Introducing Morphology

38 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY base in the innermost layer, and each affix in its own succeeding layer: see figure 3.2. FIGURE 3.2 Words are like onions But linguists, not generally being particularly artistic, prefer to show these relationships as ‘trees’ that look like this: (12) N A A un happy ness Similarly, we might represent the structure of a word like repurify as in (13): (13) V V A re pure ify In order to draw this structure, we must first know that the prefix reattaches to verbs (for example, reheat, rewash, or redo) but not to adjectives (*repure, *rehappy) or to nouns (*rechair, *retruth). Once we know this, we can say that the adjective pure must first be made into a verb by suffixing -ify, and only then can re- attach to it.

Lexeme formation: the familiar 39 3.3.3 What do affixes mean? When we made the distinction between affixes and bound bases above, we did so on the basis of a rather vague notion of semantic robustness; bound bases in some sense had more meat to them than affixes did. Let us now attempt to make that idea a bit more precise by looking at typical meanings of affixes. In some cases, affixes seem to have not much meaning at all. Consider the suffixes in (14): (14) a. -(a)tion examination, taxation, realization, construction -ment agreement, placement, advancement, postponement -al refusal, arousal, disposal b. -ity purity, density, diversity, complexity -ness happiness, thickness, rudeness, sadness Beyond turning verbs into nouns with meanings like ‘process of X-ing’ or ‘result of X-ing’, where X is the meaning of the verb, it’s not clear that the suffixes -(a)tion, -ment, and -al add much of any meaning at all. Similarly with -ity and -ness, these don’t carry much semantic weight of their own, aside from what comes with turning adjectives into nouns that mean something like ‘the abstract quality of X’, where X is the base adjective. Affixes like these are sometimes called transpositional affixes, meaning that their primary function is to change the category of their base without adding any extra meaning. Contrast these, however, with affixes like those in (15): (15) a. -ee employee, recruitee, deportee, inductee b. -less shoeless, treeless, rainless, supperless c. re- reheat, reread, rewash These affixes seem to have more semantic meat on their bones, so to speak: -ee on a verb indicates a person who undergoes an action; -less means something like ‘without’; and re- means something like ‘again’. Challenge In English, the suffix -ize attaches to nouns or adjectives to form verbs. The suffix -ation attaches to verbs to form nouns. And the suffix -al attaches to nouns to form adjectives. Interestingly, these suffixes can be attached in a recursive fashion: convene → convention → conventional → conventionalize → conventionalization. First draw a word tree for conventionalization. Then see if you can find other bases on which you can attach these suffixes recursively. What is the most complex word you can create from a single base that still makes sense to you? Are there any limits to the complexity of words derived in this way?

