘non-Germanic’). 96


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POSSESSING: -ed16 There are two kinds of possession. In the first kind, what is possessed is a natural part of the possessor. This is the possession we are talking about when we say that dogs have legs, humans have heads, arms and minds, cars have wheels, etc.17 This kind of possession— called inherent or inalienable possession—underlies a highly regular and productive type of English word-formation, exemplified by flatfooted (person), long-haired (girl), blue-eyed (boy), long-eared (donkey), white-roofed (house), four-wheeled (tractor). The adjectives in this category always contain two words ed by a hyphen, the first modifying the second. When uttered in isolation, such words often have a distinctive stress pattern in that the primary stress falls on the first syllable of the second element: flat-fóoted, blue-éyed, etc.) In the second—non-inherent—type of possession, what is owned is not part of the ‘owner’. This is the type of possession that is involved when we say, for instance, that our neighbour has two cars or that a student has three books. Possession of this kind can never be expressed by adjectives of the flat-footed, blue-eyed etc. type: it is simply not possible to speak of a *two-carred neighbour or of a *threebooked student, simply because we do not regard cars or books as natural parts of human beings. The formation of adjectives expressing inherent possession is one of the most regular and productive word-formation processes in English. As the additional—authentic—examples below indicate, the possessors do not have to be humans, and what is possessed may be anything naturally associated with the possessor18: two-legged (animal), different-haired, strong-willed, abstract-minded, blue-shirted, white-gloved, blue-helmeted, bowler-hatted, differentskinned, five-sided, three-wheeled (car), four-masted (ship), long-keeled (sailboat), shoebox-sized (flat), duck-shaped (bottle). LACKING: -less Just as there are adjectives denoting the possession of something, there are also adjectives denoting the lack of something. There is a single suffix used in creating such adjectives from nouns, i.e. -less. This suffix combines more or less freely with both concrete and abstract nouns. The following examples19 illustrate some of the range of the -less suffix: baseless (charge), breathless, boneless (beef), © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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cashless (society), childless (couple), clueless (‘without a clue’ i.e. lacking knowledge/understanding), jobless, odourless, riderless (horse), topless (swimming-suit), (scare somebody) shitless/witless, smokeless (tobacco). The suffix -less has competition from the form (-)free as in e.g. hazard-free, internet-free, leadfree and many other words. In this book, (-)free has been regarded as the second element in adjective compounds (cf. Chapter 7), but like many other such elements, it may be on its way to acquiring suffix status. RESEMBLING: -ish, -like, -ly, -y All four suffixes above are added to noun stems to create adjectives meaning ‘resembling what the noun stem denotes’, but have different productivity. The most regular among them is -like, which can in principle be added to any noun denoting humans and animals and to a good many other nouns as well. In words containing the suffix -like, the suffix-stem combinations are quite transparent: words like doglike, childlike, carlike, treelike, etc, may all mean literally ‘like a dog’, ‘like a child’ etc. Note however, that there is often a less direct meaning involved, as in e.g. He looked at me with doglike affection, which means ‘He looked at me with the kind of affection usually found in dogs’. The remaining suffixes in this group have less precise meanings and often add additional features of meaning to the new adjectives. Thus the meaning of -ish and -y is often said to be ‘somewhat like’, ‘having the characteristics of’, while -ly is said to mean ‘having the qualities of’. In actual fact it is hard to distinguish these meanings from one another. The suffix -ish often combines with ‘negative’ stems as in dandyish, fiendish, foolish, ghoulish, loutish, prudish, snobbish, sluggish, thuggish. When the stem nouns are not normally perceived as negative, the addition of -ish may suggest that they are, as in e.g. mannish, vicarish. But -ish may also have neutral meaning as in e.g. childish, girlish, boyish. It also combines with non-human stems, as in clannish, hellish, nightmarish. The suffix -y combines fairly freely with nouns denoting both humans, animals and things considered to possess characteristic features, as in for instance: bossy, catty, foxy, froggy, horsy, mousy, spidery; bricky, creamy, powdery, silvery, stony, tinny. In informal (mostly 98


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spoken) language, adjectives in -y are often modified by phrases like kind of, sort of: it looked kind of resiny/rubbery/coppery. The suffix -ly is less productive, and appears chiefly in fixed combinations denoting positive characteristics: brotherly, fatherly, manly, motherly, sisterly, soldierly, womanly. COVERED WITH/FULL OF: -y, -ful A very productive adjective-forming rule in English is the one forming adjectives meaning ‘covered with/full of what the stem denotes’ by adding the suffix -y to concrete nouns20 as in e.g. sandy, rocky, stony ‘full of/covered with sand, rocks, stones’. The rule is very sensitive to the nature of the nouns functioning as stems: it will operate only if the potential noun stem is a concrete mass noun like sand, or an inanimate, concrete, natural object like rock and stone. The rule will not operate with stems that denote man-made objects like brick and screw, nor with stems that denote animals or people (so-called animate nouns) like dog and people. Consequently, there are no adjectives *peoply ‘full of people’ or *doggy ‘full of dogs’, *bricky ‘full of bricks’ or *screwy ‘full of screws’. As we have seen, ‘coverered with/full of’ adjectives in -y generally have concrete stems. There is also a less regular type of ‘full of’ adjectivalization which attaches the suffix -ful to abstract noun stems, as in e.g. joyful, painful, regretful, stressful, thoughtful. CHARACTERIZED BY: -y The adjective-forming suffix -y is very productive. In addition to the meanings described earlier, it also appears with the somewhat vague meaning ‘characterized by’ and ‘having the characteristics of’. ittedly, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between adjectives with ‘characterised by’ meanings and those with ‘full of/ covered with’ meanings. The stems to which -y is added are mostly nouns, but it also turns up in combination with verbs, and occasionally even with adjectives. Combinations with noun stems are the most productive type, and especially in informal spoken English, it is easy to get the impression that almost any noun stem may be involved. However, there seems to be a preponderance of short Germanic words Examples: ballsy ‘possessing balls’ i.e. ‘bold’ courageous’, brainy ‘charac© Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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terised by brains = intelligence’, classy ‘having/characterised by class’, gutsy ‘having/ characterised by guts, i.e. courage’, panicky ‘characterised by panic’, smelly ‘having/characterised by a strong smell’, trafficky ‘characterised by (lots of) traffic, touristy ‘having/ characterised by (lots of) tourists’. HAVING THE PROPERTIES OF/ASSOCIATED WITH: -al/ial, an/ian, -ese, -esque, -ic, -ite, -ous All the suffixes above may be found in adjectives formed from nouns having the rather vague meaning ‘having the properties of’ or the even vaguer meaning ‘associated with’. Stylistically, these adjective suffixes are more formal than those discussed earlier and they have a tendency to occur in combination with stems from Latin and/or French. For the stress changes caused by these suffixes, see pp. 81–83. Note that -al/ial, -an/ian, -ese and -ite have homonyms used to form nouns (see pp. 88–89 in the present chapter). The adjective suffix -al appears mainly in Latin and French adjectives like accidental, dialectal, formal. It has the form -ial after the noun suffix -or as in editorial, professorial and the form -ical when alternating with a final -y suffix in word pairs like philosophy: philosophical, psychology: psychological. Its productivity is uneven. Adjectival -an and -ian are like their noun-forming counterparts in most respects. Thus in the overall distribution of these forms, -ian is much more common than -an, and if we disregard nationality adjectives like American, Brazilian etc, the productive use of the suffix is largely restricted to combinations with personal surnames. Since -ian is by far the commonest form, my examples will be limited to words with that suffix.Note that in words in -ian, primary stress falls on the syllable immediately preceding the suffix. Thus a word like e.g. Dickensian is pronounced [d kenziən]. Adjectival -ian is typically found in words expressing what is characteristic of a certain person: Chomskian/Darwinian ideas are ideas typical of Chomsky and Darwin and their schools of though, a Clintonian approach to economics is one characteristic of Clinton. Other examples of this quite productive type of word-formation are Byronian, Caesarian, Churchillian, Cromwellian, Dickensian, Machiavellian, Orwellian, Stravinskian, Wordsworthian. When royalty is involved, first names may also be used as stems, cf. Arthurian, Edwardian, Victorian. 100


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The -ian suffix seems to prefer stems of more than one syllable, although there are examples with monosyllabic stems like e.g. Bachian [bɑ kiən] and Wellsian ‘in the manner/style of Bach/Wells’. As pointed out on p. 89, the suffix -ese is fairly productive when used to create nouns denoting the jargon of certain writers, groups of people or types of text, as in Johnsonese, officialese, etc. The adjectival suffix -ese is chiefly used to form adjectives linked to placenames as in Japanese, Genoese, Burmese, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Cantonese etc. Although the number of such adjectives is quite high, this use of -ese can hardly be claimed to be productive. The suffix -esque means roughly ‘in the manner/style of’ and is used with a certain amount of freedom mainly together with names of prominent artists: Kafkaesque, Daliesque, Danteesque, Kiplingesque, Hornbyesque, but it has competition from many other suffixes, mainly -ian, cf. e.g. Orwellian, Huxleyan, Wagnerian, Lodgian. The suffix -esque is less common than its competitors: it is often used for stylistic effect, as in the e.g.: ‘… something Ludlumesquely titled “The Vienna Project”21. The suffix -ic is common in adjectives of mostly Latin origin like atomic, idyllic, poetic. Sometimes -ic may be replaced by -ical without any change in meaning. However, in a few cases words in -ic and -ical differ in meaning: economic ‘to do with the economy’: economical ‘money-saving’, historic ‘famous’: historical ‘on record in history’, classic ‘great, memorable’;: classical ‘classical music, classical languages’, electric ‘powered by electricity’: electrical ‘relating to electricity’. The -ic suffix is productive in combination with Latin stems in scientific English. The suffix -ite is more common as a noun suffix than as an adjective suffix: words like Blairite, Clintonite, Thatcherite, Trotskyite are more likely to be nouns meaning ‘follower/er of Blair etc’ than adjectives. This suffix is less common than its competitor -an/ ian. The suffix -ous is found in a number of words like e.g. adventurous, envious, furious, humorous, venomous. These words look as if they were combinations of present-day English elements (adventure + -ous, etc.), but most, if not all, of these were borrowed from French during the Middle English period. The suffix -ous is also common in loans featuring bound stems, particularly in words taking -ion as a noun ending. As a result, there are plenty of pairs like e.g. ambition: © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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ambitious, caution: cautious, oblivion: oblivious, religion: religious, suspicion: suspicious. Although many of the -ous adjectives are examples of loans from French, there are adjectives in -ous in which the suffix has been attached to free English noun stems, for instance libel(l)ous ‘containing/constituting a libel’ (a libel is a false claim damaging to a person’s reputation), murderous and mountainous. On the whole, however, the productivity of -ous in modern English must be described as weak.

Adjectives from adjectives: -ish There is one adjective suffix that combines productively with adjectives, i.e. -ish meaning ‘somewhat’: brownish, blueish, coldish, tallish. In this connection mention should be made of the use of -ish in approximations of age and time such as sixtyish, forty-fivish ‘about sixty/forty-five years old’ and sevenish, twelvish ‘about seven/twelve o’clock’. Note also earlyish, latish ‘somewhat early/late’, which function both as adjectives and adverbs.

Adjectives from verbs: -able, -ive, -y The only adjective-forming suffix combining freely with verbs is -able. The meaning of -able is ‘that can be V-ed’ or ‘that should be V-ed’ (where V stands for the actual verb stem involved). Thus if something is doable, it can be done, and if a book is readable, it should be read or is worth reading. Other examples are allowable, answerable, manageable, predictable, watchable (TV programmes), workable (policy). The suffix -able is occasionally also found in combination with phrases: if something is said to be get-at-able it is accessible, and if a book reviewer calls a book unputdownable it is claimed to be so absorbing that it cannot be put down. (Obviously unputdownable is a stylistically special word, but it shows what can be done with -able by a determined writer of English). Another common suffix forming adjectives from verbs is -ive. The meaning of -ive is ‘that Vs’ or ‘that can V’: a connective word is a word that connects or can connect, if you are ive, you . 102


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However, it is rare for -ive to combine productively with verbs in today’s English, and the relation between verb stem and suffix is often less straightforward than in words in -able. A possessive person, for instance, is not just somebody who possesses something, but a person showing a strong desire to own things. The majority of adjectives in -ive are earlier loans from French (abortive) and words formed from Latin elements. The difference between -able and -ive also extends to the company they keep: -able combines with both Germanic words and words with other origins, while -ive cannot be attached to words of Germanic origin. In addition, -ive triggers spelling and pronunciation changes in the stems to which it is added, while -able does not (see pp. 82–84). Thus e.g. conclude and repel may combine with both suffixes, but the final results are different: cf. concludable and repellable vs. conclusive and repulsive. The third and final adjective suffix attached to verbs is -y, meaning ‘inclined to V’, ‘tending to V’. Thus if somebody is chatty he/she is inclined to chat, a jumpy person is nervous i.e. inclined to jump etc. Other examples are flirty, gossipy, leaky, runny (as in a runny nose), sticky, twitchy, wobbly. This is a quite productive suffix, characteristically found in informal English.

Verb-forming suffixes Verbs from nouns and adjectives: -ify, -ise/ize The formation of new verbs in English is mostly handled by means of conversion (for which see Chapter 6) and back-formation (Chapter 9). However there are two common verb-forming suffixes in present-day English, i.e. -ise (-ize) and -ify that are attached to both adjective and noun stems Verbs formed from adjectives by means of -ise/-ize all have the meaning ‘turn something into what the stem denotes’, for example Americanise, centralise, criminalise, equalise, formalise, legalise, marginalise, modernise, tenderise ‘make (meat) tender’. This is sometimes also the meaning when the suffix is attached to nouns, for example © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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in vaporise and victimise. But in many cases the verbs formed from nouns have less simple and predictable meanings. Thus symbolise means ‘act as a symbol’, hospitalise mean ‘put into hospital’, and dieselise means something like ‘convert to diesel-powered power’. The recent formations computerise and itemise mean ‘convert to a computer-operated system’ and ‘present data as a list of individual items’. The suffix -ise/-ize is also sometimes added to place-names, creating words meaning ‘make something like that place’ in Balkanise, Israelise, Londonise, for instance. There are also more unorthodox uses of -ise/-ize, as for instance in the monarchy has Diana-ised itself 22 recently found in a major British newspaper. The suffix -ify has the same meanings as -ize, but is less common. It is found with adjective stems in e.g. amplify, simplify and with nouns in beautify, gasify, personify. On occasion, -ify is used with a pejorative meaning, for example in speechify ‘make long and useless speeches’.

Adverb-forming suffixes Adverbs from adjectives: -ly There are few adverb-forming suffixes in English, but there is little doubt that one of them is the most productive English suffix of all, i.e. the suffix -ly, which is added to adjectives, typically to form manner adverbs. Thus adverbs in -ly are formed not only from morphologically simple adjectives like brave, nice and slow, but also from participial adjectives, for example in The professor was charmingly inaccurate, The film is killingly funny, a jaw-droppingly ambitious project, She was unashamedly frank about it, an outspokenly honest .23 There are few constraints on the use of adverb-forming -ly The best known one is formal: as a rule, -ly is not attached to adjective stems that themselves end in ly. For this reason it is rare to find manner adverbs like kindlily (kindly+-ly) or friendlily (friendly + -ly). Obviously there is also a semantic constraint: manner adverbs are normally only formed from adjectives used to describe acts, actions 104


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and processes. Adjectives with other meanings hardly ever form manner adverbs: we are not likely to come across manner adverbs like *bluely, *deadly or *navally (but note that there is an adjective deadly)24. Not all adverbs in -ly have ‘manner’ meaning. Such adverbs are also formed fairly freely from all sorts of adjectives to express the meaning ‘with regard to’, for instance in basically, economically ‘with regard to basic/economic matters’, and even navally ‘with regard to naval matters’, ‘from a naval point of view’ as in e.g. Navally, that makes a lot of sense. Compare also adverbs like honestly, fortunately, regretfully expressing different speaker attitudes, as in Honestly, I don’t find it very exciting, I never replied, fortunately and Regretfully, he died last year.

Adverbs from nouns A number of suffixes serve to create adverbs from nouns, chief among them -fashion, -style, -wise and -ward(s). IN THE MANNER OF: -fashion, -style, -wise The suffixes -fashion, -style and -wise have the meaning ‘in the manner of what the noun stem denotes’, as in e.g. She advanced towards us crab-fashion (crabwise) and He dresses bank-manager style. The productivity of these suffixes is limited. IN THE DIRECTION OF: -ward(s) The suffix -ward(s) has the meaning ‘in the direction of’ and is found in a small number of adverbs like outward(s), inward(s), homeward(s). These are all established words and do not represent a productive use of -ward(s), however. What productive use this suffix has occurs in combination with noun stems, like earthwards, heavenwards, skywards. WITH REGARD TO: -wise When added to nouns, the suffix -wise is also used to express meanings like ‘with regard to’ or ‘regarding’. This apparently quite pro© Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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ductive use of the suffix is found in e.g. It makes no difference, energywise, Teamwise, were much less impressive than two years previously. Have we solved the situation carwise?

Exercises 1 As Chapter 5 shows, there are many homonymous derivational suffixes in English. How many are there in Chapter 5? Are certain forms more prone to be homonymous than others? 2 What are the characteristics of productive derivational suffixes? On what grounds is e.g. -th declared to be ‘dead’? 3 Where does the main stress fall in the following pairs and triplets of words and why does it fall where it does? Johnson: Johnsonesque, Eton: Etonian, racket: racketeer, author: authorize: authority: authorization, history: historic. 4 What is the difference between the two suffixes -ful discussed in this chapter? Can you find other examples of words with these two suffixes? 5 What is the pronunciation of word-final -sion in derision, implosion, propulsion, transmission? Can the pronunciation of -sion be predicted? 6 Several types of -ese suffix are discussed in this chapter? Which of them is productive? 7 The function of the -y/ie suffix in e.g. auntie, doggy, nightie is rather different from the functions/meanings of most other English derivational suffixes. Can you explain how -y/ie differs from the others and can you find further examples of this suffix? 8 How productive would you say that the suffixes -er and -ee really are? Can you find instances of verbs which do not appear to take these suffixes at all?

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9 Explain the conditions that have to be met by nouns taking part in hyphenated adjectivalization of the flat-footed and fourwheeled kind. 10 Explain the conditions that have to be met by nouns forming adjectives meaning ‘full of’, ‘covered with’ by adding the adjectival -y suffix.


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6 Conversion

General characteristics of conversion It is common knowledge that English nouns denoting instruments, tools, and the like may be used as verbs to describe the process of applying the instrument in typical fashion. Thus we phone, fax or email other people, just as we hammer in a nail and saw a hole in a wall. In the case of hammer and saw, it has been possible to use them both as nouns and as verbs for more than 500 years. But phones, faxes and emails have not been around for that long. The fact that nouns denoting such recently invented instruments may be used with the same verb meanings as hammer and saw indicates that we are dealing with an established word-formation process. The process in question is usually called conversion1, but the zero derivation and functional shift may also be found. The transformation of instrument nouns to so-called instrumental verbs illustrated above is only one example of the use of conversion: as will soon become clear, the conversion process may involve many other meanings as well. What all instances of conversion have in common is the fact that they change the word-class hip of a word without formal change. Conversion operates on all word-classes, but is particularly common between nouns and verbs: as we saw in Chapter 3, it has been suggested that ‘there is no noun in English that can’t be verbed2, and even if that is an exaggeration, it is probably true that the majority of (at least) the concrete nouns in English can also be used as verbs.3 Although conversion typically operates on words from the open word classes, i.e. nouns, adjectives and verbs, it sometimes also uses words from the closed word classes as input, as for example when the adverbs up and down are converted to verbs in e.g. They immediately upped the price, Several enemy aircraft have been downed, but by © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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and large this is a less important aspect of conversion. There are also instances of items from the open word classes that have been converted to closed, for instance the prepositional use of present participles like concerning, regarding, as in e.g. Do we have a problem concerning/regarding money? Conversion takes both simple, derived, and compound words as input. In the case of derived words, it may overrule the word-class identification provided by suffixes. Thus the presence of the noun suffix -ion does not prevent words like e.g. caution and commission from being used as verbs as in e.g. The prime minister cautioned against tax increases, The new office building was commissioned yesterday. There are many examples of conversion from compounds, for example the verbs to bottom-line and to cold-shoulder (other spellings may be found) from the compound nouns bottom line and cold shoulder discussed on p. 114 in this chapter. Occasionally, conversion operates on parts of grammatical constructions as in He is an also-ran, Don’t you my good man me.