40 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY Languages frequently have affixes (or other morphological processes, as we’ll see in chapter 5) that fall into common semantic categories. Among those categories are: •personal affixes: These are affixes that create ‘people nouns’ either from verbs or from nouns. Among the personal affixes in English are the suffix -er which forms agent nouns (the ‘doer’ of the action) like writer or runner and the suffix -ee which forms patient nouns (the person the action is done to). •negative and privative affixes: Negative affixes add the meaning ‘not’ to their base; examples in English are the prefixes un-, in-, and non- (unhappy, inattentive, non-functional). Privative affixes mean something like ‘without X’; in English, the suffix -less (shoeless, hopeless) is a privative suffix, and the prefix de- has a privative flavor as well (for example, words like debug or debone mean something like ‘cause to be without bugs/bones’). •prepositional and relational affixes: Prepositional and relational affixes often convey notions of space and/or time. Examples in English might be prefixes like over- and out- (overfill, overcoat, outrun, outhouse). •quantitative affixes: These are affixes that have something to do with amount. In English we have affixes like -ful (handful, helpful) and multi- (multifaceted). Another example might be the prefix rethat means ‘repeated’ action (reread), which we can consider quantitative if we conceive of a repeated action as being done more than once. •evaluative affixes: Evaluative affixes consist of diminutives, affixes that signal a smaller version of the base (for example in English -let as in booklet or droplet) and augmentatives, affixes that signal a bigger version of the base. The closest we come to augmentative affixes in English are prefixes like mega- (megastore, megabite). The Native American language Tuscarora (Iroquoian family) has an augmentative suffix -ʔoʔy that can be added to nouns to mean ‘a big X’; for example takó:-ʔoʔy means ‘a big cat’ (Williams 1976: 233). Diminutives and augmentatives frequently bear other nuances of meaning. For example, diminutives often convey affection, or endearment. Augmentatives sometimes have pejorative overtones. Note that some semantically contentful affixes change syntactic category as well; for example, the suffixes -er and -ee change verbs to nouns, and the prefix de- changes nouns to verbs. But semantically contentful affixes need not change syntactic category. The suffixes -hood and -dom, for example, do not (childhood, kingdom), and by and large prefixes in English do not change syntactic category. So far we have been looking at suffixes and prefixes whose meanings seem to be relatively clear. Things are not always so simple, though. Let’s look more closely at the suffix -er in English, which we said above formed agent nouns. Consider the following words:

Lexeme formation: the familiar 41 (16) a. writer skater b. printer freighter c. loaner fryer (i.e., a kind of chicken) d. diner All of these words seem to be formed with the same suffix. Look at each group of words and try to characterize what their meanings are. Does -er seem to have a consistent meaning? It’s rather hard to see what all of these have in common. The words in (16a) are indeed all agent nouns, but the (b) words are instruments, in other words, things that do an action. In American English the (c) words are things as well, but things that undergo the action rather than doing the action (like the patient -ee words discussed above): a loaner is something which is loaned (often a car, in the US), and a fryer is something (a chicken) which is fried. And the word diner in (d) denotes a location (a diner in the US is a specific sort of restaurant). Some morphologists would argue that there are four separate suffixes in English, all with the form -er. But others think that there’s enough similarity among the meanings of -er words in all these cases to merit calling -er a single affix, but one with a cluster of related meanings. All of the forms derived with -er denote concrete nouns, either persons or things, related to their base verbs by participating in the action denoted by the verb, although sometimes in different ways. This cluster of related meanings is called affixal polysemy. Affixal polysemy is not unusual in the languages of the world. For example, it is not unusual for agents and instruments to be designated by the same suffix. This occurs in Dutch, as the examples in (17a) show (Booij and Lieber 2004), but also in Yoruba (Niger-Congo family), as the examples in (17b) show (Pulleyblank 1987: 978): (17) a. Dutch spel-er ‘player’ (spelen ‘play’) maai-er ‘mower’ (maaien ‘mow’) b. Yoruba a-pànìà ‘murderer’ (pa ‘kill’ ènìà ‘people’) a-bẹ ‘razor, penknife’ (bẹ ‘cut’) The Dutch suffix -er is in fact quite similar to the -er suffix in English in the range of meanings it can express. The Yoruba prefix a- also forms both agents and instruments. 3.3.4 To divide or not to divide? In chapter 1 we defined a morpheme as the smallest unit of language that has its own meaning. We have now looked at affixes and bases, both