Productivity in conversion If the productivity of conversion is measured only in of wordclass change, this type of word-formation is close to 100% productive, in particular when it involves the open word classes. Thus most nouns may be used as verbs, a great many verbs may be used as nouns and adjectives can be turned into nouns and into verbs. But in order to be considered truly productive, conversion must also produce an output with predictable meaning. There are many conversion patterns for which this is in fact the case, like e.g. the conversion to verbs of nouns denoting instruments and tools. These verbs always have one and the same meaning, i.e. ‘to use the instrument or tool in typical fashion’: to fax is to use a fax to send messages and to hammer is to use a hammer (or a hammer-like instrument) to drive in nails. In fact, conversion works only because it can be safely assumed that speakers have a certain knowledge of the world that will help him/her understand a new converted word. Thus even speakers who have not previously encountered the verbs to fax or to vat will 110


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be able to interpret these new words correctly by applying his/her knowledge of how (the referents of) the nouns fax and vat are normally used: faxes are typically used to send messages and vats are typically used to store wine and other alcoholic beverages. We may conclude from this that conversion must be described in of certain broad categories of meaning reflecting the speakers’ perception of the world4. That is the basis of all descriptions of conversion and it will be the basis of the outline of productive English conversion offered below. However, far from all instances of conversion produce words that can be immediately understood. As in the case of derivation and compounding, conversion may also be used to name or label new phenomena. In such cases the meaning of the new word cannot be predicted from our knowledge the world. As an example, consider the noun to verb conversion from the noun carpet discussed in Chapter 3. Given the knowledge we have about carpets, we are fully prepared for the normal meaning of the verb i.e. ‘to provide (a room) with a carpet’. What we are not prepared for is the meaning it has in e.g. Hugh was carpeted by his boss meaning ‘Hugh was severely reprimanded by his boss’. As the following sections will show, conversion is frequently intentionally used to create such new words with non-predictable meaning.

Productive English conversion patterns Conversion from noun to verb There is a fairly stable set of meanings expressed by verbs converted from nouns, i.e. PUT IN/ON, PROVIDE WITH, REMOVE FROM, USE INSTRUMENT DENOTED BY STEM, TRAVEL BY/SEND BY, ACT AS/LIKE, CHANGE INTO. PUT IN/ON (LOCATION, STORAGE) Verbs with the meaning ‘put in/on’ are frequently formed from nouns denoting containers: we bottle, can, tin, and vat food or wine in order to preserve it or treat it, and we pot plants. We can also bag and box something; in addition we can corner somebody, garage the car and position a building. The meaning is sometimes figurative, as © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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in e.g. file a complaint, market a project and dustbin (a plan or a project). Figurative meaning is especially common when the startingpoint for the conversion process is a compound: if we blacklist or fastlane/fasttrack somebody, it is only figuratively that we put them on the black list or in the fast lane/track. PROVIDE WITH Examples of ‘provide with’ meanings are e.g. carpet (a room), wallpaper (a room), wall (off) an area, arm the people, fuel (up) a car, plaster a wall, line a coat, floor a room and roof a house. Typically there is an obvious and expected connection between the thing that is provided and the space that is provided with it. To carpet or wallpaper a room is natural in most English-speaking cultures. It would be considerably less natural to carpet or wallpaper a car or a safe. REMOVE FROM Noun to verb conversion with this meaning is only possible with nouns denoting entities that are by definition part of a certain type of ‘owner’ (a relation called inherent or inalienable possession in Chapter 5). As examples of such inherently possessed nouns we may mention bark (by definition part of a tree) and shell (by definition part of e.g. nuts, peas, mussels). In exceptional cases, such inherently possessed entities may be removed from their owners: we may take away the bark from a tree or the shell from a nut. It is such cases that the ‘remove from’ verbs are used to describe. If there is no inherent possession involved, the meaning of the new verb will be of the ‘provide with’ type. Further examples of the ‘remove from’ type of conversion is found in constructions like to core an apple ‘remove the core from an apple’, bone a fish, skin an animal, top a tree, brain an animal. There is a limited need for such verbs and the pattern can hardly be claimed to be very productive. In addition, this conversion type has competition from prefixes like like un-, de- and dis- discussed in Chapter 4. USE INSTRUMENT DENOTED BY STEM IN TYPICAL FASHION Verbs with this meaning—also known as instrumental verbs—can be created fairly freely. Most nouns denoting tools and instruments 112


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may serve as starting-points for such verbs. The meanings of the verbs are always tied to the prototypical use of the instrument: thus to hammer means ‘to hit with a hammer’ or ‘to hit as if with a hammer’; if you use the hammer to, say, scratch you back, you cannot be said to have hammered it. Other instrumental verbs are drill, saw, chisel, sandpaper, file (‘make wood smooth by means of a file’). Instrumental verbs have also been formed from a vast number of nouns denoting more recent instruments, as in e.g. sledgehammer, steamroller, keyboard, videotape, radio, telephone, brake. They have also been formed from nouns denoting body parts as in e.g. He headed the ball into the net, She elbowed her way to the front; cf. also the less straightforward finger, stomach. One peculiarity of verbs formed from nouns denoting tools and instruments is the fact that the original tool/instrument need not always be involved. It is thus perfectly possible to say e.g. He hammered the table with his shoe or She sawed a hole in the wall with her false teeth. To provide for such cases, we need to qualify the definition of instrumental verbs into something like ‘use instrument or something like it in typical fashion’. (Cf. also Ljung 1976) TRAVEL BY/SEND BY The verbs in the TRAVEL BY/GO BY category are closely related to the instrumental verbs. As their name indicates, they have to do with means of transportation and include verbs like bicycle, canoe, motor meaning ‘go by bicycle, etc.’, and also chopper ‘send/go by helicopter’, mail ‘send by mail’. Sometimes the connection with the original noun has been lost. A case in point is the verb ship, which means simply ‘send goods to buyer by whatever means available’, i.e. no actual ship need be involved. On of this it is not uncommon to encounter sentences like The article you ordered was shipped on Feb. 22 by first class mail. There is also an intransitive verb as in The new version will ship in a month or two. ACT AS/LIKE The meaning ‘act as/like’ is found in both transitive and intransitive converted verbs. Thus you may bully (somebody), pilot (a plane), host (a meeting)‘act as host for’, chair (a meeting) ‘act as chairperson for’, police (a meeting), referee (a football match). © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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Intransitive uses are found in e.g. to lord (it over the others) ‘act in a superior and domineering manner’ and to swan (around) ‘move about in a casual and relaxed way typically perceived as irresponsible or ostentatious by others.5 The notion of ‘acting as/like somebody or something’ is a vague one and it is sometimes not easy to understand just what it means, as in the cases of e.g. badger (somebody) ‘repeatedly and annoyingly ask someone to do something’, ferret (out something) ‘search tenaciously for something’. Although not highly productive, the ‘act as/like’ pattern is still available for new formations. CHANGE INTO Straightforward examples of converted verbs with ‘change into’ meaning are easy to find: cash (a cheque), wreck (a car), remainder (books), bundle (one’s clothes), slice (a melon). Often a figurative meaning creeps in as an alternative to the literal one. The verb trash, for instance, may mean ‘change into trash’, ‘wreck’, but it can also mean ‘criticize severely’ in both British and American English. The British English verb rubbish, on the other hand, is used only with the meaning ‘criticize severely’. The ‘change into’ pattern has limited productivity and faces competition from suffixed verbs in -ize/-ise like atomize and carbonise. OTHER MEANINGS IN NOUN TO VERB CONVERSION In addition to the categories of meaning above, many verbs converted from nouns have meanings that are less predictable than those found in most of the examples above. One example among many is the verb to bottom-line, converted from the compound noun bottom line, originally used to denote the final result of a balance sheet. The noun soon took on the additional meaning ‘outcome’, ‘final result’. Using that meaning as input, conversion set in, producing the verb to bottom-line meaning ‘explain/sum up the final outcome of’. (Note that both the noun and the verb have primary stress on the second element.) Other examples include the transitive cold-shoulder ‘be unfriendly to someone’ (I was cold-shouldered by my old friends), exodus ‘force many people to leave’ (They decided to exodus the city), fastlane/fasttrack ‘give priority to’ (We had to fasttrack the project), leaflet ‘distrib114


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ute leaflets’ (Different political groups were leafleting the neighbourhood), mainstream ‘bring into line with mainstream practice’ (Try to mainstream your thinking), statement ‘send out information about bank ’ (Service charges will be statemented every month) top ‘exceed’ (Losses are said to top £100 this year). Personal names may be involved, as in Are you trying to Joan of Arc me?6 meaning ‘Are you trying to kill me by setting fire to me’? There are also many intransitive examples of noun to verb conversion like audition ‘perform at an audition for a role in a play’ (I once auditioned for a minor role in Hamlet), dialogue (with) ‘take part in a conversation’ (We are not willing to dialogue with them), grandstand ‘attempt to attract favourable attention’ (a grandstanding actor), interface with ‘interact with’, ‘establish with’ (We wish to interface with the world), network ‘interact with people’ (They network with other females), peak ‘reach a highest point’ (Interest rates will peak at 7.5 per cent), platform ‘stop’ [of trains] (This train doesn’t platform at Oxford’)

Conversion from verb to noun Conversion from verb to noun is considerably less productive than conversion going in the opposite direction. However, there are certain clear semantic trends, i.e. the tendency to create nouns denoting ACTIVITY/INSTANCE/RESULT and AGENT/INSTRUMENT. (Note that verb to noun conversion involving stress shift as in e.g. a túrn-off from turn óff will be dealt with under partial conversion.) ACTIVITY/INSTANCE/RESULT The most productive type of verb to noun conversion is that producing nouns denoting the activity described by the verb, a single instance of the activity, or the result of that activity (it is often impossible to distinguish between these): a fight may be the activity of fighting (She was wounded during the fight), a cut may be both an instance of cutting (He divided the loaf with a single cut of his knife) and the result of cutting (Her arms had several cuts). Other examples here are nouns like bite, bow, cut, fling, go, leak, look, pee, spin, try, walk most often found in phrases like take a bite, give a bow, have a fling, take a leak, take a look, have a pee, go for a spin (in the car), have © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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a try/go, go for a walk. Other examples include (some) sleep/rest, an attempt, a display, a show. Many of the examples above are of long standing and have been in the language for hundreds of years. However, verb to noun conversion is an ongoing activity, and there are many recent examples of the process. One of them is the noun take as in e.g. She has her own take on things meaning ‘She has her own approach to things’. Another somewhat more involved example of verb-to-noun conversion is the noun spin, created by conversion from the homonymous verb. The sense of the verb is that found in sports texts, i.e. ‘to cause a ball to rotate by giving it a twist’. As could be expected, this verb was soon converted to a noun with the regular meaning ‘activity/instance/result of spinning’, as in e.g. The ball had a lot of spin. The noun spin was subsequently borrowed into the language of politics with a slightly different meaning, i.e. ‘the (often favourable) interpretation put on political events’. Spin-giving in this sense soon developed into a flourishing business, with experts known as spin doctors. AGENT/INSTRUMENT As shown previously, the most common way of forming agent and instrument nouns is by adding the suffix -er (and sometimes other suffixes like -ant, -ent and -or) to a verb: somebody who writes is a writer, etc. In a small way, the same meaning may be expressed by conversion as in a bore (‘a boring person’), a cheat (‘a person who cheats’), a snitch (‘a person who informs on others’).

Other types of conversion In addition to the noun-to-verb and verb-to-noun conversions discussed above, there is also conversion involving other word classes. The most important of these is the conversion of participial forms of verbs to adjectives in -ed and -ing creating forms like (very) astonished, (highly) irritated, (quite) amusing, (absolutely) hair-raising.7 There are also less productive and regular types of conversion, i.e. conversion of adjectives to nouns, of adjectives to verbs, conversion involving closed word classes, and conversion based on phrases. 116


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Examples of adjective to noun conversion are: a bitter/two bitters = pint(s) of bitter, a daily/two dailies, a weekly/two weeklies, a friendly/two friendlies (non-competitive game or match), a white/two whites, a nasty/two nasties (‘an unpleasant or dangerous thing’). Very occasionally participial adjectives in -ed may be converted to nouns. A recent example of this is found in the newspaper headline US steps up efforts to win over ‘undecideds’8. Conversion from adjective to verb is fairly common. It is found in established examples like calm, dry, slow, empty, black, smooth, clean. All these converted verbs have meanings that are predictable from the meanings of the adjectives involved. This need not be the case, however: consider the verb total, converted from the homonymous adjective, for example. Total (v) has the predictable meanings ‘add up to’ as in His earnings total £50, 000 and ‘add together’ as in total one’s receipts. However, it may also mean ‘destroy a vehicle completely’ (particularly in American English) as in My car was totalled on the highway yesterday. Conversion from closed word-classes: on occasion prepositions/ adverbs are turned into verbs as in She upped and left, They downed the aircraft. A more recent example is out ‘reveal the homosexuality of somebody’ as in The mayor was outed in the local newspaper. There is also at least one case of conversion from a modal auxiliary, i.e. A visit to the royal torture chamber is a must. Conversion from phrases includes e.g. I was just an also-ran and now I’m a has-been, in the word wannabe (‘want to be’) used about people who want to be famous and successful and others like e.g We left a message on a post-it.

Partial conversion At the beginning of this chapter, conversion was defined as a type of word-formation involving no formal change in the word it operates on. Rather contradictorily, linguists sometimes also use the term ‘partial conversion’ to describe word class change that is accompanied by formal change. Partial conversion is used in three such cases:


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In a very limited number of noun-to-verb changes, there is accompanying pronunciation and/or spelling change: from the noun shelf we form a verb shelve ‘(figuratively) put on the shelf’: the -f is voiced to -v(e). In the same way, the verbs use, abuse, house have a final voiced -s, while the nouns have final voiceless -s. In British English there is also a difference in the spelling between the nouns licence and practice, and the verbs license and practise. (In American English, the spellings are license and practice for both noun and verb). Conversion from verb to noun may also be accompanied by stress shift, especially in British English. Thus a limited number of words have word-final stress as verbs, but initial stress as nouns, for example addict (verb [ə dkt], noun [ dkt]), attribute (verb [ə trbju t], noun [ trbju t]), import (verb [m pɔ t], noun [ mpɔ t]), intercept (verb [ntə sept], noun [ ntəsept]), transfer (verb [trnsfə ], noun [ trnsfə ] 9. The same difference is found in nouns converted from verbs with the productive prefix re-‘again’, ‘anew’, like rewrite, re-sit, re-take (an exam), which have nominalizations taking primary stress on the prefix re-. These shifts in stress placement are found above all in British English, while American English sometimes places the stress on the first element of the word in both nouns and verbs. The only regularly productive type of partial conversion is the one turning phrasal verbs into nouns (for phrasal verb cf. Chapter 2). In this process, primary stress, which lies on the second element (the particle) in phrasal verbs, is moved to the first element i.e. the verb itself. Accordingly, when phrasal verbs like drop óut, push úp, put dówn, take óut are converted to nouns, they change their stress pattern to dróp-out, púsh-up, pút-down, and táke-out. There is also often a spelling difference in that the nouns are hyphenated as in push-up, or written as a single word, as in the case of slowdown.10 Sometimes the meaning of such nouns is fairly predictable; a person who drops out of school—or some other organized activity—is a dróp-out. A similar fairly regular correspondence between the verb and noun meanings is also found in e.g. slow down:slowdown, pay off: pay-off, cut out:cut-out. But it is very common for verb-to-noun conversions accompanied by stress shift to result in nouns with meanings not found in the original phrasal verb. It is generally possible, for instance, to 118


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push up or put down a number of things, but the nouns púsh-up and pút-down can only be used with reference to an exercise for strengthening arm muscles and a critical and humiliating remark, respectively. Likewise the verb melt down could be used about e.g. a snowman or an ice statue, but the noun melt-down can only be used about an accident in a nuclear reactor.

Exercises 1 What are the similarities and the differences between conversion and derivational suffixation? 2 Why is it claimed that truly productive conversion is based on assumptions about people’s perceptions of the world? 3 What is the labelling function of conversion and how does it differ from what was previously called ‘productive’ conversion? 4 What is the difference between the nouns taking part in ‘provide with’ conversion and ‘remove from’ conversion? 5 How does the conversion of instrumental nouns to verbs work? Can you find exceptions to this pattern in the form of instrument-denoting nouns that refuse to take part in this kind of conversion? 6 What kind of conversion has affected the words printed in bold in the following sentences? Who is paying for the eats? This program will graph the tables. Bruce is a real swot. What you say dovetails with what we already know. The demand for their products has almost flatlined. The unmicrowavability of these French fries is well known11 Note that in addition to conversion, some of the examples above have also been affected by other word-formation processes. 7 Consider the underlined forms in the following examples: a sandstorm, a Chicago mobster, a let-us-all-be-friends smile. Should these items be regarded as adjectives formed by conversion? If not, how do you suggest that the above forms are best ed for? (Cf. p. 200). © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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8 In a white ‘a white person’, a Red ‘a communist’, the adjectives white and red have been converted to nouns denoting people with certain characteristics linked to the meaning of the adjective. Can you find other adjectives that may be converted to nouns denoting persons? 9 The term partial conversion is really a contradiction in . Can you think of other—and perhaps better—ways of ing for the word-formation described under this heading. 10 If—as suggested in this chapter—participial adjectives like astonished and amusing are regarded as cases of conversion from verb to adjective, how do you suggest we explain the fact that a form like e.g. painting is found both as a verb (She was painting the wall) and as a noun (Hang the painting in the corner, His painting is getting worse and worse)?

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7 Compounding

General characteristics of compounding

1

In previous chapters we have discussed how words (lexemes) may be turned into new words (lexemes) by the addition of prefixes and suffixes, or simply by being converted to a new word class and meaning without outward change. In the present chapter we will discuss another, very productive, word-formation type known as compounding, which combines two or more words into a new word known as a compound. The great majority of compounds belong to the open word classes. The largest and most varied category is that of the noun compounds, like for example textbook and blackboard, the second largest contains adjective compounds like childproof, accident-prone and breath-taking. There are few verb and adverb compounds. Most verbs that seem to be compound have in fact been formed by backformation (see pp. 161–162) or conversion. The majority of apparent compound adverbs are really suffixal derivations formed by attaching the suffix -ly to compound adjectives of the breath-taking type. Compounds belonging to the closed word classes are not as a rule created productively by speakers. As the examples in the previous paragraph show, compounds are usually made up of two words, of which the second (called the head) determines the word class and general category of the compound as a whole, while the first (the modifier) explains what kind of head we are talking about. Compounds of this type are said to be endocentric, which means that semantically the compound as a whole is an extension—or a sub-class—of the head: a textbook is a book of a certain kind, a person who is accident-prone is prone to have accidents, etc. The discussion in the rest of this chapter will focus almost exclusively on the endocentric compounds. © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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The tree-diagram below indicates how the compounds blackboard, textbook and accident-prone are analysed into modifier and head. Compound

Modifier

Head

black text accident

board book prone

The positions as modifier (first element) and head (second element) are open to all words, i.e. it is not the case that certain words may be used only as modifiers and certain others only as heads. In a compound like textbook, for instance, text happens to be the modifier and book the head, but nothing stops us from reversing that order and producing the compound book text, if that is a meaning we want to express. However, it so happens that certain words have meanings that make them particularly useful as heads, making them occur more and often in that function. In certain cases, this may be the beginning of a grammaticalization process with the end result that the word in question is transformed into a suffix, i.e. a bound form. As suffixes, the former words typically undergo semantic specialisation and loss of stress. The history of English provides several examples of such developments, for example the suffixes -hood, -ly and -dom, as in childhood, friendly and kingdom. The suffix -hood goes back to the Old English word had ‘state, rank’, -ly is a development of Old English lic ‘body’, and -dom was originally a word meaning ‘judgement, rule’. Developments of this kind are by no means confined to history, but are an integral part of the overall process of change forever going on in all human languages. In today’s English, for instance, certain nouns have begun to develop suffix-like qualities and may be regarded as ‘pseudo-suffixes’. A well-known example of this pattern, which goes as far back as the Old English period, is (-)man (as in policeman, businessman, congressman, etc. In many but not all of 122


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its uses, -man is phonologically marked in that it has lost its word stress and is pronounced [mən]. Semantically the meaning of -man is specialised in that it is used to refer to people belonging to a certain profession or occupation (denoted by the stem). For a long time it was taken for granted that the representatives of these professions etc were all male, but in recent years a distinction between the sexes has been made possible by the introduction of forms like policewoman, congresswoman, etc. A later development is the introduction of sex-neutral forms in -person, sometimes providing a choice between three different forms, two of them sex-explicit and one sex-neutral, for example chairman/chairperson/chairwoman, salesman/salesperson/saleswoman, spokesman/spokesperson/spokeswoman. Two recent pseudo-suffixes are -babble and -speak. They are both used to describe the kind of language typically used by certain groups of people, but also indicate that the speaker takes a critical view of both the group and their language (especially in the case of -babble). Among the examples of -babble and -speak formations we find academic-babble, counselling-babble, hippie-babble, agent-speak, business-school-speak, Bush-speak, City-speak, Foreign Office-speak. In addition to being added to stems that are words, both -babble and -speak are also often attached to bound classical stems, as in e.g. eco-babble/eco-speak, Euro-babble/speak, psycho-babble, techno-babble used with reference to the jargons of ecologists, Eurocrats, psychologists and experts on technology.

Compound versus phrase In the opening paragraphs above, a compound was defined as consisting of two words, of which the second (called the head) determines the word class and general category of the compound as a whole, while the first (the modifier) explains what kind of head we are talking about. An important question raised by such an analysis is how to draw the line between a compound—like blackboard—on the one hand and a syntactic phrase—like black board—on the other. This is a problem that arises in particular in the analysis of combinations in © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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which the final word (the head) is a noun, not when the final element is an adjective or a verb2. Compounds and phrases are similar in that both consist of a modifier (black) and a head (board). They also differ in significant ways, however. In the opinion of many linguists, the most obvious difference has to do with word stress: noun compounds have primary stress on the modifier (the first element), while noun phrases have primary stress on the head (the second element)3. Thus not only blackboard, but also other compounds like blackbird and darkroom have the stress pattern [ - -], while the phrases black board, black bird and dark room are stressed [- '-]. The difference in stress patterns has often been claimed to be accompanied by a difference in meaning. According to this theory, compounds are like simple words in being ‘labels’ (cf. p. 56) i.e. in being used to refer only to special categories of ‘things’ in the (real or imagined) world. Such an explanation is certainly true of many compounds with noun heads, in particular adjective+noun compounds like blackboard, blackbird, hothouse, etc:.a blackboard is not a board that happens to be black, but a particular type of teaching aid and parallel arguments can be made for blackbird and hothouse. In fact in none of these combinations does the adjective have any descriptive value: it is for example perfectly possible to speak of green blackboards, albino blackbirds and cold hothouses. The meanings of the syntactic phrases are quite different: black boards, black birds and hot houses do not make up distinct categories of ‘things’. Furthermore, the adjectives involved have kept all their descriptive force: black boards, black birds and hothouses really are black and hot, respectively, which means that it would be contradictory to speak of *green black boards, *albino black birds and *cold hot houses. As the discussion above has indicated, the combined meaningstress argument above works well for the adjective+noun combinations: if they have primary stress on the adjective, they also tend to have labelling meaning and may thus be called compounds. If they have primary stress on the noun, they tend not to have labelling meaning and are accordingly syntactic phrases. Inevitably, there are exceptions, for example combinations like white paper, Yellow pages and small beer all of which have clearly labelling meanings, but in which primary stress falls on the noun. (A white 124


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paper is an official report by a government, the Yellow Pages (trademark) is book containing the telephone numbers of businesses, and the informal small beer means ‘someone/something unimportant’). Let us now turn to the noun+noun combinations. Like the adjective+noun combinations, they can be assigned to two groups with regard to stress: those with primary stress on the first noun, and those with primary stress on the second noun. But unlike what was the case with the adjective+noun combinations, it is less easy to link this stress-related distinction to that between labelling and non-labelling meaning. Compare for instance the noun+noun combinations smoke signal, jet aircraft, and climate change on the one hand, and London policeman, Birmingham school, Sunday morning on the other. In the first group, primary stress falls on the first word, while in the second it falls on the final word. If noun+noun combinations work the same way as adjective+noun combinations, this should mean that the of the first group have labelling meaning, while those in the second group do not. However, there doesn’t seem to be much of a difference between the two groups in this respect: arguably, if smoke signals, jet aircraft, and climate change are ‘distinct categories of things’ in need of labels, so are London policemen, Birmingham schools and Sunday mornings. A more promising approach, if we want to establish a semantic difference between the differently stressed noun+noun combinations, is to look at the ways the two nouns are related, or to be more precise, how the phenomena referred to by these nouns are supposed to interact ‘in the real world’. Although there are exceptions to this, there is a strong tendency for noun-noun combinations with primary stress on the first element to be typically associated with certain such relations rather than with others. One such relation is ‘function/ purpose’—the second element is used for/in connection with the first—as in e.g. cough medicine, space shuttle, mouse-trap, another is ‘production’—the second element produces the first—as in e.g. power plant, gas works, oil well. There is probably an infinite number of such relations, but as argued above some of them seem to occur much more often than others. A list of such frequently occurring noun-noun relations will be found on p. 132. © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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Two things need to be mentioned in this context. The first one is that with the age of time many of the referents of such nounnoun combinations take on a certain character which comes to be regarded as typical: there is, for instance, an infinite number of possible mouse-traps, but only one has proved successful and commercially viable. As a result, mouse-trap has developed a labelling function over the years. The meanings of many other noun-noun combinations have been affected in the same way. The second matter that should be brought up here is that many if not most noun+noun combinations are open to several interpretations: typically a mouse trap is a trap used to kill mice, but if it turned out that mice were clever enough to set traps for other animals, mouse-trap would be a perfectly reasonable term for such a contraption. In the discussion above it has been suggested that by placing primary stress on the first element in a noun+noun combination we can create noun+noun compounds, i.e. we indicate that the relation between the ‘things’ referred to by the nouns is of a particular kind. The fact that, with time, many of these combinations may develop rather specialised meanings—a phenomenon known as lexicalization—should not be allowed to obscure the highly productive nature of noun+noun compounding as a device for forming new English words with predictable meanings.4

Compounds and spelling It is customary, in discussions of English compounds, to say something about the relation between compounds and spelling. It might be thought that the compound:phrase distinction should be reflected in the spelling. More precisely we might assume that word combinations that are spelt as single words or are hyphenated—like blackbird or sun-worship—would be compounds, while combinations in which there is a space between the words (black bird, tight rope, green card) would be non-compounds i.e. syntactic phrases. However, such an assumption has fatal flaws. To begin with, consider the adjective+noun combinations tight rope and green card. They have two interpretations: one the hand they may be phrases meaning ‘rope that is tight’ and ‘card that is green’ respectively, on the other they may be compounds meaning ‘rope/wire stretched 126


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tight above the ground on which acrobats perform their feats’ and ‘permit allowing non-US citizen to remain and work indefinitely in the US’. As could be expected, the phrase interpretations of tight rope and green card have primary stress on the second noun, while in the compound interpretations, primary stress falls on the first noun: in other words, the placement of primary stress tells us which combinations are compounds and which are phrases. But the spelling provides no guidance whatever in this matter. In addition, in compounding as elsewhere, English spelling turns out to be quite inconsistent. Consider for instance the items businessman, business-man and business man. There are three different spellings involved, but from the point of view of meaning all three must count as one and the same word, an interpretation confirmed by the stress pattern. Other examples of the same phenomenon are e.g. girlfriend:girl-friend:girl friend and teapot:tea-pot:tea pot. Obviously we would not want to argue that businessman and businessman, girlfriend and girl-friend, teapot and tea-pot are compounds, but that business man, girl friend and tea pot are not. From these examples we may conclude that if both semantic and stress-related evidence indicate that a certain word combination is a compound, then the way it is spelt is irrelevant. On the other hand, spelling may be helpful when we wonder where to place the stress in written forms: if a written form is made up of two shorter words and is spelt as an uninterrupted word, then a good guess is that it is a compound and should accordingly be stressed on the first element.

Exocentric compounds As we have seen, one of the main characteristics of endocentric compounds is that the entire compound basically belongs to the same general category as the rightmost word, the head: a textbook is a kind of book, to headhunt is to hunt in a certain way, originally to collect the heads of dead enemies, now to find a suitable person for a business position. There is another smaller group of compounds containing compounds like hardback, paperback, for which this is no longer the © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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case: these compounds do not, strictly speaking, have a head. Thus neither hardback nor paperback denote a kind of back, but stand for different types of books; a hardback is a book that has a hard back, a paperback a book that has a back made of paper. Other examples are hardtop, which not a top but a car with a hard top, and blackhead, which is a pimple with a black head. Such headless compounds are labelled exocentric compounds. The above examples of exocentric compounds all denote objects. However, many if not most exocentric compounds are used with reference to people with certain characteristics. A redhead, for instance, is a person with red hair, a blue-beard somebody with a blue beard, and an egghead is a person with a high forehead and hence assumed to be an intellectual. Similar meanings are found in e.g. big-nose, big-foot used about people with big noses and big feet. Many exocentric compounds used about people have negative meaning and are stylistically informal or vulgar, for example birdbrain used about somebody considered stupid, loudmouth ‘person who talks loudly and offensively’, the American badass for a tough and aggressive person, and smartass/smart-ass (British smart-arse/ smart-alec) meaning a person who always has a clever answer. Other examples of negative person-oriented exocentric compounds are hard-ass ‘tough person’, American English tight-ass ‘inhibited or conventional person’ sticky-fingers (used about a person who is ‘sticky-fingered’ i.e. a thief), Australian English sticky-beak meaning ‘an inquisitive person’, slimeball, scumbag, shitbag used about people considered repulsive by the speaker, and the somewhat milder slowcoach (BrE)/slowpoke (AmE), used to denote a slow person. Another type of exocentric compound is the category of hyphenated ‘coordinating’ constructions used to describe people having two different functions or roles simultaneously, like actor-writer, owner-occupier, philosopher-statesman, player-manager, secretary-treasurer, singer-conductor, writer-director, writer-producer. Most of these are used as attributes in connection with proper names as in e.g. actorwriter John Fields etc. In other uses they function as common nouns and form plurals by adding a plural -s to the final word as in e.g. (tax relief for) owner-occupiers. There are also exocentric adjective compounds with ‘co-ordinating’ meaning. The most common type indicates that two character128


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istics are possessed in equal measure, as in e.g. a bitter-sweet smile, the Swiss-German border, a French-Italian enterprise.

Noun compounds: general characteristics Noun compounds are the most common type of compound and exhibit a wide range of forms and meanings. In of the wordclasses involved, we can distinguish between noun compounds consisting of a single common noun+single common noun (snowball), -ing form+noun (washing machine), noun+ing-form (wine drinking), proper noun+noun (Markov chain), single noun+agentive/ instrumental noun (tax-payer), adjective+noun (small talk), verb+noun (push-button), preposition+noun (aftershock), adverb+noun (off-chance). The majority of English noun compounds are combinations of two (sometimes more) nouns and the following comments deal almost exclusively with this type. The list above does not include nouns like push-up, line-up, cutout—all with primary stress on the first word—which are not regarded as compounds but are analysed as conversions from the phrasal verbs push up, line up and cut out (cf. Chapter 6).

Noun + noun compounds Syntactic noun+noun compounds5 There are two main kinds of noun+noun compounds—syntactic compounds and others. The syntactic compounds have heads that are nouns derived from verbs by the addition of the suffixes -er or -ing, such as payer in tax-payer and drinking in wine-drinking.6 The non-syntactic compounds, on the other hand, usually have heads that are simple nouns, for example stain, rod and shuttle in bloodstain, fishing-rod, space shuttle. The fact that the syntactic noun+noun compounds have heads derived from verbs makes it possible to describe their meanings in syntactic . Thus syntactic compounds with heads in -er, like tax-payer, cardriver, smoke detector, all have the structure Direct Object + Subject: a © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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tax-payer is a person (Subject) who pays taxes (Object), a car-driver is a person (Subject) who drives a car (Object), and a smoke detector is a device (Subject) that detects smoke (Object). Syntactic compounds with heads in -ing such as wine-drinking, cheese-eating, deer-hunting have equally straightforward meanings. They have the structure Direct Object + Predicate’: wine-drinking is the activity of drinking (Predicate) wine (Direct Object) and cheeseeating is the activity of eating (Predicate) cheese (Object). Compounds of the wine drinking and tax-payer types are very common and constitute a highly productive source of new words in English. The following list is a small selection of attested wine drinking examples: dress-making, fault-finding, cigar-smoking, bookwriting, story-telling, bear-shooting, bass fishing, bird-watching, trainspotting. An equally small selection of attested tax-payer examples includes the following items: matter converter, stone-chucker, matchmaker, sheep-stealer, tabloid-owner, engine-driver, dog-owner, Channelswimmer, block-buster (‘bomb capable of busting (= destroying) an entire block of buildings’, cassette recorder/player, war crimes trial reporter. The formal structure of wine drinking and tax-payer is also found in compounds with slightly different meanings, such as day-dreaming, sun-bathing, ocean-sailing on the one hand, and factory worker, cave dweller, night fighter on the other. Here, the first noun (the modifier) denotes the place where the activity is carried out rather than a direct object: day-dreaming is ‘dreaming in the day(time)’, and a factory worker is somebody who works in a factory. Before we leave this section, mention will be made of a problem raised in Chapter 5 in connection with certain of the words described as syntactic compounds above, for example tax-payer, sheep-stealer, dress-making and train-spotting. Compounds have been defined as combinations of stems that are themselves words in English and accordingly the four words above must be analysed as combinations of tax and payer, sheep and stealer, dress and making, and train and spotting. However, no dictionary lists payer, stealer, making and spotting as entries and their status as English words is accordingly somewhat problematic. The alternative to a compound analysis of tax-payer, sheep-stealer etc. would be to regard them as instances of suffixation involving the agentive suffix -er. But as we know, the suffix -er is 130


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added to verbs and since there are no verbs *to tax-pay, *to sheepsteal, *to dress-make and *to train-spot, it seems wise to abandon this line of reasoning altogether. Whatever the solution to this problem may be, it is clear that words like tax-payer etc constitute a challenge to the definition of a compound as the combination of two or more words to form a new word.

Non-syntactic noun + noun compounds The previous section dealt with noun+noun compounds of the wine drinking and tax-payer types, which have morphologically complex heads ending in -er, -ing or synonymous suffixes. The remaining noun+noun compounds have heads that are simple nouns, or suffixed forms that do not carry suffixes of the -er and -ing type. In such compounds, there is no clue telling us how the (referents of the) two nouns are supposed to be related: all we can be sure of is that the things denoted by the two nouns are somehow related to each other. The exact nature of the relation will have to be determined by the speakers’ knowledge of the world and their opinions about what is a reasonable connection between the referents of the two nouns. Thus most of us will agree that the most likely interpretations for e.g. power plant, space shuttle and blood stain are ‘plant that produces power’, ‘shuttle used in space/for space travel’, and ‘stain caused by blood’. In fact the examples above illustrate three common semantic patterns in English non-syntactic compounds. Such meaning patterns may be used to describe families of compounds with similar meanings; accordingly we speak of a PRODUCING pattern for compounds like power plant, of a PURPOSE pattern for compounds like space shuttle, and of a CAUSE patterns for compounds like bloodstain. ittedly, a description in of meaning patterns has certain shortcomings. One of them is that one and the same noun+noun combination may be used to express several of these patterns. Furthermore, it is probably not possible to predict and list all possible patterns. However, even if it is impossible to list all the semantic patterns open for the non-syntactic noun+noun compounds, it is obvious that some of these patterns are much more likely to occur than © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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others. So, while it is no doubt impossible to list all the possible meaning patterns for English noun compounds, it is certainly possible to present a list of the most common and representative patterns. That is the objective of the following list.

Common meanings in noun+noun compounds In the following survey of (endocentric) English noun compounds, only compounds made up of two words have been included. When a distinction needs to be made between the first and the second word, the first is called A, the second B. B is an act by A: bee-sting, sunrise, sound change, population growth B is an action/activity involving A: book review, haircut, word formation, population poll, book launch B is an activity done in/on/at A: homework, moonwalk, city stroll, barn dance B is used for/connected with A: space shuttle, security officer, speed bump, dustbin, fishing-rod, ashtray, washing-machine B is powered by A: motorcycle, combustion engine, diesel engine, jet aircraft, wind farm B produces/causes A: toy factory, silk-worm, power plant, death blow, cancer cell, wind machine B is produced/caused by A: bloodstain, oil stain, saw dust, dog droppings B is part of A: doorknob, window sill, broomstick, floor board, window pane B is an A: girlfriend, killer whale, feeder bus, she-goat, he-goat B resembles A: frogman, goldfish, bullet train, snail mail. In e.g. bear hug and hyena smile, the hug and the smile obviously don’t resemble a bear and a hyena, but a bear’s hug and a hyena’s ‘smile’ B operates by means of A: smoke signal, water jet, cable TV, ball bearing In addition to the above list of noun-noun compound meanings, in which initial primary stress is the rule, there is a type of noun+noun 132


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combination in which the placement of primary stress is much more difficult to predict, i.e. the combinations meaning ‘B is made of/consists of A’. Among the of this category we find e.g. snowflake, raindrop, sand dune, all of which have primary stress on the first word. However, we also find e.g. gold medal, chocolate biscuit, clay pigeon with the same type of meaning relation between the two nouns but with primary stress on the final element. To add to the confusion, there are combinations with this meaning which would seem to be exactly parallel, but whose stress patterns differ. Compare for instance chocolate cake—with primary stress on the first word just like e.g. snowflake—and chocolate pudding which carrries primary stress on the second word, just like chocolate biscuit, gold medal and clay pigeon. Primary stress is also placed on the second word in killer whale. Sometimes stress movement triggers a change in meaning: if primary stress in toy factory is moved from the first to the second word, the resulting compound is likely to be understood to mean ‘factory that is a toy’ rather than ‘factory that produces toys’. The noun+noun examples in the list above are all made up of common nouns. However, not all English noun+noun compounds are of this type. One fairly common type of noun+noun compound has a personal name as its first element, for instance Chomsky adjunction, the Tourette syndrome (also known as Tourette’s syndrome), Markov chain, Turing machine. Compounds of this type tend to be highly specialised technical labels for processes associated with the persons named by the modifier. Finally, although the great majority of compounds made up of common nouns consist of two (or more) singular nouns, there are cases in which the modifier is a noun in the plural, for example arms cache [kʃ] ‘place where arms have been hidden’, priorities debate and weapons inspection.

Noun compounds with adjectival and other modifiers In addition to the noun compounds made up of two nouns, there is a fair number of noun compounds consisting of an adjective modi© Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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fier and a noun head. As the discussion on p. 124 showed, most of these are labels, i.e. have institutionalized meanings and contrast both in stress patterns and meanings with syntactic phrases with predictable meanings. Compare for instance the compounds darkroom, blackboard, whiteboard, man, blackbird, tight rope with the ordinary noun phrases dark room, black board, white board, mad man, black bird and tight rope. Noun compounds may also consist of combinations of locative particles and a following noun, as in e.g. outhouse, back-water, outlier, in-breath, downpour and others. (For the formally similar type upstream, upmarket, upscale etc., compare the section on compound adverbs p. 139). Historically English had a class of exocentric compounds consisting of a verb followed by a noun, for instance pickpocket ‘person who picks your pocket’ and cut-throat ‘person who cuts other people’s throats’. This type has little if any productivity today. There exists another type of verb+noun compound which is endocentric and fairly productive, exemplified by sailboat, hovercraft (‘boat that sails’, ‘craft that hovers’), swimsuit, talk-show (‘suit/show in which you swim/talk’).