42 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY free and bound, and considered their meanings and how they combine into complex structures. We assume that affixes have meaning, but sometimes it’s not completely clear whether they do. Consider words like report, import, transport, deport, comport, and export. They certainly seem to be made up of pieces, but is it clear what these pieces mean? In fact, English has dozens of words that are similar to what we might call the -port family. See how many cells of table 3.1 you can fill in. in- ex- con- re- trans- de- -port -mit -ceive -duce -cede -fer -scribe -gress -sist Table 3.1. Challenge Do you think that units like -port, -mit, -ceive, and the like should be considered morphemes? If so, what problems do they present for our definition of morpheme? If not, what should we do about the intuition that native speakers of English have that such words are complex? One reason for our dilemma in analyzing these forms is that they are not native to English. They were borrowed from Latin (or from French, which in turn is descended from Latin), where they did have clear meanings: -port comes from the verb portare ‘to carry’, -mit from the verb mittere ‘to send’, -scribe from the verb scribere ‘to write’, and so on. But English speakers (unless they’ve studied Latin!) don’t know this. Morphologists are left with an unsatisfying sense that the words above somehow ought to be treated as complex, but are nevertheless reluctant to give up the strict definition of morpheme. Similar to these are word-pieces that are sometimes called cran morphs, from the word cranberry. The second part of the word cranberry is clearly a free morpheme. But when we break it off, what’s left is a piece that doesn’t seem to occur in other words (except in recent years, words like cranapple that are part of product names), and doesn’t seem to mean anything independently. There are quite a few of these cran

Lexeme formation: the familiar 43 morphs in the names of other types of berries: rasp- in raspberry, huckle- in huckleberry. In cases such as these we are even more tempted than we were with -port, -ceive, and the like to divide words into morphemes, even though we know that one part of the word isn’t meaningful in the way morphemes usually are. 3.4 Compounding Derivation is not the only way of forming new words, of course. Many languages also form words by a process called compounding. Compounds are words that are composed of two (or more) bases, roots, or stems. In English we generally use free bases to compose compounds, as the examples in (18) show: (18) English compounds compounds of two nouns: windmill, dog bed, book store compounds of two adjectives: icy cold, blue-green, red hot compounds of an adjective and a noun: greenhouse, blackboard, hard hat compounds of a noun and an adjective: sky blue, cherry red, rock hard 3.4.1 When do we have a compound? How do we know that a sequence of words is a compound? Surprisingly, it’s not that easy to come up with a single criterion that works in all cases. Spelling is no help at all; in English there is no fixed way to spell a compound word. Some, like greenhouse, are written as one word, others like dog bed, as two words, and still others, like producer-director are written with a hyphen between the two bases. A better criterion is stress; compounds in English are often stressed on their first or left-hand base, whereas phrases typically receive stress on the right. Compare, for example, a greenhouse, which is the place where plants are grown, to a green house, that is, a house that’s painted green. But it’s not always the case that compounds are stressed on the left. For example, most people pronounce apple pie with stress on the second base, but apple cake with stress on the left one. Yet we have the feeling that both are compounds; it seems illogical to consider one a compound and not the other. There is, however, one test for identifying compounds that is fairly reliable: we can test for whether a sequence of bases is a compound by seeing if a modifying word can be inserted between the two bases and still have the sequence make sense. If a modifying word cannot sensibly be inserted, the sequence of two words is a compound. This test confirms that both apple pie and apple cake are compounds, in spite of their differing stress. In neither case can we insert a modifier like delicious between the two stems; *apple delicious pie and *apple delicious cake are equally peculiar! 3.4.2 Compound structure We can look at compounds as having internal structure in precisely the same way that derived words do, and we can represent that structure in

44 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY the form of word trees. The compounds windmill and hard hat would have the structures in (19): (19) N A N hard hat N N N wind mill Compounds, of course, need not be limited to two bases. Compounding is what is called a recursive process, in the sense that a compound of two bases can be compounded with another base, and this compounded with still another base, so that we can eventually obtain very complex compounds like paper towel dispenser factory building committee report. As with derived words, it is possible to show the internal structure of complex compounds using word trees. Assuming that this compound is meant to denote a report from the building committee for the paper towel dispenser factory, we might give it the structure in (20): (20) N N N N N N NN N N N N N paper towel dispenser factory building committee report Some compounds can be ambiguous, and therefore can be represented by more than one structure For example, the compound arctic cat observer, might have this structure: (21) A N N arctic cat observer N N