Adjective compounds

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Participial adjective compounds The most important types of compound adjectives have second elements that are participles in -ing and -ed like for instance breath-taking, money-making, far-fetched, deep-fried. Just like the nominal compounds wine-drinking and tax-payer discussed earlier, these adjectival compounds are syntactic, i.e. they are really abbreviations of syntactic relations. Thus a wine-drinking heaster is a heaster who (habitually) drinks wine, a money-making scheme is one that makes (predicate) money (direct object), and a deep-fried dish has been fried (predicate) deep (adverb) in oil. The adjectival status of such combinations varies. While the examples above contain -ing forms that have basically remained participial, others have purely figurative meaning and are fully 134


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adjectival: they may be used both in attributive and predicate position and have gradable meanings making it possible for them to be modified by intensifiers like very, quite, extremely, etc. Thus an experience may be extremely breath-taking, and an analogy may be highly far-fetched. Other participial combinations are impossible or at least odd in predicative position and when preceded by intensifiers: it is doubtful whether you can say that a certain scheme is money-making or that it is a very money-making scheme. Type 1: breath-taking /money-making In this highly productive compound adjective construction the modifier is a noun and the head a present participle. It has syntactic meaning in that the noun can be thought of as the direct object of the verb underlying the present participle: if a business venture is money-making, then it ‘makes money’. As a rule, primary stress falls on the modifier, except in combinations with self-, like self-denying, self-ing, etc. Many of these constructions have become fully adjectival and can take intensifiers like very, quite, completely, extremely, etc., for instance awe-inspiring, blood-curdling, breath-taking, hair-rising, mindblowing, mind-boggling, mirth-provoking, mouth-watering, thought-provoking. These expressions are of course all metaphorical (cf. p. 25): no breath-taking or blood-curdling experience actually takes your breath away, nor does it literally curdle you blood (curdle is a technical term describing what happens to milk if left too long). We are normally so used to these expressions that we never think about their literal meanings. But sometimes speakers/writers come up with fresh and astonishing metaphors. A recent example is the (British) compound adjective jaw-dropping, found in e.g. jaw-dropping remarks, a jawdropping experience, literally remarks/an experience so surprising or shocking that they make your jaw drop.8 Other participial combinations retain much of their literal meaning and cannot as a rule take intensifiers, for instance: headline-grabbing (news), money-making (scheme), dollar-hurting (rate of exchange), gravity-defying (pirouettes), money-swallowing (project), substancesnorting (heir), bribe-taking (referee), banner-waving (ers), lifethreatening (illness) self-ing (person). Many of these and similar adjectives are particularly common in certain types of texts like newspaper and magazine texts. © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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Type 2: far-reaching/hard-working The type 2 compound adjectives consist of an adverb modifier and a head that is a present participle. They have syntactic meaning: a person who is hard-working is a person who works hard. Primary stress as a rule falls on the modifier (cf. hard-working [ - -] but the word stress pattern is more variable than in Type 1. Stress on the head is often found in combinations like far-reaching and outgoing, and often also in e.g. left-leaning, slow-moving. Most compound adjectives of this type are gradable and may be modified by intensifiers like very, extremely, quite, etc. as in e.g. very far-reaching consequences, extremely hard-working people, incredibly high-flying plans, highly left-leaning views, very rapidly-changing ideas. The modifiers in these adjectives may be used in the comparative and the superlative as the examples the biggest-selling book and a higher-grossing product show. Type 3: rain-soaked/Los Angeles-based/language-retarded Adjective compounds belonging to this type are often stylistically somewhat marked constructions and typical of the writing found in daily newspapers, official documents and certain types of academic and technical texts. Depending on the nature of the verb underlying the -ed participle, these compounds fall into several different categories, corresponding to (at least) three different syntactic constructions: (1) The modifier is a common noun that can be regarded as the ive subject of the ed-participle: a rain-soaked body is a ‘body soaked by rain’. Further examples: self-styled, self-appointed, expert-tested (system), moth-eaten, suntanned, city-owned, rainenforced (break), rebel-ed (initiative), propeller-driven (Douglas DC-7). (We should also include here compounds like snowcovered, sand-filled etc.). Sometimes the modifier is a nominalized adjective, often indicating nationality as in British-led (operation), American-brokered (solution), French-controlled (territory), but cf. also for instance (the) black-preferred (vote). The majority of these compounds are non-gradable, but a few have gradable meanings, for example suntanned and rain-soaked. (2) The modifier is a geographical name or a nationality adjective and indicates the base or origin of something. Examples: Bristol136


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based (company), Dallas-headquartered (organisation), Swedishborn(comic), Devon-ed (fishing-boats), Winchester-educated (Smith). Cf. also e.g. home-brewed, home-made, foreign-made. (3) The modifier is a noun indicating the phenomenon that is affected by the -ed participle like e.g. hearing-impaired and language-retarded This is a minor compound category apparently restricted to cases where the modifying noun is ‘naturally connected’ with its owner (cf. the discussion in Chapter 5 of -ed adjectives of the long-legged and blue-eyed type.) Type 4: far-fetched/much-needed The modifier in this very productive type of compounding is often one of a rather limited number of adverbs expressing spread, distance and the like: examples are far-fetched, far-flung, wide-spread, high-flown, deep-seated. The modifier may also be an adverb of frequency or degree as in e.g. nearly-packed (stadium), almost-finished (game), often-quoted (expression), understated, overblown, or an adverb of manner as in neatly-folded (napkins), firmly-held (conviction). Note that far-fetched, far-flung, high-flown, nearly-packed, almost-finished, overblown, understated have primary stress on the second word.

Non-participial compound adjectives In addition to the participial compounds, there are at least two undoubtedly adjectival compound types, both of which combine initial nouns with a following adjective. Type 1: -friendly/lead-free/work-shy These compounds are made up of a noun modifier and an adjective head. The meaning expressed by all such compounds is that something or somebody has the qualities of the adjective with regard to the referent of the noun head: a -friendly gadget is a gadget that is ‘friendly’ with regard to s, a work-shy person is shy (reluctant) when it comes to working. Examples: accident-prone, lead-free (petrol), environment-conscious, capital-intensive, childproof, crashworthy, machine readable, friendly, carsick, trigger-happy, street-smart, work-shy. This is a very productive pattern, and certain adjectives in particular enjoy great © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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popularity as second word in these combinations, for instance proof, worthy, free, and, in particular, friendly. Thus there is not merely -friendly, but also baby-friendly, customer-friendly, roadfriendly (car), wheelchair-friendly. For some reason, primary stress goes on the second element in all combinations with -friendly. Type 2: sea-green/red-hot These compounds are made up of a noun modifier and an adjectival head. Their meaning is basically comparative: sea-green means ‘as green as the sea’, stone dead ‘as dead as (a) stone’, etc. Further examples of this type of compound are ash-blonde, sea-green, bottle green, blood-red, snow white, pitch black, stone-cold, stone-deaf, stone-dead, grass-green, ice-cold. These compounds all have primary stress on the second word. There is a small set of informal compound adjectives with similar form and meaning, but in which the first element seems to have more of an intensifying force, for instance dirt-cheap, piss-poor, red-hot (and possibly also a form like shit-scared).

Compound verbs The term ‘compound verb’ suggests that there exists a compounding process that combines two existing lexemes to form a compound verb. However, the majority of verbs that look as if they were compounds have not been created by combining two existing lexemes to form a third, but have been derived from compound nouns, either by back-formation or by conversion. When such verb are created by means of back-formation, the starting-point is compound nouns ending in -ation, -ion, -ing, -er or -or. The suffix is removed and the result is a new, back-formed verb: from back-formation we get the verb to back-form, etc. Further examples will be found in Chapter 9. For seemingly compound verbs that are actually cases of conversion (cf. Chapter 6), the origins are compound nouns converted to verbs. Examples of verbs formed in this way (and already mentioned in Chapter 6) are bottom-line, fast-lane, fast-track, keyboard, mainstream, network, videotape, wallpaper. Other instances of such 138


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verbs are breath-test, brown bag ‘take a packed lunch to work’ or ‘bring one’s one liquor to a party’, carbon-copy and block-bust. The verbs crash-land, double-book, fine-tune, soft-land may be genuine combinations of noun plus verb and adjective/adverb plus verb, but may also be either conversions or back-formations. Combinations of particles and verbs like e.g. backtrack, and upgrade appear to be genuine compound verbs.

Compound adverbs With the exception of the examples in the section on exocentric constructions (pp. 127–129), all compounds discussed so far have been endocentric, i.e. the word class of the head word has also been the word class of the finished compound. Thus textbook and green card [ ri nkɑ d] are noun compounds because book and card are nouns, and awe-inspiring and lead-free are adjective compounds because inspiring and free are adjectives. Although there were few directly formed verb compounds, the word class hip of the compound verb agreed with that of its final element. But in the case of adverbs, such correspondance is extremely hard to find. With the exception of the informal British example doublequick ‘very quickly’ there don’t seem to be any compound adverbs whose final are themselves adverbs. There is no lack of adverbs that are combinations of words: a very important type of adverb is the type exemplified by words like mind-bendingly (boring), heart-breakingly (sad), jaw-droppingly9 (exciting). But these are all derived forms created by adding the suffix -ly to the adjective compounds mind-bending, heart-breaking and jawdropping. Another type of adverb created by the combining of words are those consisting of a locative preposition and a following noun10. Common prepositions in these cases are up and down as in e.g. downmarket/down-market, upmarket/up-market, downstairs, upstairs, mid-market, upmarket/up-market, upstream, downstream, upscale. The majority of these combinations may be used both as adverbs and as adjectives, but in most of these cases, the stress patterns are different. As adverbs these compounds have primary stress on the © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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second element, as adjectives they tend to take primary stress on the first element; compare e.g. They live upstairs, The bus was rolling downhill in which upstairs and downhill are adverbs and stressed on the second element, and I’ll give you the upstairs room and It was a downhill race in which upstairs and downhill are used as adjectives and accordingly have primary stress on the first elements up- and down-.11

Exercises 1 Try to find additional examples of formations in -man/-person/ -woman and -babble and -speak. Can you think of other forms that should be regarded as pseudo-suffixes? 2 In addition to the forms -man, -babble and -speak used as examples of ‘pseudo-suffixes’, there is the form -gate, found in e.g. Dianagate, Irangate, Iraqgate, Saddamgate. Try to find out what common element of meaning these words have and why they have this particular meaning (clue: cf. the Watergate scandal of 1972). Are words formed by the addition of -gate of the same type as those formed by the addition of -man, -babble and -speak? 3 The following word combinations all qualify as adjective+noun compounds on semantic grounds, since their meanings are not predictable from the meanings of the individual words that make them up: black sheep, blue grass, blue jeans, bluejay, blueprint, fine print, grey (gray) area, grey (gray) matter, small print, smart bomb. To what extent is their status as compounds confirmed by their stress patterns, and what do they mean? 4 Using the criteria for noun+noun compounds discussed on pp. 123 and 125–126, which of the following noun-noun combinations would you consider to be compounds?: bomb scare, bomb disposal, chocolate biscuit, chocolate box, fishing-rod, fish farm, fish finger, salmon-fishing, winning post, winning streak. Motivate your answers. 5 Indicate how you would analyse compounds consisting of more than two words, for example war crimes investigation, open class 140


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words, talk-show host murder, jet airline pilot strike, spare parts supply management system. 6 Try to create compounds describing the following phenomena: (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g) (h) (i) (j)

a shovel used to remove sand young people who drink wine people who (habitually) drink white wine a collection of records with only one song or piece of music on each side an injury involving the ligament in the knee a gun powered by air a fear that people riding bikes are chronically under the influence of alcohol grass reaching as high as a person’s knee legislation designed to be helpful to people who vote a task that is so difficult that it boggles the mind

7 Among the noun+noun compounds discussed in this chapter, the most regular and productive types are the so called syntactic compounds described on pp. 129–131, i.e. compounds like taxpayer and wine-drinking. It is possible to challenge the compound status of these words and to argue that they are not formed by compounding, but in another way. Try to think of an alternative explanation and what the consequences of accepting it would be. 8 Although in general noun+noun compounds have more predictable meanings than the adjective+noun compounds, there are noun+noun compounds with meanings that are impossible to predict, for example the items listed below. Look them up in a dictionary and find out what they mean and what their stress patterns are. Also consider which of them may be given a more straightforward interpretation and whether the difference in meaning in such cases is reflected in the stress patterns: glass ceiling, ballpark figure, pigeon-hole, holding pattern, guest worker, toy boy, desktop, fish-finger, country house.


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8 Combining forms and neo-classical compounds


General characteristics In our earlier discussion of word-formation mention has sometimes been made of a phenomenon called neo-classical compounding and of the so-called combining forms of which such compounds are composed. In this chapter we will return to this highly productive type of English word-formation in somewhat greater detail. However, this is not the place to give a full the neo-classical compounds, and all the brief discussion below can claim to do is to draw attention to their main characteristics and to point to some of the ways in which they are similar to and different from affixation and ordinary compounding. The combining forms are bound base morphemes from Latin and Greek. The ‘combining’ part of the name refers to the fact that such forms are bound stems combining (in principle only) with each other to create words like e.g. astronomy, biology, democracy, economy, astronaut, democrat and others. Such combinations have certain basic similarities with ordinary English compounds in the way the elements they consist of are related. Both may be said to consist of a modifier and a head: astronomy, biology and astronaut, for example, are basically the same as ‘star science’, ‘life science’ and ‘star sailor’. However, for all their semantic parallelism, the neo-classical compounds also differ fundamentally from ordinary English compounds in consisting of bound stems: it is true that both biology and life science are similar in the way the meanings ‘life’ and ‘science’ are combined, but the English compound consists of two words while the neo-classical compound is made up of the two bound stems bio- and -logy. © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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Another difference has to do with the number and order of elements serving as building blocks in the two kinds of compound. As the discussion in Chapter 7 showed, English compounds may consist of a very wide variety of word combinations, and there are no restrictions on what may appear as first element and as second element: house is the first element in the compound houseboat, but the second in boathouse. The combining forms, by contrast, are restricted in number1 and subject to constraints regarding their position in the word. Some of them—for example astro-, bio-, biblio-, demo-, ethno-, psycho-, techno—may occur only as first elements in a neo-classical compound and will be referred to as Initial Combining Forms or ICFs for short. Others—like -crat/cracy, -gram/-graph/graphy, -naut, -logy, -nomy—are Final Combining Forms (FCFs) that may be used only as second elements. In principle, the two categories do not change their position in the compound: initial forms remain initial, final forms stay final.2 There are certain exceptions to this principle. A few combining forms may be used both at the beginning and at the end of neoclassical compounds, for example phon(o) ‘sound’ and phil(o) ‘love’, ‘friend’. Thus there are both e.g. phonology ‘sound study’ and Francophone ‘person who is a native speaker of French’, and both philosophy ‘love of wisdom’ and Anglophile ‘person who loves things English’. Another element appearing in both positions is the Greek stem –cosm- ‘world, universe’, which is used as an ICF in cosmology ‘science of the origin of the universe’ and cosmonaut ‘navigator in the universe’, but as an FCF in microcosm, macrocosm meaning ‘miniature universe’ and ‘the whole universe’ respectively. There now remains one loose end to be taken care of in this preliminary section: why are words like biology, astronaut, telegram, psychology said to be ‘neo-classical’ compounds? Neo- is a Latin form meaning ‘new’, and as the name ‘neo-classical compounding’ suggests, this kind of compounding is new in the sense that combinations like biology, astronaut etc. were not found in classical Latin or Greek, but are later combinations of elements taken from Latin and/or Greek. The difference between Greek and Latin now no longer matters: the two languages are freely mixed as for instance in compounds like television (Greek tele- ‘distant’ + Latin -vision ‘viewing’) 144



The neo-classical compounds are obviously also new in the sense that most of the ‘things’ they refer to simply did not exist at the time when classical Latin and Greek were still used. The great majority of the neo-classical compounds belong to the language of science and have been formed in relatively recent times: the words telephone (‘distant sound’), telegraph (‘distant writing’) and helicopter (‘spiral wing’) did not make their appearance until they had something to refer to. However, the combinatorial possibilities of neo-classical compounding have been available in English (and other languages) for a very long time and the mere thought of possible future technical developments may trigger the development of to describe all manner of as-yet-unrealised inventions, cf. for example the attested English word teleportation, which refers to a presently unavailable technique of instantaneously moving matter from one point (in space or time) to another (cf. ‘Beam me up Scotty’ from the scifi movie Star Trek). I end this section with a list of familiar neo-classical compounds illustrating the use of some common combining forms: astronomy (astr(o) ‘star’ + nomy ‘knowledge’), biology (bio- ‘life’ + -logy ‘study’), democracy (dem(o)-‘people’ + -cracy ‘rule’), democrat ‘er of democracy’, ethnography (ethn(o)- ‘people’ + -graphy ‘description’, ‘writing’), psychology (psych(o)- ‘soul’ + -logy), technology (techn(o)‘art’, ‘craft’ + -logy).

Neo-classical compounding compared with affixation In the of the neo-classical compounds given in the previous section, these compounds were described as combinations of initial and final combining forms, bound Latin and Greek stems that can basically only combine with each other. This description makes them clearly different from the other bound forms in English that are restricted to word-initial and word-final position, namely prefixes and suffixes: prefixes and suffixes are only attached to stems that are words, not to bound stems. © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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There are also other differences between affixes and combining forms. If we compare the initial combining forms—the ICFs—with the prefixes, we note that, unlike the prefixes, the ICFs must end in a vowel-sound, typically -o, as for instance in psychology, biology, astronomy, astronaut but sometimes also in other vowel-sounds, as for example in extravagant, hyperbole (‘exaggerated statement’), omnipotence (‘all-powerfulness’). However, the tendency for ICFs to end in -o is very strong. Just how strong it is becomes apparent when—as happens—ordinary English words are sometimes turned into ‘fake’ ICFs used in words intended as humorous names for more or less improbably types of scientific expertise. Two examples of such jokes are the words insectology and kiddology with the intended meanings ‘the knowledge of/ the science of insects’ and ‘knowledge of/the science of children’ respectively.Note that these are merely two examples picked at random: in principle it is possible to turn all English nouns into fake ICFs in -o and it may also happen to phrases as in common sensology recorded as early as 1903. The joke may be pushed even further by combining kid, insect etc. not only with -logy but also with other final combining forms, for instance the -crat and -cracy found in democrat, democracy. The result would be humorous forms like kiddocracy [k dɒkrəsi] and insectocracy [nsek tɒkrəs] meaning ‘government by kids’ and ‘government by insects’ respectively, and kiddocrats [ kdəkrts] and insectocrats [n sektəkrts], which could be used about people (?) ing or involved in these types of government. When native English words are turned into ICFs as in the examples above, another difference between ICFs and prefixes becomes apparent. It has to do with the assignment of word stress. As pointed out in Chapter 4, prefixes have secondary or even primary stress. The ICFs on the other hand, follow a quite different principle for stress assignment. This principle says that in neo-classical compounds, primary stress is placed on the third syllable from the end of the word, the so-called antepenult. In accordance with this principle, neo-classical compounds consisting of just three syllables have their heaviest stress on the first syllable, i.e. the third syllable from the end of the word, cf. e.g. astronaut, kiddocrat, microcosm. If a fourth syllable is added, the principle of antepenult stress places the primary stress on the second 146



syllable from the beginning of the word (because that is now the third syllable from the end): cf e.g. astronomy, psychology, kiddology, democracy. Predictably, the addition of a fifth syllable moves the stress one further syllable to the right as for example in aristocracy literally ‘rule by the best’, a word formed from Greek elements in Old French. The workings of the antepenult stress rule are sometimes disturbed by other factors, in particular by the presence of suffixes affecting stress placement (cf. p. 81). Consider for instance the adjective democratic formed from the same elements as democracy and democrat. However, while the last two words are stressed in accordance with the antepenult stress rule, democratic is not, but has primary stress on the second syllable from the end of the word. The reason for this is the presence of the suffix -ic ; like quite a few other English suffixes (cf. pp. 81–83), -ic requires primary stress to be placed on the syllable immediately preceding it. As the discussion above has shown, there are several good reasons to distinguish between prefixes and initial combining forms. However, there is no denying that certain linguistic forms seem to belong to both camps, i.e. to be used both as prefixes and as ICFs, for example the forms extra- and hyper-. These forms quite clearly combine with stems that are words in e.g. extra-territorial, extra-kind, hyper-correct, hyperinflation. Furthermore, they carry at least secondary stress in all combinations in which they occur, they do not end in -o, and the words in which they occur do not follow the antepenult stress rule. These are all excellent reasons for regarding them as—quite productive—prefixes. However—as we have already observed—extra- and hyper- are just as clearly ICFs in words like extravagant and hyperbole, where they combine with bound stems, have somewhat indistinct meanings, and are stressed in accordance with the antepenult principle (extravagant is pronounced [k strvəənt] and hyperbole [ha pə bəl]. The conclusion is that we have to accept the existence of a fair amount of homonymy between prefixes and initial combining forms.


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Productivity of the neo-classical compounds Most of the examples given so far of neo-classical compounds have been familiar words, words that we encounter so often that we no longer think of them as compounds, for example astronomy, biology, democracy, ethnography and psychology. However, even in these few examples it is easy to see that the combinatorial possibilities among the combining forms are far from exhausted. As speakers, we are free to recombine the elements in the examples above in whatever ways seem fit to us. Nothing prevents our forming new words like for instance astrocracy ‘government by the stars’, astrography ‘the description of the stars’, psychonomy ‘the study of the soul’, and ethnocracy ‘government by (different) peoples’. Today such recombining of bound Latin and Greek stems is one of the most productive sources of new English words. Many of the new words are known only to specialists in science and technology and other areas of research. However, an increasing number of such are now finding their way into the English in general use. A recent instance of this is the new word kleptocracy [klep tɒkrəsi] ‘government by stealing/thieves’.3 The writer must have assumed that the -cracy element was familiar from words like democracy etc., and that most of his readers would know the meaning of kleptofrom the words kleptomaniac and kleptomania.

Telescopic combining forms In the previous discussion, word-initial forms like astro-, bio-, psycho- were described as initial combining forms with the meanings ‘star’, ‘life’, ‘soul’, which combine exclusively with final combining forms like -logy, -nomy, and others to make up neo-classical compounds like astronomy, biology, , psychology. However, in recent scientific, technical and scholarly terminology, such forms no longer represent bound Latin and Greek stems, but are shortenings of old neo-classical compounds like astronomy, biology, psychology and so on. (This particular type of shortening is 148



called back clipping and is described in Chapter 9). These new forms—which have aptly been called ‘telescopic combining forms’4—combine both with bound classical stems and with ordinary English words, carry secondary or even primary stress. In addition, the words in which they occur are not stressed in accordance with the antepenult principle. The following examples illustrate the use of the telescopic forms: astrophysics ‘the use of physics in astronomy’, bio-medicine ‘the combination of biology and medicine’, ecocide ‘ecological murder’ bioterrorism ‘biological terrorism’ ecofeminism ‘ecological feminism’, biohazard ‘biological risk to human health’, biodegradable ‘biologically degradable’, ecosystem ‘ecological system’, eco-fatigued ‘tired of ecology’, technofear ‘fear of technology’, technobabble ‘technological jargon’, technopeasant ‘farmer who makes use of modern technology’. Like the original initial combining forms, the telescopic forms have a strong tendency to end in -o, but there is sometimes variation between -i and -o for example in words containing the stem agr-: the form used in telescopic combinations is sometimes agri- sometimes agro-, both meaning ‘agricultural’. Thus there is on the one hand agribusiness, from which we get agriproducts, and on the other agrobiology, agrochemical, and even agrobiotechnology. The strength of the ‘final -o principle’ is also obvious in what may be termed ‘fake telescopic forms’, i.e. bound forms in -o that have not been created by clipping operations on neo-classical compounds, but are—etymologically incorrect—reductions of other words like e.g. globo-cop ‘police force of the entire world’ (formed from global), robo-cop ‘policeman that is a robot’ (from robot) and enviro-friendly ‘friendly towards the environment’.

Common combining forms The lists on p. 150–151 show some of the common combining forms.


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Initial forms Combining form

Original meaning

Example

aero

air

aeronaut(ics)

astro

star

astronaut

auto

self

autobiography

biblio

book

bibliophile

bio

life

biology

centi

hundred

centimetre

chrono

time

chronometer

crypto

secret

cryptography

demo

people

democracy/crat

dys

bad, difficult

dysfunction(al)

giga

billion

gigabyte

homo

same

homonym

kilo

thousand

kilobyte

macro

large-scale

macrocosm

micro

small-scale

microscope

mono

(having)one

monorail

multi

many

multi-ethnic

neo

new

neo-nazi

pal(a)eo

ancient

pal(a)eography

pedo/paedo

child

paediatrician

phono

sound

phonology

photo

light

photography

poly

(having)many

polysemy

porno

prostitute

pornography

proto

original

prototype

psycho

soul

psychology

techno

art, craft

technology

tele

distant

television

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Final combining forms Combining form

Original meaning

Example

-cide

killing

homicide

-cosm

world

microcosm

-cracy

form of government

democracy

-graphy

writing

pornography

-logy

science

biology

-mania

madness

bibliomania

-meter

measure

centimetre

-naut

sailor, pilot

astronaut

-nomy

the laws of

astronomy

-nym

name

homonym

-phile

loving

bibliophile

-phobe

fearing

technophobe

-phone

sound

telephone

-scope

view

telescope

-vision

view

television

Exercises 1 Look up the following neo-classical compounds in a large English-English dictionary that provides both pronunciation and etymologies. Find the meanings of the elements that make up the words and determine whether the stress pattern agrees with the antepenult principle: pleistocene, oxymoron, pentagon, carbohydrate, appendectomy. 2 Try to explain the variation in stress found in the following series of words (Tip: take a look at Chapter 5, pp. 81–83): automaton:automate:automatic; pathology:pathologist:pathological; cryptogram:cryptography—cryptographer—cryptographic © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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Anglophile:Anglophobe:Anglophobia acid:acidic:acidophilus:acidophilic 3 Form as many meaningful combinations as you can from the following ICFs and FCFs: ICFs: astro-, auto-, bio-, crypto-, dys-, multi-, micro-, phono-, techno- tele- FCFs: -cide, -cosm, -cracy, -logy, -mania, -naut, -phobia, -phone, -scope, -vision 4 The word helicopter is often analysed as consisting of heli- and -copter. This is etymologically incorrect, since helicopter is a combination of helico- ‘spiral’ and -pter ‘wing’. However, the form heli- occurs in a number of combinations, such as helipad ‘landing and take-off area for helicopters’, heliport ‘airport for helicopters’, and heliskiing ‘skiing in which the skier is taken up to the mountain by helicopter’. How would you classify the form heli- in helipad, heliport and heliskiing—as a prefix, an initial combining form or the first element in a compound? 5 In Chapter 8 it was found that forms like astro-, bio-, etc. may be both ordinary initial combining forms and so-called ‘telescopic’ forms. Can you think of final combining forms that may be used as telescopic forms?

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9 Irregular Word-formation


Characteristics and types of irregular word-formation The purpose of the present chapter is to briefly present a number of processes that serve to extend the English vocabulary in different ways, but which are clearly on the outskirts of traditional word-formation. There are three main types of such irregular word-formation processes, i.e. back-formation, shortening with the sub-categories initialisms and clippings, and blending i.e. word mixing. Some attention will also be given to reduplicative compounding and to a minor type of irregular word-formation known as rhyming slang. In addition, the phenomena of borrowing and meaning extension will be briefly considered. Before proceeding to a presentation of the different ‘irregular’ processes above, it is worth considering just how ‘irregular’ wordformation differs from its ‘regular’ cousin. What is it that the regular word-formation types have got that the irregular ones haven’t? There are at least two major differences. One has to do with the nature of the output of the two types of word-formation. While it is true that an important function of many regular word-formation rules is to enrich the vocabulary by creating ‘labels’ for new categories in need of naming, many of these rules are also used for ‘syntactic repackaging’ (cf. p. 56), i.e. to create forms that are used and then forgotten. By contrast, two of the three main types of irregular word-formation are used mainly to create labels, i.e. to enrich the vocabulary: both shortening and blending have this function. Back-formation is different in this respect, and has been regarded by some scholars as a kind of derivation operating in the same way as prefixation, suffixation and compounding.1 © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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The other difference concerns the predictability of the formations. Most regular word-formation processes create new words from old in reasonably predictable ways and by predictable means: we expect action verbs to be able to develop agent nouns in -er, we expect most adjectives to form state/activity or extent nouns in -ness, we expect conversion and compounding to follow certain patterns, and by and large we are right to do so. Most irregular word-formation lacks such predictability. Thus the process of shortening known as ‘back-clipping’ (p. 159) gives us the clipped forms celeb, demo and rep from the words celebrity, demonstration and representative, but not e.g. *calam, *explan or *init from calamity, explanation and initiative. In addition, we can never be quite sure what parts of a word will be removed by clipping or be involved in blending. Who would have guessed, for instance, that a word like weblog would be ‘fore-clipped’ to blog (cf. p. 161), and why is it that the blending of fog and smoke yielded the form smog rather than e.g. *foke?

Borrowing Strictly speaking, borrowing has nothing to do with word-formation: it is a way to enrich the vocabulary resources of a language by importing foreign lexical material. However, borrowing is not entirely unrelated to word-formation: what is borrowed, in certain cases, is not merely words or phrases, but also the patterns and affixes underlying word-formation in a foreign language. One example of pattern borrowing is the construction el --- o, borrowed from Spanish and used in American English with the meaning ‘the most …’, as in el cheapo (‘the cheapest’), el creepo (‘the greatest creep, most like a creep’), el sleazo (‘the sleaziest’)2. Another loan from Spanish is the informal savvy from Spanish sabe usted ‘you know’. On its own, savvy is used both as an adjective meaning ‘competent, knowledgeable’ and as a noun meaning ‘knowledge, know-how’. It is used in word-formation to form adjective and noun compounds like for example computer-savvy, E-savvy, street savvy, tech savvy. Thus a person may possess computer-savvy, Esavvy (E = ‘electronics’) or he/she may be computer-savvy, E-savvy. 154



A few instances of affixes or affix-like elements have been borrowed from German. Thus echt ‘true, genuine, real’ functions as an English prefix in e.g. echt-Massachusetter, echt-Viennese. Another German prefix loan is uber- [υ bə(r)] used with a meaning close to that of super- i.e. ‘the ultimate form of …’, as in uber-boomer, uber-TV show.3 There is also a suffix -nik borrowed from Russian and Yiddish, which enjoyed considerable popularity in the days of the Sputnik. It is found in words like beatnik and peacenik and also in more recent words like refusenik, spacenik, waitnik, nogoodnik. As the examples indicate, this suffix is used to form nouns denoting individuals. The exact meaning of the suffix is hard to define; in fact there seem to be several suffixes -nik with more or less different meanings.4 A more recent suffix loan is -bot5, a suffix derived from Czech robota meaning ‘forced labour’. This suffix is used to create words related to machines, computer programs and the like. Examples include: knowbot ‘an automatic agent able to search for electronic networks’, cancelbot ‘computer programs that automatically cancel unsolicited advertising on the Internet (also known as SPAM); there is also a verb to cancelbot. Other examples include mobot (mobile devices capable of independent behaviour), microbot, nanobot (different types of miniaturized machines). Mention should also be made of the suffix -ville, obviously borrowed from French and sometimes used in American English in the form -(s)ville6 to denote a place or situation having the characteristics of the word preceding -sville as in e.g. dullsville, dragsville, squaresville These are fairly dated examples, but as the following quotes indicate, -(s)ville still has a certain amount of productivity: ‘This is shitsville’ said Mr Leiter.7 ‘While many of the MBA gold-diggers high-tailed it back to old Economy-ville, the people who matter in Silicon Valley—the geeks—weren’t going anywhere.’8


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Meaning extension Not everybody would regard meaning extension or semantic change, as it is also called, as a kind of word-formation. Yet undeniably the extension of the meanings of existing words is a very productive way of forming new words. In the present book it has been regarded as a form of irregular word-formation, i.e. basically as word-formation for which no principles may be established; others take a different view9. There is a certain superficial similarity between meaning extension and the type of regular word-formation called conversion. Like conversion, meaning extension brings about a change of word meaning without an accompanying change in form. But at that point the similarity ends: meaning extension does not change the word class of a word and it has none of the regularity and predictability of meaning found in conversion. Meaning extension operates in several different ways. In one of its manifestations, it is a continuous historical process of semantic change that affects all languages and gradually changes the meanings of their vocabulary items. This kind of change is very slow and speakers often take a long time realising that the meaning of a word has gradually changed. It has often been observed10 that the gradual type of meaning change mentioned above can be described in of two diametrically opposed semantic tendencies. On the one hand, it may lead to generalization or widening of meaning, as in the case of the English word box, which originally denoted only small containers made of box-wood, but has gradually acquired its present meaning of ‘any container with a flat base and sides, typically square and having a lid’11 On the other hand, it may lead to specialization or narrowing of meaning. An often used example of this is the word or meat, which originally denoted food in general and only later took on the meaning ‘edible flesh’. But semantic change may take place much more quickly: the word gay for instance used to mean ‘happy’, ‘carefree’ until the 1960s, but is now exclusively used with the sense of ‘homosexual’, a change that started in American English in the 1960s12 The new meaning of gay has now replaced the old one more or less completely. 156



Initialisms: abbreviations and acronyms Several of the irregular word-formation patterns involve word shortening. The most common type of shortening is represented by the so-called initialisms, which reduce multi-word combinations— usually names of organizations—to single words made up of the initial letters of the words involved in the combinations. Initialisms are now a permanent feature of English and a rapidly growing category that numbers hundreds of thousands of . In fact, the recent Acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations Dictionary (22nd edition, 1997) contains over half a million entries. There are two kinds of initialisms. The larger group, known as abbreviations, contains items in which each letter is pronounced separately: CIA is pronounced [si a e], UN is pronounced [jυ en] A smaller but still important group contains shortenings known as acronyms, in which the combinations of initial letters are read out as words, as for instance in AIDS [edz], and NATO [ netəυ]. There are also initialisms in which the two types are mixed, in particular compound initialisms in which the first element consists of one—sometimes two—letters, like e.g. e-mail/email, g-man, g-suit, T-bone, X-ray/X ray, AK-47, CDROM. In addition there are certain initialisms that may be treated as either abbreviations or acronyms, for instance RAF (the Royal Air Force).

Abbreviations In writing, abbreviations consist of strings of letters, which may or may not be separated by full stops. Most of them are spelt with capital letters, although there are those that are not. Many are proper names of institutions or places, for instance CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), NYC (New York City), UN (the United Nations), ANC (African National Congress), GOP (the ‘Grand Old Party’ = the American Republican Party), GB (Great Britain). A few abbreviations refer to—usually famous—people, for example FDR (Franklin Delano Roosewelt), JFK (John Fitzgerald Kennedy), GWB (George Walker Bush). Other abbreviations are non-names: DJ/dj (disk jockey), DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), TEFL (the teaching of English as a foreign © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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language), IOU (for ‘I owe you’, a signed document explaining that you owe money to somebody), MC/emcee (master of ceremonies), VIP (very important person), TV, CEO (Chief Executive Officer), RPM/rpm (revolutions per minute), SF/sf (science fiction), PC/pc (personal computer; political correctness), SUV (suburban vehicle). As the example PC/pc shows, one and the same abbreviation may have more than one denotation. There is also a smaller category of abbreviations which stand for common phrases, for instance PDQ/pdq (‘Pretty damn quick’), sob (‘son of a bitch’), asap (‘as soon as possible’—also used as an acronym pronounced [eisap] or [aesap], aka (‘also known as’ as in John Smith aka John Stickyfingers), FAQ (frequently asked questions).

Acronyms Turning now to the acronyms, we may begin by noting one difference between these forms and abbreviations: since acronyms have to be pronounceable, they can only contain letter sequences also permitted in ordinary English words (cf. the discussion of phonotactic rules on p. 52). Like the abbreviations, acronyms often denote institutions and organizations: NAFTA (North American Free Trade Association), NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), WAC (Women’s Army Corps). Certain acronyms naming organizations have obviously been composed as a (more or less obvious) reminder of the purpose of the group, like e.g. GASP (Group against Smokers’ Pollution) and AIM (American Indian Movement), PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity). Among the acronyms that do not name institutions we find e.g. AIDS/aids, SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder)13, soho (small office home office) RAM (random access memory), ROM (read only memory). The following denote groups of people with certain characteristics: yuppie (young upwardly mobile), GLAM/glam (greying, leisured, affluent, married) and WASP/wasp (white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant). 158



A number of acronyms have to all intents and purposes become common nouns and are always spelt with small letters like e.g. laser, radar, scuba, and the rather surprising noun snafu, defined in dictionaries as ‘a chaotic or confusing situation’ and said to be a shortening of ‘situation normal, all fucked up’. Acronyms may also occasionally stand for more or less natural phrases, for instance nimby ‘not in my backyard’, and Thif ‘thank God it’s Friday’.

Clipping English has a number of ways to reduce word length. In the previous section we discussed one of these methods of word shortening, i.e. the creating of initialisms. This technique makes it possible to reduce multiword units like the names of organizations or products to strings containing the initial letters of the words in the original multiword unit. But shortening processes may also operate on single words by removing part of the word, an operation known as clipping. In the most common type—back-clipping—the final part of the word is removed, as for instance in lab(oratory), porn(ography) and prof(essor). Other examples of back-clipping are ad(vertisement), (istration), advert(isement), beaut(y), biog(raphy), bod(y), celeb(rity), demo(nstration), decaf (‘decaffeinated coffee’), ref(eree), info(rmation), intro(duction), perk (>perquisite ‘fringe benefit’), perp(etrator ‘person who has committed a crime’), rep(resentative), veg(etable), Jag(uar), Merc(edes), dorm(itory), cert(ainty), rev(olution), tech(nology). Note that back-clipping usually operates only on certain senses of a word: the back-clipping rev (plural revs), for instance, can only be used in the technical sense ‘an instance of revolving’; rev is not a back-clipping of revolution ‘political upheaval’ and consequently we cannot say e.g. *the Russian Rev meaning ‘the Russian Revolution’, only the engine was turning over at 300 revs a minute. (There is also a verb to rev, which means to make an engine revolve at a faster pace: She was revving her engine). Cert for certainty is mostly used in the phrase It’s a (dead) cert!. The clipping Brit is predominantly used to © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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denote a person who is British, rather than as an alternative to the adjective British. As the examples above show, the majority of back-clippings are nouns. There are also back-clippings from other word classes, for instance the adjectives brill(iant) and fab(ulous). Most of the back-clippings above are easy to understand even if you have not seen them before. Sometimes the connection with the underlying word is less obvious. A recent example of such a nontransparent back-clipping is dis/diss ‘speak in a disrespectful way towards or about somebody’, as in He was dissed by the White House (Newsweek April 29, 2002, p. 44). The word could in theory be an abbreviation of any of the many verbs in dis-, but is a back-clipping from the verb disrespect. Back-clippings may also be dephrasal, i.e. shortened forms of phrases, for instance nuke


therefore, clipping is an important source of informal expressions and slang. Clipping sometimes removes parts of words that are in themselves meaningful units, for example when aero- is removed from aeroplane and when respect is removed from disrespect. But, as most of the examples above show, most clippings do not show the same respect for natural boundaries: cf. for instance the clipped forms biog, info, demo from biography, information, and demonstration, which would have been more naturally analysed into bio- and -graphy, inform- and -ation and demon(str) and -ation. A recent example of unlikely clipping is the word blog from weblog14 ‘easily updated website’ (Newsweek May 27, 2002, p79), and also the derived forms blogger and blogging. Of course nobody is unaware of the correct analysis of weblog, i.e. as the combination of web and log; the reason for the new formation must be a desire to distinguish weblogs from all other logs.