Lexeme formation: the familiar 45 The way we’ve drawn this tree, the compound arctic cat has been compounded with the noun observer to make a complex compound. The compound as a whole then must mean ‘an observer of arctic cats’. But if the compound arctic cat observer were intended to mean ‘a cat observer who likes to do her observations in the arctic’, the structure of the tree would be that in (22), where cat observer is first compounded, and then arctic added in:4 (22) N A N N N arctic cat observer Often, the more complex the compound is, the greater the possibility of multiple interpretations, and therefore multiple structures. Challenge The compound paper towel dispenser factory building committee report could in fact have more than one meaning. See how many different meanings you can come up with, and draw a tree that corresponds to each of those meanings. Languages other than English frequently construct compounds on free bases just as English does, although we can see in the French and Vietnamese examples in (23) that the order of elements in the compound is sometimes different from that in English, a fact we will return to in the next section: (23) a. French: timbre poste ‘stamp-post  postage stamp’ chêne liège ‘oak cork  cork oak’ b. Dutch: boekhandel ‘book shop’ zakgeld ‘pocket money’ c. Vietnamese: nhá thuong ‘establishment be-wounded’  ‘hospital’ nguói ọ̉’ ‘person be-located’  ‘servant’ As we saw above, English has bound bases as well as free bases, and when we put two of them together, as in the examples in (24), we might 4. These two interpretations are sometimes distinguished in spoken speech by placement of stress.

46 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY call these forms compounds as well. Some linguists call them neo-classical compounds, as the bound bases usually derive from Greek and Latin: (24) English compounds on bound bases: psychopath, pathology, endoderm, dermatitis In languages like Latin where, as we saw, word formation often operates on roots or stems, rather than on free forms, all compounds are formed from bound bases. Specifically, the first parts of the compounds in (25) are formed from the roots of the nouns ala ‘wing’ and capra ‘goat’, (respectively al- and capr-) plus a vowel -i- linking the two parts of the compound together: (25) Latin compounds: ali-pes ‘wing-footed’ capri-ficus ‘goat fig’  ‘wild fig’ The -i- that occurs between the two roots has no meaning, and is not the vowel that usually precedes the inflections (for these two nouns, that vowel would be -a). It is there solely to link the parts of the compound together, and is therefore sometimes called a linking element or alternatively an interfix (the latter term is less common). 3.4.3 Types of compounds In English and other languages there may be a number of different ways of classifying compounds. In order to explain the various types of compounds, there is one indispensable term I need to introduce: the head of the compound. In compounds, the head is the element that serves to determine both the part of speech and the semantic kind denoted by the compound as a whole. For example, in English the base that determines the part of speech of compounds such as greenhouse or sky blue is always the second one; the compound greenhouse is a noun, as house is, and sky blue is an adjective as blue is. Similarly, the second base determines the semantic category of the compound – in the former case a type of building, and in the latter a color. English compounds are therefore said to be right-headed. In other languages, however, for example French and Vietnamese, the head of the compound can be the first or leftmost base. For example a timbre poste (23a) is a kind of stamp, and a nguói ọ̉’ (23c) is a kind of person. French and Vietnamese can therefore be said to have leftheaded compounds. One common way of dividing up compounds is into root (also known as primary) compounds and synthetic (also known as deverbal) compounds. Synthetic compounds are composed of two lexemes, where the head lexeme is derived from a verb, and the nonhead is interpreted as an argument of that verb. Dog walker, hand washing, and home made are all synthetic compounds. Root compounds, in contrast are made up of two lexemes, which may be nouns, adjectives, or verbs; the second lexeme is typically not derived from a verb. The interpretation of the semantic relationship