Back-formation Back-formation creates new words from old by removing a noun suffix from words that contain typical noun endings like e.g. -ation, -er, -or, -ing, -ism and -ist. It is a process that has been at work in English for hundreds of years, the classic example being the verb edit formed from the borrowed Latin word editor. The first attested occurrence of the noun is from 1649, while the verb makes its first appearance only in 179115. However, back-formation is very much alive today and is responsible for more recent formations like e.g. the verbs (to) orientate from orientation, (to) obsess from obsession, and (to) opt (for something) from option. Back-formation bears a superficial resemblance to clipping in that both serve to create shorter words from longer ones, but the two processes differ both with regard to their output, to the elements that are removed from the original word, and to their function. The output of back-formation is a new lexeme with a different meaning and word-class hip than the original. The output from clipping is a word that is shorter than the original but belongs to the same word class and has the same basic meaning. The output © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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words are synonymous with the longer original forms, but occupy a quite different stylistic niche: clippings like e.g. fab and demo are entirely appropriate in laid-back communication as when you’re chatting with your friends, but only the full forms fabulous and demonstration will do on more formal occasions. A further difference is that clipping may remove parts of a word that are not meaning-carrying as in the examples biog and info cited above. As we have seen, back-formation operates in of real or perceived suffix morphemes: it is a process that changes what is perceived as a complex word (normally a noun) into a shorter and more basic one, normally a verb. The examples given of back-formation so far have all involved single words: from orientation we derived orientate, from obsession we got obsess. To these we can add further examples, like to liaise ‘to establish a working relationship with’ from liaison, to laze from the adjective lazy, to peddle from the noun peddlar and to televise from television. However, in present-day English, back-formations are much more often formed from compounds than from single words, usually by the removal of the nominal suffixes -er, -ation and -ing from the second part of noun compounds. (As nouns in -er normally also are found as -ing-forms, it is often impossible to determine exactly which of the two was the original). The great majority of the new back-formed verbs are hyphenated. The following list contains examples of fairly recent verbs resulting from the application of back-formation to noun compounds: baby-sit


Blends and blending Blending is a kind of word mixing in which elements from two separate words are fused, as in e.g. Oxbridge (Oxford+Cambridge)—used when the two universities are regarded as a single phenomenon as in an Oxbridge education, —sexploitation (sexual+exploitation) and Clintonomics (Clinton+economics) i.e. Clinton’s approach to economics. The result of the process of blending is called a blend. As the three examples above show, blends exhibit three kinds of fusion. In the first example, parts of the fused words (Ox- and -bridge) have simply been ed together, in the second there is partial overlap between sex and exploitation, and in the third the first part—Clinton—has been kept as a full word, to which -onomics from economics has been added. The overlapping type is by far the most common one. When it comes to the meanings of blends, it turns out that in the majority of such formations, the two words that are fused are not treated as being equally important16. Instead, the second word is given more importance than the first: formally, it tends contribute a longer and more distinctive element, and semantically it is normally the head of the construction making up the definition of the blend: sexploitation is ‘exploitation involving sex’, Clintonomics is ‘economics (economic policy) as practised by Clinton’. Further examples of blending, most of which the claim about the importance of the second element, are given below: Amtrak (for American track; a US railway line), ballute (balloon and parachute), breathalyser (analyser using breath), carbecue (barbecue to which you go in a car), chunnel (tunnel under the Channel), cremains (cremated remains), dawk (dove and hawk used figuratively), eargasm (ear and orgasm), edutainment/infotainment education/information as entertainment, elint (electronic intelligence), floptical (a floppy disk using an optical track), glasphalt (glass and asphalt), Globowood (global and Hollywood), © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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guestimate (guess and estimate), hazchem (hazardous chemicals), hi-fi (high fidelity), Intelsat (Intelligence satellite), kidvid (kids’ video), misper (‘missing person’), sci-fi (science fiction), slanguage (slang and language), smog (smoke and fog), stagflation (stagnation and inflation), twigloo (‘igloo-like building made of twigs’), On occasion, second elements in blends take on a suffix-like character. They develop a meaning of their own and are used with a certain amount of productivity in new combinations. In this category we find e.g. the second element -(o)nomics from economics, first used in Reaganomics (‘economics as practiced by President Reagan’) and later also in Nixonomics Thatchernomics and Clintonomics; no doubt, the time will soon be ripe for Bushonomics. Other examples of such semi-suffixes are the -el in hotel, motel, boatel, floatel and -(o)holic, originally from alcoholic but now also found in e.g. chocoholic, shopoholic, workaholic. Compare also the second elements in compounds that have developed suffix-like characteristics like -babble, -gate, -man, -person, -speak discussed in Chapter 7.

Reduplicative compounds Reduplicative compounds are sometimes more aptly called ‘echoic words’17. These constructions are combinations of two words that somehow echo each other in that the second word repeats the first with a slight change in pronunciation/spelling. There are two categories. In one the change affects the vowel in the first word, while the consonants are kept intact, as for instance in flip-flop, riff-raff, shilly-shally, tick-tack/tick-tock, wishy-washy, zig-zag. In a second, equally common type, the vowels stay the same, but one of the consonants is changed, as for example in hanky-panky, higgedly-piggedly, hobnob, hoity-toity, nitty-gritty, pitter-patter, roly-poly, teeny-weeny/teensy-weensy. 164



The meanings of these words are often sound-imitating (onomatopoeic): flip-flop refers to a kind of light sandal and to the noise caused by walking in such sandals; for some reason it also has the figurative meaning ‘to change one’s mind abruptly’. Riff-raff is a term for undesirable people (cf. Fawlty Towers), to shilly-shally is to fail to make up one’s mind or to act resolutely. The basic meaning of wishy-washy is ‘weak’, ‘watery’, but in present-day English it is normally used to describe behaviour or a state of mind characterised by lack of resoluteness. Tick-tack and zig-zag are self-explanatory. As for the second type, hanky-panky means ‘improper behaviour’, often to do with money or sex, higgedly-piggedly means ‘in disorder’, to hobnob with certain people is to be friendly with them or meet them socially; there is more than a hint that the people in question are socially superior to the ‘meeter’, a hoity-toity person is snobbish. The nitty-gritty is the most essential and often difficult aspect of some undertaking, pitter-patter is the sound of quick steps, a rolypoly is a kind of pudding and by extension also a term used about plump people. Teeny-weeny (in American English teensy-weensy) means ‘very small’ or ‘at all’ as in e.g. Doesn’t he have any money?— Not a teeny-weeny bit! It would be easy to find additional examples of reduplicative compounds and it appears that new compounds of this type are still being formed, especially for informal use. While the examples above mostly contain words that are not themselves recognised English lexemes, there are also reduplicative constructions involving established English lexemes, for example brain-drain, flower power, high-five, hip-hop, hotshot, jet set, mumbo jumbo, multiculti, shock jock (a disk jockey who expresses opinions in an offensive manner) sky-high as in blow the place sky-high. A recent example of reduplicative compounds is Aga saga, defined in The Oxford Dictionary of New Words as “popular novel involving an Aga stove focussing on semi-rural middle’class family life’. From same source we get happy-clappy/happyclappy, an ‘informal and slightly disparaging term for a member of a Christian group whose worship is marked by enthusiasm and spontaneity’. Finally there is an interesting example of a reduplicative compound based on both clipping, suffixation and reduplication, i.e. argy-bargy ‘quarrel, argument’. We can distinguish three distinct © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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phases in the formation of argy-bargy: first argument has been backclipped to arg, then the ‘familiarizing’ informal suffix -y is attached to arg and finally the resulting argy has been reduplicated as bargy, the whole process yielding argy-bargy.

Rhyming slang Rhyming slang is a type of slang that can be traced back to the 18th century and is particularly associated with Cockney English. The formation of expressions of this type of slang is a two-stage process. The first stage involves finding a two-word phrase, the last word of which rhymes with the target word, i.e. the word whose meaning we want to express. (In actual fact a lot of such two-word phrases have already been created and are unlikely to be replaced by other phrases). The two-word phrase is then used instead of the target word to create a kind of code in accordance with the description below: Phrase

Target word

Cain and Able

table

china plate

mate

butcher’s hook

look

apples and pears

stairs

But the process above may then be taken one step further in that the final word in the phrase—the one rhyming with the target word—is dropped: Phrase

Target

Modified phrase

Cain and able

table

Cain

china plate

mate

china

butcher’s hook

look

apples and pears stairs

166

butcher’s apples



The coding is now complete and s of rhyming slang can produce utterances supposedly only understood by their fellow s, like e.g. Take a butcher’s at that car!, Bring your china! One of the chief uses of rhyming slang has been to provide euphemisms for offensive or taboo words. Thus Richard the Third is used instead of turd (‘shit’), Bristol Cities for titties, Hampton Wick for prick, Berkshire/Berkley Hunt for cunt18. The above examples of rhyming slang are of long standing and you sometimes get the impression that this type of word-formation is no longer productive. However, as the following examples indicate, it is clearly the case that—to a certain extent at least—rhyming slang is still productive: Adam and Eve ‘leave’, bangers (and mash) ‘cash’, Britney Spears ‘beers’, do bird ‘do time’ (in prison), from (bird)lime, which rhymes with time, John Major ‘pager’, Steve McQueen’s ‘jeans’ and (whiskey and) soda ‘mobile phone’ (soda rhymes with Voda as in Vodafone)19.


167


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References

References

Valerie Adams. 1973. An Introduction to Modern English Word-formation. London:Longman. Valerie Adams. 2001. Complex Words in English. London: Longman. Jean Aitchison. 1987 Words in the Mind. Oxford: Blackwell. Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable. 1978. A History of the English Language. Third ed. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge. Laurie Bauer. 1983. English Word-formation. Cambridge etc.: CUP. Laurie Bauer. 1988. Introducing Linguistic Morphology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Laurie Bauer 1994. Watching English Change. London: Longman. Laurie Bauer. 2001. Morphological Productivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robert Beard. 1996 in ‘Once More on the Analysis of ed-adjectives’ Journal of Linguistics 12:2, 155–157. Leonard Bloomfield. 1933. Language. New York: Holt. Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang. 1990. Tony Thorne. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd. Herbert E. Brekle & Dieter Kastovsky (eds.) 1977. Perspektiven der Wortbildungsforschung. Wuppertaler Schriftentreihe Linguistik 1. Bonn: Bouvier. G.L. Brook. A History of the English Language. Second impression. 1960. London, Reading: Andre Deutsch. Neil Burton-Roberts. 1998. Analysing Sentences 3 ed. London: Longman. Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms. 1998:Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. J. Chapman. 1986. New Dictionary of American Slang. New York: Harper & Row. Herbert E. Clark & Eve V. Clark. 1979. ‘When Nouns Surface as Verbs’. Language 55:4, 767–811. © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL). 2001. Ed. by Rodney Huddleston & Geoffrey K. Pullum. Cambridge: CUP. David Crystal. 1997. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dictionary of Clichés. The Facts on File Dictionary of Clichés. 2001. Christine Amner. New York: Checkmark Books. A.C. Gimson & Alan Cruttenden. 1994. Gimson’s Pronunciation of English. 5th edition. Revised by Alan Cruttenden. Fifth edition. London, New York: Edward Arnold. Robert A. Hall. 1974. The Comic Style of P.G.Wodehouse. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books. Paul J. Hopper & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 1993. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: CUP. Richard Hudson. 1976. ‘Problems in the analysis of ed-adjectives’. Journal of Linguistics 11:1:69–72. Geoffrey Hughes. 2000. A History of English Words. Oxford: Blackwell. Howard Jackson & Etienne Zé Amvela. 2000. Words, Meaning and Vocabulary. London & New York: Cassell. Otto Jespersen. 1942. A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. Part VI: Morphology. Copenhagen: Einar Munksgaard. Francis Katamba. 1994. English Words. London & New York: Routledge. Dieter Kastovsky. 1986. ‘The problem of productivity in word formation’ Linguistics 24, 585–600. Dieter Kastovsky. 1995. ‘The Syntactic Aspects of Word-Formation: Where Are We Today?’, In Gunnel Melchers & Beatrice Warren (ed.s) Studies inAnglistics. Stockholm Studies in English LXXXV. Stockholm: Almqvist &Wiksell International. Dieter Kastovsky 1986. ‘Word-Formation and Pragmatics’. In A Yearbook of Studies in English Language and Literature.Pp. 63–78. Herausgegeben von Otto Rauchbauer. Göran Kjellmer 1984, ‘Why great:greatly but not big:*bigly‘?’ On the formation of English adverbs in -ly, Studia Linguistica 38, 1–19. Göran Kjellmer. 2000‚ ‘Potential Words‘. Word 51/2:208–28. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roger Lass. The Shape of English. History and Structure.1987. London, Melbourne: J. L. Dent and Sons Ltd. 170


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Magnus Ljung. 1970. English Denominal Adjectives. Gothenburg Studies in English 21. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Magnus Ljung, 1974. A Frequency Dictionary of English Morphemes. Gothenburg Data Linguistica Series. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Magnus Ljung. 1976 a. ‘Instrumental Verbs’ in Brekle & Kastovsky 1976. Magnus Ljung. 1976 b. ‘Ed adjectives revisited’. Journal of Linguistics 12:2:159–68. John Lyons. 1995. Linguistic semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tom MacArthur 1992. The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Hans Marchand. 1969. The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-Formation. Second ed. Munchen: Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung. W.J. Meys 1975 Compound adjectives in English and the ideal speakerlistener. Amsterdam: North Holland. David Minugh. 1991. On Pronounceable English. A Handbook of English Pronunciation. Stockholm Papers in English language and Literature. University of Stockholm. Oxford Dictionary of Collocations. 2002. Oxford, New York etc.: Oxford University Press. The Oxford Dictionary of New Words. 1997 Elisabeth Knowles with Julia Elliott. Oxford, New York: OUP. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Eric Partridge. 1961. A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. New York: MacMillan. Steven Pinker. 1995. The Language Instinct. New York: Harper Perennial. Randolph Quirk et al. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Stuart Robertson and Frederic G. Cassidy. 1954. The Development of Modern English. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. John Saeed. 1997. Semantics. Reprint 2001.Oxford:Blackwell. Robert Stockwell & Donka Minkova. 2001. English Words.History and Structure. Cambridge: CUP.


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Elizabeth Closs-Traugott and Mary Louise Pratt. 1980. Linguistics for Students of Literature. San Diego, New York, etc.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch. Beatrice Warren. 1978. Semantic Patterns of Noun-Noun Compounds. Gothenburg Studies in English 41. Beatrice Warren. 1992. Sense Developments. Stockholm Studies in English LXXX. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. John Wells. 2000. The Longman Pronouncing Dictionary. 2nd ed. London: Longman.

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Notes

Notes

Chapter 1 1 The American Heritage Dictionary of English. 2 The notion of sign and the distinction between motivated and non-motivated signs was first formulated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in the early 1900s (cf C.Bally and Albert Sechehaye (eds.) Cours de Linguistique Générale, 1st ed. 1916, Paris: Payot. Translated into English as Course in General Linguistics New York: Duckworth. 3 These definitions are from The New Oxford Dictionary of English. 4 The place of English and the other Germanic languages in the larger context of the Indo-European language family is traditionally illustrated by a family tree diagram like the one below adapted from Robertsson-Cassidy 1954:33. Indo-European

Armenian

Hellenic

Albanian

Italic

Celtic

West

Germanic

Balto– Slavonic

North

Tokharian

East (Gothic)

West

East

(Dutch, English, Frisian, German)

(Danish Swedish)

5 The data about the barking of dogs comes from the list Sounds of the World’s Animals Copyright Catherine Ball at www.georgetown.edu/cball/animals/cat.html). Another example making the same point may be found in Pinker (1995:152), i.e. © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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Notes

the fact that pigs in English-speaking countries go oink but in Japanese they say boo boo. 6 Definitions of the morpheme may be found in most introductions to linguistics. See also e.g. Katamba 1994:32–52, Ljung 1974:12–23, MacArthur 1992:670. For a classic definition of ‘morpheme’ cf. for example Bloomfield’s Language pp. 161–8. 7 Cf. Ljung 1974:197. 8 For more information about immediate constituents and the analysis of complex words, see Bauer 1988:144-46, Pinker 1995:133–36. 9 For further reading about words as types and tokens, see e.g. Ljung 1990:3–4, Lyons 1995:49, 53, 176. 10 This example has been taken from Bauer 1988:7. 11 Obviously the number of types can never be greater than the number of tokens. In very short texts there may be the same number of types and tokens. 12 Definitions and discussions of the lexeme may be found in many books on semantics and vocabulary like e.g. Lyons 1995:51, 56– 7, Saeed 1997:55–9. Note that although inflectional suffixes are ignored when forms are brought together as one lexeme, the socalled derivational suffixes are not: bank and banker are different lexemes, as are slow and slowly, kind and unkind (cf. Chapter 3 for a definition of derivation and derivational). 13 For homonym and homonymy see e.g.Alm-Arvius 1998:59–61, Lyons 1995:54–60, Saeed 1997:63–4. 14 In addition, many dictionary entries contain different lexemes. See for instance the entries for the word charge in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language and The New Oxford Dictionary of English. 15 See the discussion of speakers’ word storage in Aitchison 1987:108–117, Pinker 1995:146. 16 Teapot, ashtray, wine glass and other compounds vary in the way they are spelt. Teapot may also be spelt tea-pot and tea pot, and ashtray and wine glass are also found with the spellings ash-tray and wineglass. Cf. Chapter 7 for more comments on the spelling of compounds. 174


Notes

17 Although neither clichés nor idioms can be clearly and exhaustively defined, there is no shortage of ‘dictionaries’ of both. Two recent books of this kind are Ammer 2001 and the Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms 1998. 18 Metaphor is perhaps the most important figure of speech, for which see e.g. Alm-Arvius 1998: 58, Crystal 1997:70, Saeed 1997:302–8, 336. For a different approach to metaphor, cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980. 19 Sense and reference are central linguistic for which see e.g. Alm-Arvius 1998:34–7, Lyons 1995:204, 225, Saeed 1997:12, 23–6, 30–32. 20 See Saeed 1997:23–4 for the difference between denotation and reference; as Saeed points out (p. 27) the term extension is sometimes used instead of denotation. Cf. also Alm-Arvius 1998:35, Lyons 1995:78–80. 21 For more information about sense relations cf e.g. Alm-Arvius 199846-61, Lyons 1995:79–80, Saeed 1997:62–5, 65–71. 22 For this figure, see for instance Baugh and Cable 1978:177, Katamba 1994:208. 23 There was little or no direct borrowing from Greek into Old or Middle English, but many of the loans from Latin or French had originally been borrowed into Latin from Greek. Many scientific and learned Greek borrowed later have been Latinized in various ways.

Chapter 2 1 Extensive discussions of word classes will be found in Quirk et. al. 1985 and The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cf. also Crystal 1997:206–213, Lyons 1968:317–29, Pinker 1995:105–6. 2 Assessments of the total number of words in English (and other languages) vary wildly, as do estimates of how many words different categories of speakers know. For some of these, see Crystal 1997: 118–125 and Pinker 1995:150–51.


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3 Crystal 1997:213. 4 This quote is from Rombauer-Becker Joy of Cooking 1962 Bobbs Merrill, Indiananpolis, Indiana. 5 For a full and interesting discussion of different types of class hip cf. Taylor Linguistic Classification 1995 2nd ed Chapter 2–3 6 These and the other criteria in this chapter are based on the word-class classification in Greenbaum 1996, but basically reflect mainstream grammatical thinking on these matters. 7 Cf. also the discussion in Chapter 6, where it is pointed out that the word-formation process known as conversion may override suffixation: a noun like e.g. position may be used as a verb as in e.g. They positioned the table between the chairs. 8 There are also verbs followed by a direct object and a so-called objective predicate complement, for example call, consider, regard as in e.g. She called me a fool, We consider him a genius, They regard this as a terrible mistake. 9 Unlike the other word classes, the adverb class is divided between the open and the closed type: there are sets of adverbs that are closed like e.g. those denoting definite time (now, then) and place (here, there). But there are also those that are clearly open, in particular the class of manner adverbs formed by the addition of the suffix -ly. 10 The definition of determiner used here is along traditional lines; cf. e.g. Greenbaum 1995, Burton-Roberts Analysing Sentences (3rd ed.) page 154, Quirk et.al.1985:253–7. Huddleston and Pullum 2001 The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. 11 The standard work on grammaticalization is the book Grammaticalization by Paul J. Hopper and Elizabeth ClossTraugott CUP 1993. 12 These examples are from Hopper-Traugott 177–178.

176


Notes

Chapter 3 1 As the discussion of words like defrost, unsaddle on pp. 63 in Chapter 4 will show, there are also prefixes that change the word class of the stems they are attached to. 2 Certain suffix forms turn up both in inflection and in derivation, in particular -ed and -ing, which are found both in inflectional verb forms (They talked, They were talking) and in derived nouns and adjectives like flat-footed, carpeting, etc. Adjectives like amused and amusing (as in an amused smile, amusing stories) and nouns like a painting, the painting of the walls pose a particular problem in this respect (for discussion of these questions cf. Chapter 2 p. 41, Chapter 6 p. 116). 3 MacArthur 1992:263 4 All languages have rules—sometimes called phonotactic rules— determining what sound and letter-sequences are permitted in the language. For information about the phonotactic rules for English, see Traugott-Pratt 1980:61–4 and Cruttenden-Gimson 1994:216–23. 5 Cf MacArthur The Oxford Companion to the English Language p. 876 6 This definition is from The Oxford Dictionary of English. 7 A related but not identical question is under what circumstances a potential word may become an actual one. Cf. Kjellmer 2000 for a discussion of this. 8 According to Saeed 1997:71, modern dictionary makers do not always follow this principle but simply list all derived forms even if their meaning is predictable. 9 For more information about lexicalization, see e.g. Bauer 1983:48–61. 10 The distinction between syntactic repackaging and labelling used here has been borrowed from Kastovsky 1986 (and elsewhere). Kastovsky uses syntactic recategorization instead of syntactic repackaging.


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Chapter 4 1 Most verbs containing ‘removal’ dis- like for instance discourage, dismantle, dismember were borrowed from French during the Middle English period. 2 This point is made in Adams (2001:71) who has also supplied the examples used here. Cf. also Bauer (1983:37–38) 3 For the historical background of English prefixes, see e.g. Marchand 1969:129–34 4 Stress assignment in English is notoriously difficult to describe. There are several treatments of English stress in general and word stress in particular in the literature, for instance Bauer 1983 Chapter 5, Gimson 1994 Chapters 10–12, and Minugh 1991, Chapters 5, 7–9. 5 For extensive discussions of productivity in word-formation, cf. e.g. Adams 2001 (7–10, 146–53), Bauer 1983, Chapter 4, Bauer 2001, Kastovsky 1986. See also The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language p. 1630. In this book, productivity in word-formation is regarded as a cline extending from highly productive to weakly productive processes. No English word-formation rule is 100% productive, but some, like the rules for adverb-forming -ly and noun-forming -ness come close. 6 From one of John Cleese’s Monty Python sketches. 7 The principle that negative un- doesn’t combine with simple nouns is (very occasionally) violated in formations like e.g. unperson/unperson, which means roughly ‘a (usually politically) impossible person’ i.e. someone who is not accepted by the establishment. 8 In George Orwell’s pessimistic vision of a totalitarian Britain in the novel 1984, one of the prominent features is the simplification of English word-formation permitting among other things, words like ungood and even double-plus-ungood meaning ‘very bad’. See Crystal 1997:135 for an of Orwell’s fascinating ‘Newspeak’. 9 Cf. Kastovsky 1986:594, who provides the example ‘The TimePatrol also had to unmurder Capistrano’s great-grand-mother, unmarry him from the pasha’s daughter in 1600, and uncreate 178


Notes

those three kids’ from the science-fiction novel Up the Line by Robert Silverberg 1969/1975, p. 152, London: Sphere Books. Cf. also e.g. unbreak (as in Unbreak my heart from a pop song) and the unusual unsay ‘withdraw, retract’ something previously said. 10 Unexpected formations like dedog are one of the distinctive features of style of P. G. Wodehouse. In addition to dedog—from The Mating Season (1949)—there is also the verb detro from Frozen Assets (1964). 11 There is another type of combination with anti-, which is used to form nouns like e.g. anti-hero, anti-matter meaning ‘person who is the opposite of a hero’, ‘something that is the opposite of matter’. Here anti- carries primary stress. 12 Newsweek April 2002 13 Heard on BBC World News, March 13, 2002.

Chapter 5 1 For more detailed s of the interplay between suffixation and word stress, cf. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL pp. 1669–72 and Bauer 1983:116–20), Minugh 1991, Lass 1987:204–10. 2 The given here is based on Bauer 1983:112–22. 3 Cf. Ljung 1974:26. 4 These examples are from Adams (2001:64) 5 The examples creditcarditis and televisionitis are from NODE and AHD respectively. The rest of the examples have been taken from The Independent on CDROM from 1992. It turns out that this use of the -itis suffix goes back to at least the early 1900s: according to the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, Asquith used the term fiscalitis as early as 1903, when writing in The Westminster Gazette. 6 These examples are from Adams 2001:62. 7 Cf The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language p. 1691, Bauer 1983:268, and Marchand 1969:245–7. © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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Notes

8 From Newsweek May 20, 2002, p.65. 9 The i-suffix is discussed i Marchand 1969:354–5 and in Bauer 1983:253–5. 10 The meaning of nouns in -ness and -ity is traditionally said to be ‘state, quality, condition’, as in e.g. Marchand 1969 pp. 312 and 334. However, these nouns commonly mean ‘fact’ or ‘extent’. Thus e.g. His carelessness/sincerity amazed me will normally be taken to mean either ‘The fact that he was careless/sincere amazed me’ or ‘The extent to which he was careless/sincere amazed me’. 11 The greater productivity of -ness is shown by the fact that it may combine with rather unexpected stems, for example proper nouns as in the following quote from Ford Madox Ford Parade’s End (Penguin Classics, 1982 p. 54: It was perhaps partly her Edinburgh-ness. 12 Cf Bauer 1983:222, Adams 2001:32 13 This example is from Adams (2001:28) 14 For examples of the creative use of -ee, see Kastovsky 1986:598. 15 See Bauer 1994:40–47. 16 For a discussion of the possessive -ed suffix, see Beard 1976, Hudson 1976, Ljung 1976. 17 We are talking about what is normally the case: we expect people to have heads and hands, cars to have wheels, etc. Obviously, in less normal cases, all such possessions may be lost. 18 What is inherently possessed may also be properties like size, and shape, as the examples shoebox-sized and duck-shaped show. 19 From The Independent on CDROM 1996. 20 Cf. Ljung 1970: 64–8, 76–91. 21 Newsweek Aug 5, 2002, p. 54. 22 The Daily Telegraph, July 2, 2002 23 The jaw-droppingly example is from The Times Literary Supplement, Nov.1, 2002, p.12. Like the earlier example unputdownable, jaw-dropping and jaw-droppingly are stylistically marked words. However they seem to be on the increase in certain journalistic genres. 180


Notes

24 For further discussion of the limits of ly-suffixation, see Kjellmer 1984.

Chapter 6 1 s of conversion will be found in e.g. Marchand 1969, Quirk et.al. 1985: Clark and Clark 1979, Adams 2001 and the Cambridge Grammar of Modern English 2 MacArthur 1992:263. 3 In most cases of conversion it is possible to determine its direction i.e. what is the input word and what is the output. Thus in word pairs like hammer(n): hammer (v) and fax(n): fax(v) it reasonable to assume that the verb has been formed from the noun, not the other way round. But there are also many instances of homonymous word pairs for which such decisions are impossible, for example hate, love, count. 4 For discussion of such categories (cf. e.g. Adams 2001:22, Bauer 1983, Clark and Clark 1979). 5 Both definitions from The New Oxford Dictionary of English. 6 From le Carré Smiley’s People. 1980. London and Sydney:Pan Books p. 172. 7 As mentioned in Chapter 2 (p. 41), verb to adjective conversion is probably the best explanation for adjectives like astonished, amusing, breath-taking, etc. As noted in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, p.1644 this is an unusual case of conversion using inflected forms as its point of departure. 8 From the Financial Times, March 11, 2003, p. 3. 9 For further examples of such verb:noun pairs, see Minugh 1991:227–8. 10 Note that partial conversion from phrasal verb to nouns with ‘agentive’ or instrumental meaning may take many different forms. Thus in addition to the type drop-out, drop-in, there are the types in-drop, dropper-in and dropper-inner (the final example usually found only in informal spoken English). Cf. Bauer 1983:288–90. 11 This example has been borrowed from Pinker 1995:129. © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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Notes

Chapter 7 1 There is a fair amount of disagreement among linguists concerning the proper definition of ‘compound’in English. For an early treatment, cf. for example Jespersen 1942, A Modern English Grammar Part VI pp. 134–183 and Marchand’s classic Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-Formation. 1969:11– 30. More recent treatments will be found in Bauer (1983:106–9), Bauer (1988:33–7, 100–104), Quirk et.al. (1985:1330–32, 1567– 70), The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2001:449– 51, 1644–66), and Adams (2001: 4–5). Note also that the socalled ‘reduplicative compounds’ like argy-bargy, riffraff etc. are dealt with in Chapter 9. 2 For this point cf. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language p. 447. 3 There is no total agreement about the role of stress in noun compounds. Thus Bauer 1983:104–105 and The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (p. 451) have no faith in the role of stress placement as a predictor of compound status. The latter argues that the compound:phrase distinction can only be established on syntactic grounds (pp. 449–50). Others are in favour of regarding stress as at least an important tool in the recognition of noun+noun compounds, for instance Marchand (1969:28– 29), Quirk et. al (1985:1568–69) and Adams (2001:80). 4 All the examples of compounds given here consist of just two words. However, it is clear that both compounds and phrases may consist of three or more words, for example weapons inspection crisis, or small arms factory owner. Such compounds have to be analysed on several levels, the first into weapons inspection and crisis and then into weapons and inspection, the second into small arms factory and owner, then into small arms and factory and finally into small and arms. (Small arms ‘firearms that can be carried in the hand’). 5 For syntactic compound (sometimes also called synthetic compound), see Bauer 1988:36, Adams 2001:78–9, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language p. 1652n

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Notes

6 They may also have other agentive or activity-denoting suffixes like -ent or -or and -ance or -ion, as in insect repellent, cassette ejector, slum clearance and word deletion 7 For a comprehensive treatment of compound adjectives, see Meys 1975. 8 In the early 1990s, jaw-dropping was quite an uncommon word: in the 100 million word British National Corpus, there are four instances: a jaw-dropping experience (twice), jaw-dropping remarks and a jaw-dropping piece of strategic diplomacy. However, both the adjective and the adverb jaw-droppingly are clearly on the increase. Thus The Independent on CDROM from 1998 has 24 instances of jaw-dropping, and 5 of jaw-droppingly. Those figures have gone up to 33 for the adjective and 9 for the adverb in the Independent on CDROM from 2001. 9 (From the Times Literary Supplement, Nov 1, 2002, p. 12. 10 The fact that the word class of such adverb compounds is different from that of their heads raises the question whether they should be regarded as exocentric compounds (cf. pp. 127–129) 11 In addition to the compound adverbs mentioned in this section, there are occasional rather surprising adverbs like e.g. dropdead used as an intensifier in drop-dead gorgeous (also used as a premodifier in e.g. Chicago—the drop-dead musical!

Chapter 8 1 They are not restricted for linguistic reasons—classical Latin and Greek had very rich vocabularies—but because latter-day speakers of English cannot be assumed to know all the classical forms that could in principle be used to form neo-classical compounds. 2 I owe the ICF and FCF to Bauer 1983. The vast majority of the combining forms are initial: of the 550 plus combining forms listed in The New Oxford Dictionary of English, more than 400 are initial forms. 3 Kleptocracy was found in Newsweek. 4 This is the term used in MacArthur 1992:233 © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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Notes

Chapter 9 1 For discussions of back-formation, cf. Adams 2001:136–8, Hughes 2000:54 2 From the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang 3 The example of uber has been taken from The Oxford Dictionary of New Words 4 There is a very extensive discussion of the suffix(es) -nik in Bauer 1983:259–66. 5 The information about the suffix -bot is from The Oxford Dictionary of New Words 6 The information about -(s)ville is from Chapman 1986 (New Dictionary of American Slang: Harper & Row) 7 From The Independent News on CDROM 1992. 8 From NEWSWEEK March 25, 2002, p. 58. 9 For example Beatrice Warren in Warren 1992. 10 in e.g. G.L. Brook A History of the English Language pp. 177–180, Bloomfield Language p. 426 to give just a few sources) 11 This is the definition of box in The New Oxford English Dictionary. 12 The change in meaning of gay from ‘carefree’ to ‘homosexual’ and ‘homosexual man’ became established in the 1960s according to The New Oxford Dictionary, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Crystal 1997:138. 13 See the entry for SAD from in the Oxford Dictionary of New Words. 14 The clipping blog and its derivatives blogger, blogging was first found in Newsweek May 27, 2002, p. 79. Later issues of Newsweek also had blogoshere and blogspeak. 15 According to the OED 16 Cf. Adams 2001:139. 17 This term is from MacArthur 1992:854-55. Discussions of reduplicative compounds will also be found in Bauer 1983:213, Marchand 1969, $ 8.2.1, Adams 2001 127-29, Katamba 1994: 79, Jespersen 1942, part VI pp 173-183. Cf. also Hughes 2000:61 184


Notes

who mentions forms from Yiddish English (Yinglish) like Oedipus-schmoedipus. 18 Cf Hughes 2000:48, Partridge 1961. 19 I am grateful to Tanya Fitzgibbon for the examples of modern rhyming slang.


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Discussion of exercises


Chapters 1–8 There is no discussion of exercises of a fact-finding nature. This is indicated by means of a dash (–).

Chapter 1 1 In motivated signs there is a natural connection between form and meaning while there is no such connection in non-motivated (arbitrary) signs. Flag signals are usually non-motivated and so are most human sign languages, although they also have certain motivated characteristics. Animal territory marking uses motivated signs. 2 Grammar is concerned with changes in form with predictable effects on the meaning of an utterance. This makes it possible to write rules for grammar. Vocabulary is concerned with the relation between the form and meaning of linguistic signs. In a vocabulary consisting only of simple words, that relation is arbitrary and consequently not predictable, and no rules can be written about it. For non-simple words see the answer to question 4 below. 3 Onomatopoeic words are intended to imitate certain sounds like e.g. animal calls. Sound symbolic words on the other hand contain (sequences of) sounds supposed to be associated with certain meanings. 4 Unlike simple words, words created by word-formation rules have meanings that are partly predictable: we know, for © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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instance, that words ending in -ation are highly likely to be nouns formed from verbs and to express the activity or result of carrying out what the verb denotes. In the same way we form informed guesses about words ending in -er (likely to be agent nouns), -ly (probably manner adverbs), etc. 5 A morpheme is the smallest meaningful form in a language i.e. a form that cannot be further cut up without becoming meaningless. Most morphemes in English are free, i.e. they can appear on their own as words (read). A limited number are bound, i.e. they can only occur together with a stem that is itself a word. Bound morphemes in English are either prefixes or suffixes or so-called combining forms (see Chapters 4, 5 and 8). 6

representative represent

ative

recalling recall re

ing

call

untruthfulness untruthful un

ness

truthful truth

ful

7 The type:token distinction is usually applied only to written texts, in which words are defined as strings of letters separated by empty spaces. If we count all such words in a text, we are dealing with tokens. However, if we only count each individual letter-combination once (i.e. if we don’t count repetitions) we are dealing with types. By dividing the number of types by the number of tokens we arrive at the type:token ratio of the text. That ratio is often regarded as an indication of text difficulty: the higher the type:token ratio, the more difficult the text. 8 There are 42 types in Text A and 52 in Text B. The number of tokens is 53 in A and 60 in B. Dividing the types by the tokens we arrive at the following TTRs (type:token ratios): A = 0.79, B = 0.87. 9 In Text A the number of lexemes is 41: a and an represent the same lexeme. In Text B, the number of lexemes equals the number of types minus 1: the forms be and is are included under 188



the same lexeme BE. In this count, plural suffixes, past tense suffixes, apostrophe s suffixes and n’t as in Don’t and ‘s as in name’s have been counted as inflectional endings. The numbers would be different if we counted n’t as not and ‘s in My name’s not Jack as an instance of be. We might also wish to count at once as a single complex lexeme. 10 The non-Germanic languages that have had the greatest impact on English vocabulary are French, Latin, Greek.

Chapter 2 1 A word class is a class of words sharing certain important characteristics having to do with syntactic function, the grammatical categories expressed, and meaning. These characteristics are also used to define the different word classes. The semantic (notional) criterion is problematic because it is vague and less comprehensive than the others. 2 Content words have denotation. They denote phenomena found in ‘the real world’ or some imagined world, like people, objects, processes, actions, qualities and others. Function words do not have denotation, but are mainly used to link content words in different ways. Most function words are limited in number and do not readily accept new : they are said to belong to the closed word classes. There is no upper limit to the number of content words and the word classes they belong to are accordingly known as open classes. It is possible to leave out certain function words because they are predictable: leaving them out does not deprive the text of essential information. Leaving out the content words, on the other hand, would make the text incomprehensible. 3 It may for instance be argued that count nouns – especially those denoting concrete phenomena – are more central to the noun category than uncountable nouns. 4 Proper nouns lack denotation and are used as names, i.e. they refer directly to different phenomena. Unless they are recategorised, they do not normally take articles or the plural. (Note that © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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not all names consist of proper nouns, however). Common nouns have denotation and can as a rule always take the definite article. If they are countables they also take the indefinite article and the plural, but if they are uncountables they accept neither. 5 They cannot take the indefinite article unless they have been recategorised as count nouns meaning ‘type of’, ‘kind of’. 6 As indicated above, uncountables may be recategorised as countables and then get the meaning ‘type of’,’sort of’. In addition, countable nouns may be recategorised as uncountables and then get the meaning ‘mass’. If the original countable in these cases denotes an animal, the recategorised form is usually assumed to have a meaning linked to food, as in e.g. Would you like some turkey? – No thanks, but I’d like a little more rabbit. Proper nouns may be recategorised as common count nouns, as in e.g. This was a new Susan. 7 Recategorisation resembles conversion in that a new word is created without formal change. But unlike conversion, recategorisation doesn’t change the word class of the original word: turkey is still a noun when it is has been turned into an uncountable referring to food. 8 These examples show how difficult it is to distinguish between nouns and adjectives. As the examples make clear, both upper class, Sydney and 1930s can be used attributively. They may also be used both in predicative position and with intensifiers as in Her accent was very upper class, The atmosphere is very Sydney, and This music is very 1930s. However, most linguists would still not accept Sydney and 1930s as adjectives for a number of reasons. Upper class is clearly a phrase and as such cannot be assigned to any word class. Sydney is a typical proper noun, and 1930s looks like a plural noun phrase which may occur in typical noun phrase positions like e.g. in the 1930s. What these examples show is that the ability to occur in attributive and predicative position is not confined to adjectives, but is open to a vast number of other words and phrases.

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We may conclude that three criteria commonly said to single out adjectives as a word class are not doing a very good job. 9 The adverbs are difficult to characterise in of a set of common characteristics mainly because they fall into different subgroups with different functions. Thus some, like the intensifiers, operate only at phrase level and serve to modify a following adjective or adverb, others function as adverbials in clauses, and some express the speakers attitude to what (s)he is saying. 10 Grammaticalization is a cover term for a number of different types of linguistic change leading to the reanalysis of single words or combinations of words. Grammaticalization may turn a content word into a suffix as when Old English lic ‘body’, ‘likeness’ was transformed into the suffix -ly found in e.g. manly. It may also turn a content word into a function word, for instance in the case of the verb bar developing into the preposition bar ‘except for’. An often cited example of a combination of words gradually turning into a single word is the development of the word gonna from be going to.

Chapter 3 1 Complex words: reclassify, unbelievable, Londoner, Bushie(s), Clintonian. Compound words: water crisis, sun-tanned, arms cache, steamroller. In this book, the word Clintonomics is analysed as a blend (cf. Chapter 9) combining Clinton and the segment -onomics from the word economics. An alternative analysis is to treat Clintonomics as a suffixed word consisting of Clinton and -onomics. 2 The fact that forms ending in noun suffixes like steamroller and audition may be converted to verbs indicate that when suffixation and conversion clash, the latter wins. 3 The problem with noun-verb pairs like love(n):love(v), fear(n):fear(v) is that it is difficult – without turning to the historical evidence – to determine the direction of the conversion, i.e. what should be regarded as the starting-point for the conversion process and what as the result. Other words presenting © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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the same kind of difficulty are e.g. count, play and whistle and many others. In such cases it is not worth the trouble to try to establish the direction of the conversion. 4 Strictly speaking, English does not have the type of word-formation known as infixation, i.e. insertion of bound morphemes inside words. However, it has often been pointed out that English has a similar construction, making possible the insertion of ‘swearwords’ like bloody and fucking into words with at least three syllables, as for example in e.g. absobloodilutely, imfuckingpossible. As the examples show, the insertion place is immediately before the syllable with main stress in the original word. The effect of this type of insertion is to add emphasis to certain words. 5 The permitted consonant combinations – known as clusters – at the beginning of English words are listed below. Note that the symbols used are phonetic and that sometimes there are several spellings corresponding to a single cluster. Note also that certain rare combinations occurring in loanwords have been excluded. Permitted word-initial two-consonant clusters: [bj], [bl], [br], [dj], [dr], [dw], [fj], [fl ], [fr], [gl], [gr], [gw], [kj], [kl], [kr], [kw], [pj], [pl], [pr], [sf], [sj], [sk], [sl], [sm], [sn], [sp], [st], [sw], [ʃr], [ʃm], [θr], [tʃ]. Examples of written words with these clusters: beautiful, black, bride, duke, drive, dwell, few, flat, from, gloat, grade, Gwendolyn, cute, class, croak, quick, puke, pluck, prim, sphinx, suit, school, slow, smart, snow, speak, stone, swallow, shrink, schmuck, throw, cheat. Permitted three-consonant clusters: [skl], [skr], [skw], [spl], [spr], [str] as in sclerosis, scream, sprawl, squeamish, spleen, street. 6 We use our knowledge of word-formation productively when we actually create a word that is new to us. We use it analytically when we analyse an existing complex or compound word. 7 – 8 Chief among the factors that determine whether a derived, compound or converted word is entered in the dictionaries are the word’s frequency and the question whether its meaning is predictable or not. Words that are very infrequent or have 192



meanings that are highly predictable are often left out. As pointed out in note 8 to this chapter, however, today’s dictionary makers do not always follow these principles. 9 The point of the discussion of propeller and wheelchair is to show that many words that are labels have unpredictable meanings from the beginning: once the propeller and the wheelchair were invented – or even conceptualised – they were given these names. Labels may also develop over time – a process sometimes referred to as lexicalization – as in the case of typewriter which was originally used with reference both to the machine and the person, but is now only used (if at all ) about the machine (cf Bauer 1983:57). 10 Labelling and syntactic packaging refers to the two main functions of words created by word-formation. Labels are used to identify phenomena that need a name and in so doing they add to the word-stock of the language. (Cf. the discussion above concerning propeller and wheelchair). In syntactic repackaging, word-formation is used to rephrase a syntactic construction, as for instance when the person who (had) helped me is replaced by my helper.

Chapter 4 1 The ‘removal’ prefixes de- and un- untypically change the word class of the stem they are attached to. This is also true of certain other prefixes like e.g. out-. 2 A fully productive prefix combines freely with all stems belonging to a certain well-defined class of stems. If new are added to that class of stems, a fully productive prefix is able to combine with all of them. Fairly productive prefixes are less reliable in this respect, and weakly productive prefixes even less so. 3 – 4 When negative un- is attached to an adjective it creates a word expressing the opposite of the original stem meaning, while words created by the addition of non- merely deny the existence © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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of the qualities denoted by the stem . When un- is non-typically added to nouns like person, dog and book the combinations mean ‘the very opposite of a person, dog, book’. (See also Bauer 1983:279–285) 5 For example new, quick, tall, wide. 6 A few suggestions: clearly stems combining with mega- must be gradable: a word like *mega-nuclear would be odd because nuclear is normally not gradable. Mini- seems to combine only with stems that are countable nouns and accordingly *minisnow is an unlikely new formation. Out- only combines with verbs denoting activities in which competition is possible: outdie sounds odd (but no doubt a context could be dreamt up for it). 7 – 8 The prefix co- is normally added to agent nouns denoting people performing some specialised activity in which it is normal to have one or several partners.The verbs pilot and produce (films, plays, etc.) both denote such specialised activities. To a lesser extent that is also true of believe (‘have certain religious beliefs’), run and sing, but not of like, sit and snore. (Note however, that there will always be writers/speakers who will produce words like co-snorer in order to show originality). 9 – 10 The combining forms (for which see Chapter 8) are all bound Latin or Greek stems, and as such they usually denote extralinguistic phenomena like the stars (astro-), the soul (psycho-) etc. The English prefixes on the other hand have meanings like e.g. degree/size, liking/disliking, negation, reversal, repetition.

Chapter 5 1 – 2 The definition of a fully productive derivational suffix is basically the same as that for prefixes, excepting the type of forma194



tion involved. Thus a productive derivational suffix combines freely with all the stems belonging to a certain well-defined class and will combine with new stems meeting the specifications for that class. 3 The words Johnson, Eton, racket, author, history all have main stress on the first syllable. The main stress remains on the first syllable in authorise because -ise is one of the suffixes that do not affect stress placement, but is moved to the syllable immediately preceding the suffix in Etonian, authority, historic because -(i)an, -ity and -ic move the main stress in a word to the syllable immediately to their left. The suffixes -esque, -eer and -ation belong to the class of suffixes requiring that main stress be placed on the suffix itself, which explains the stress patterns of Johnsonesque, racketeer and authorization. 4 One -ful suffix is attached to nouns to form other nouns denoting amount as in a plateful of beans A second -ful suffix is added to nouns to create adjectives meaning ‘full of what the stem denotes’ as in truthful. 5 Word-final -sion is pronounced [ʃən] in propulsion and transmission, but [ən] in derision and implosion. The two different pronunciations can be predicted from the form of the stems of the verbs underlying the -sion forms: if the verb stem ends in -de, as in deride and implode, -sion is pronounced [ən]. In all other cases it is pronounced [ʃən]. 6 The only productive -ese suffix is the one used to form nouns meaning ‘jargon typical of the person(s), organization, text etc.that the stem denotes’. The noun and adjective suffixes -ese encountered in e.g. a Japanese, Can you speak Japanese and a Japanese company often occur in combination with nouns of countries, but their productivity is limited by the limited number of new country names. 7 The function of the -ie/-y suffix in words like auntie, doggie/doggy, nightie is merely to express familiarity and informality on the part of the speaker. Other suffixes have more definite meanings. Note that this also applies to the (different) -ie/-y suffix found in words like foodie. junkie, cutie etc., which changes the stems food,


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junk, cute into words denoting persons having different relations to the stem: foodie and junkie denote people who like food, junk (drugs), a cutie is a person who is cute. 8 – 9 Nouns that take the suffix -ed in these constructions must be felt to be inherently part of their ‘owner’: this explains why a car with four wheels may be described as four-wheeled, but a person who owns four wheels may not. 10 The only nouns that can be turned into adjectives meaning ‘full of, covered with’ by means of the suffix -y are concrete mass nouns like e.g. sand and dust, and concrete nouns denoting natural objects like rocks and stones.

Chapter 6 1 Conversion is like (most cases of) suffixation in changing the word class of the stem it is applied to. Conversion and suffixation also express much the same meanings, and are often ‘in competition’ with each other. But – with the exception of ‘partial conversion’ – word-formation by means of conversion does not involve any formal change in the word to which it is applied. Suffixation always changes the form of the word it is applied to. 2 Truly productive conversion results in words with predictable meanings as when instrument-denoting nouns are converted to instrumental verbs. Such conversion is obviously based on the assumptions speakers have about the way(s) different instruments are typically used. 3 Like other types of regular word-formation, conversion is used to create linguistic labels when its output is no longer predictable. 4 A noun like carpet is converted to a ‘provide with’ verb in e.g. to carpet a room, while the noun bark can only be given a ‘remove from’ meaning when converted to a verb as in e.g. to bark a tree. These different interpretations have to do with the fact that car196



pet and bark have different relations to their ‘owners’, i.e. rooms and trees: a room does not necessarily have a carpet, while a tree must have bark (possesses bark inherently). 5 The formation of instrumental verbs from nouns denoting instruments and tools exploits our natural expectations about the way(s) the referents of such nouns are typically used. However, the meaning of the potential instrumental verb may already be expressed by another word – a phenomenon known as blocking. Thus an instrument noun like spade is not normally converted to a verb to spade, since the verb dig already exists. (Note however that there is a verb spade but with a different meaning. Compare also axe, pen). 6 Eats ‘food’ : verb to noun conversion with plural suffix added, graph ‘show in graph form’: noun to verb conversion, swot ‘person who studies hard’: verb to agent noun conversion, dovetail ‘fit in with, agree with’: compound noun to verb conversion, flatline ‘die’: compound noun to verb conversion The word unmicrowaveability is the result of several word-formation processes: the compound noun microwave oven is abbreviated to microwave (n), which undergoes conversion to the verb (to) microwave ‘prepare (food) in a microwave’. To this verb the suffix -able is attached, producing the adjective microwaveable. The negative prefix un- is added and finally the noun suffix -ity is attached yielding unmicrowaveability. 7 As in the case of Sydney, 1930s and upper class in question 2 in Chapter 2, sand and Chicago are best regarded as nouns used with attributive function, and let us all be friends as a phrase with the same function. Regarding such cases as instances of conversion to adjectives would force us to assign adjective status to all words and word combinations that may occur attributively and predicatively, including most nouns. 8 – 9 The only productive use of ‘partial conversion’ is when it is applied to phrasal verbs like e.g. show off – with main stress on off – to turn them into nouns like a show-off ‘person who shows off’ with main stress on show. As an alternative to calling this


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‘partial conversion’ we could set up a new type of word-formation operating in of stress change. 10 In this chapter it was suggested that forms in -ing like amusing etc. are best analysed as adjectives converted from participles. However, when it comes to clearly nominal forms in -ing like painting in e.g. Hang the painting in the corner, the general opinion among linguists seems to be that we are dealing with suffixation rather than conversion, and that in such cases a nounforming suffix -ing has been attached to the verb stem.This is also the view taken in the present book. For further discussion, see Adams 2001:28, The New Cambridge Grammar of English p. 1702, Marchand 1969:302.

Chapter 7 1 – 2 The form -gate comes from the name of the Watergate hotel in Washington D.C. connected with the 1972 scandal that eventually toppled President Nixon. The -gate element then came to be used in names for other political scandals. In such names, the -gate ‘suffix’ is added to the name of a person, place, etc. involved in the scandal, as in e.g. Dianagate, Camillagate, Saddamgate, Irangate, etc. The words in -gate differ from those in -babble, -man, -speak in that the element -gate has nothing to do with the noun gate, while the meanings of -babble, -man and -speak are clearly related semantically to babble, man, speak. 3 – 4 The combinations bomb scare (‘B is produced by A’ ), bomb disposal, salmon-fishing (‘B is activity involving A’), chocolate box, fishing-rod, winning post (‘B is used for A’) and fish farm (‘B produces/causes A’) meet both the stress criterion and the semantic criterion for noun+noun compounds. Chocolate biscuit and fish finger belong to the problematic group of ‘B is made of/consists of A’ and have main stress on the fist element, as does winning streak.

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5 The tree-diagrams below give the analyses for war crimes investigation and talk show host murder: war crimes investigation war crimes war

talk show host murder

investigation

crimes

talk show host talk show talk

murder

host

show

6 (a) sand shovel, (b) young wine-drinkers (c) white-wine-drinkers (d) a singles collection, (e) knee ligament injury, (f) air gun, (g) bike alcoholism fear, (h) knee-high grass, (i) voter-friendly legislation (j) a mind-bogglingly difficult task 7 In the analysis proposed in Chapter 7, a word like tax-payer is considered to be the result of a compounding process combining tax and payer. To this it might be objected that payer is seldom if ever found as a word on it own. An alternative analysis is to claim that tax-payer has been derived by suffixation from a verb to tax-pay and that a noun like wine-drinking is derived in a similar way from to wine-drink. The problem is that there are no verbs tax-pay or wine-drink in English. Yet another explanation would be to derive nouns like these from phrases like ‘person who pays taxes’ and ‘the activity of drinking wine’. 8 –

Chapter 8 1 – 2 Neo-classical compounds normally have primary stress on the third syllable from the end – also known as the antepenult – and this is what we find in the majority of the examples given here, i.e. acidophilus, Anglophile, Anglophobe, automaton, automate, cryptogram, cryptographer, cryptography, pathological, pathologist, pathology. In acidic, acidophilic, automatic and cryptographic on © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

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the other hand, the main stress falls on the second syllable from the end of the word, a position due to the influence of the suffix -ic (cf. Chapter 5). 3 – 4 Heli- in these words obviously stands for the whole word helicopter: heli-skiing is helicopter-assisted skiing, a helipad is a landing pad for helicopters, etc. Heli- in these words must accordingly be counted as a telescopic initial combining form, just like the form bio- in words like biodegradable, where bio- stands for the whole word biological(ly). 5 Word-final telescopic forms are much less common than wordinitial ones, but they do exist. One example is the form -naut in chimp(o)naut ‘astronaut who is a chimpanzee’. In this example -naut stands for ‘astronaut’, but its normal meaning is ‘sailor’, as in e.g, astronaut ‘sailor among the stars’. (The example chimp(o)naut is from Bauer 1983:271).

200


Index and lists Index abbreviation 157–158 acronym 157–159 adjective definition 42 adjectives in -ed and -ing 41, 116 adverb definition 42–43 ‘direction’ 105 intensifier manner 42–43, 104–105 ‘with regard to’ 105–106 affix 15, 49–50 antepenult 146–147 back-formation 161–162 barking 13 blends 163–164 borrowing 154–155 clipping definition 159 back-clipping 159–160 fore-clipping 160 cognate 11 combining forms definition 143 word-final 144 word-initial 144 telescopic 148–149 compound definition 121–122 adjective compounds 134–139 adverb compounds 139–140 compound vs. phrase 123–126 © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

endocentric compounds 121 exocentric compounds 127– 129 noun compounds 129–134 spelling 126–127 syntactic compound 129–131 verb compounds 138–139 conversion definition 109–110 ‘act as/like’ 113–114 ‘activity/instance/result’ 115– 116 agent 116 ‘change into’ 114 instrumental verb 112–113 location/storage 111–112 partial conversion 117–119 ‘provide with’ 112 ‘remove from’ 112 ‘send/travel by’ 113 denotation 25 derivation(al) 50, 80–81 etymology 11 generalization of meaning 156 Germanic languages 11 grammaticalization 45–46, 122, 191 head 50, 121–122 homonym 22, 45, 62, 70, 80, 116

201

Index and lists

idiom 25 immediate constituent 18 Indo-European 11 inflection 22 initialisms 157 irregular word-formation 153–167 Jabberwocky 54 label(ing) 55, 56, 59 lexeme 21–24 lexical density 21 lexicalization 56, 126 loans from French 28 from Greek 28–29 from Latin 27–29 Middle English 27 Modern English 28 modifier 51, 121–123 morpheme definition 15 base morpheme 16 bound morpheme 16 free morpheme 16 morphology 17 multimorphemic word 17 multiword unit 23–24 neo-classical compound 143–151 nominalizations 93–95 noun definition 35 common noun 37 count(able) noun 37 mass noun 37 proper noun 37 uncountable noun 37 Old English 26 onomatepoeic/peia 12

202

prefix definition/function 63–64 ‘attitude’ 74 ‘degree/size’ 70–74 ‘location/direction’ 74–75 manner 70 ‘negation’ 67–68 productivity 66 ‘removal’ 69 ‘time/sequence’ 75–76 ‘reversal’ 68–69 preposition definition 45–46 complex prepositions 24 recategorisation 38–40 reduplicative compound 164–166 reference 25 rhyming slang 166–167 sense 25–26 sign definition 9 motivated 10 non-motivated (arbitrary) 10 simplified language 33 sound symbolic words 12 sound-imitating words 12 stem 16 suffix definition 49, 79–80 adjective-forming 96–103 adverb-forming 104–106 ‘agent/instrument’ 94–95 ‘activity’ 86–87, 95–96 ‘amount’ 85 ‘associated with’ 100–102 ‘characterised by’ 99–100 ‘collective’ 85–86 ‘covered with/by’ 99 direction 105 familiarity 91 © Magnus Ljung and Studentlitteratur 2003

Index and lists

‘having properties of’ 100–102 ‘lacking’ 97–98 manner 104–105 noun-forming 85–96 person associated with stem 88–90, 94 ‘possessing’ 97 ‘receiver of action’ 96 ‘resembling’ 98–99 ‘result’ 95–96 ‘somewhat’ 102 ‘sex/size/status’ 91 ‘state’ 87, 92 ‘that can/should be V-ed’ 102– 103 ‘turn into’ 103–104 verb-forming 103–104 synonym(y) 26 syntactic repackaging 56–59 telescopic forms 148–149 token 19–21


type 19–21 type/token ratio 19–21 verb definition 40–41 phrasal 41 prepositional 41 word definition 19–25 complex 15–18 compound 15, 121–123 content word 31–32 function word 31–32 orthographic word 19 simple word 15 word-form 19 word class definition 31–35 closed 32–33 open 32–33 word manufacture 52–54

203

Index and lists

List of prefixes Prefix

Meaning

Page

a-

negation

68

anti-

attitude

74

arch-

degree/size

70

co-

location/direction

74–75

de-

reversal

68

de-

removal

69

dis-

negation

68

dis-

removal

68

dis-

reversal

69

ex-

time/sequence

75

extra-

degree/size

70–71

extra-

location/direction

75

hyper-

degree/size

71

in-

negation

68

inter-

location/direction

75

macro-

degree/size

71

mal-

manner

70

mega-

degree/size

71

micro-

degree/size

72

mini-

degree/size

72

mis-

manner

70

neo-

time/sequence

75

non-

negation

67–68

out-

degree/size

72

over-

degree/size

72

post-

time/sequence

76

pre-

time/sequence

76

pro-

attitude

74

re-

time/sequence

76

semi-

degree/size

72

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Index and lists

sub-

degree/size

73

super-

degree/size

73

trans-

location/direction

75

ultra-

degree/size

73

un-

negation

67–68

un-

reversal

68

un-

removal

69

under-

degree/size

73


205

Index and lists

List of suffixes (WCF stands for ‘word class function of suffix, WCS for word class of stem) Suffix

WCF

WCS Meaning

Page(s)

-able

A

V

‘that can/should be V-ed’

102

-age

N

N

‘activity/state’

86–87

-age

N

V

‘activity/result’

95

-al

N

V


95

-al/-ial

A

N

‘having properties of stem’

100

-an/-ian

N

N

‘person associated with stem

89

-an/-ian

A

N

‘having properties of stem’

100

-ant/-ent

N

V

‘agent/instrument’

95

-ation

N

V


95

-dom

N

N

‘state’

87–88

-ee

N

N

‘small size’

91

-ee

N

V

‘receiver of action’

96

-er

N

N

‘person associated with stem’

88–89

-er

N

V


94–95

-ery/-ry

N

N


86–87

-ese

A

N

‘having characteristics of

100–101

-ese

N

N

‘person associated with stem

89–90

-esque

A

N

‘having characteristics of stem’

101

-ess

N

N

‘female’

91

-ette

N

N

‘small size’, ‘female’

91

-fashion

ADV

N

‘manner’

105

-ful

N

N

‘amount’

85

-ful

A

N

‘full of’

99

-hood

N

N

‘state’

87–88

-i

N

N

‘citizen of stem’

90

-ic

A

N

‘having characteristics of

101

-ie

N

N

‘person having characteristics of stem’ 92

-ie/-y

N

N

‘person interested in/good at stem’

90

-ie/-y

N

N

‘familiarity’

91

-ify

V

N/A

‘turn into what stem denotes’

103–104

206


Index and lists

-ing

N

N

‘collective’

85-86

-ing

N

N


86

-ing

N

V


95

-ion

N

V


95

-ise/-ize

V

N/A

‘turn into what stem denotes’

103–104

-ish

A

N

‘resembling’

98

-ish

A

A

‘somewhat’

102

-ism

N

N


86

-ist

N

N


90

-ite

N

N


90

-ite

A

N


101

-itis

N

N


87

-ity

N

N

‘state of being stem’

92

-ive

A

V

‘that Vs’,’that can V’

102–103

-less

A

N

‘without’,’lacking’

97–98

-like

A

N

‘resembling’

98

-ly

ADV

A

‘manner’ (and others)

104–105

-ly

A

N

‘resembling’

98

-ment

N

V


95–96

-ness

N

N

‘state of being stem’

92

-o

N

N

‘person having characteristics of stem’ 92

-or

N

V


-ous

A

N


101–102

-ry

N

N

‘collective’

86

-ship

N

N

‘state’

88

-style

ADV

N

‘manner’

105

95

-ward(s)

ADV

N

‘direction’

105

-wise

ADV

N

‘with regard to’

105–106

-wise

ADV

N

‘manner’

105

-y

A

N

‘characterised by’

99–100

-y

A

N

‘resembling’

98–99

-y

A

N

‘full of, covered with’

99

-y

A

V

‘inclined to V’

103


207

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