Lexeme formation: the familiar 47 between the head and the nonhead in root compounds is quite free as long as it’s not the relationship between a verb and its argument. Compounds like windmill, ice cold, hard hat, and red hot are root compounds. We can also classify compounds more closely according to the semantic and grammatical relationships holding between the elements that make them up. One useful classification is that proposed by Bisetto and Scalise (2005), which recognizes three types of relation. The first type is what might be called an attributive compound. In an attributive compound the nonhead acts as a modifier of the head. So snail mail is (metaphorically) a kind of mail that moves like a snail, and a windmill is a kind of mill that is activated by wind. With attributive compounds the first element might express just about any relationship with the head. For example, a school book is a book used at school, but a yearbook is a record of school activities over a year. And a notebook is a book in which one writes notes. With a new compound (one I’ve just made up) like mud wheel, we are free to come up with any reasonable semantic relationship between the two bases, as long as the first modifies the second in some way: a wheel used in the mud, a wheel made out of mud, a wheel covered in mud, and so on. Some interpretations are more plausible than others, of course, but none of these is ruled out. In coordinative compounds, the first element of the compound does not modify the second; instead, the two have equal weight. In English, compounds of this sort can designate something which shares the denotations of both base elements equally, or is a mixture of the two base elements: (26) Coordinative compounds: producer-director, prince consort, blue- green, doctor-patient A producer-director is equally a producer and a director, a prince consort at the same time a prince and a consort. In the case of blue-green the compound denotes a mixture of the two colors. Finally, there are also coordinative compounds that denote a relation between the two bases (like doctor–patient in doctor–patient confidentiality). We will return to these below. For coordinative compounds we can say that both elements are semantic heads. We find a third kind of semantic/grammatical relationship in subordinative compounds. In subordinative compounds one element is interpreted as the argument5 of the other, usually as its object. Typically this happens when one element of the compound either is a verb or is derived from a verb, so the synthetic compounds we looked at above are subordinative compounds in English. Some more examples are given in (27): (27) with -er truck driver, hand mixer, lion tamer with -ing truck driving, food shopping, hand holding with -ation meal preparation, home invasion with -ment cost containment 5. We will go into arguments in more depth in chapter 8. For now, it’s enough to know that the arguments of the verb are its subject and its complements (direct object, indirect object, and so on).

48 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY It is easy to see that subordinative compounds are interpreted in a very specific way: that is, the first element of the compound is interpreted as the object of the verb that forms the base of the deverbal noun: for example, a truck driver is someone who drives trucks, food preparation involves preparing food, and so on. Synthetic compounds are not the only subordinate compounds, however. A second type of subordinate compound is poorly represented in English, but occurs with great frequency in Romance languages like Spanish, French, and Italian: (28) English pickpocket Italian lava piatti (lit. ‘wash dishes’  ‘dishwasher’) Spanish saca corcho (lit. ‘pull cork’  ‘corkscrew’) In these compounds the first element is a verb, and the second bears an argumental relationship to the first element, again typically the complement relationship. We will return to these shortly. We can further divide attributive, coordinative, and subordinative compounds into endocentric or exocentric varieties. In endocentric compounds, the referent of the compound is always the same as the referent of its head. So a windmill is a kind of mill, and a truck driver is a kind of driver. Endocentric compounds of all three types are illustrated in (29): (29) Endocentric compounds Atrributive: windmill, greenhouse, sky blue, icy cold Coordinative: producer-director, blue-green Subordinative: truck driver, meal preparation The Dutch, French, and Vietnamese compounds in (23) are endocentric, as well, although as we pointed out above, the head occurs on the left in these compounds. Compounds may be termed exocentric when the referent of the compound as a whole is not the referent of the head. For example, the English attributive compounds in (30) all refer to types of people – specifically stupid or disagreeable people – rather than types of heads, brains, or clowns, respectively. So an air head is a person with nothing but air in her head, and so on. Again, all three types of compounds may be exocentric: (30) Exocentric compounds Attributive: air head, meat head, bird brain, ass clown Coordinative: parent-child, doctor-patient Subordinative: pickpocket, cutpurse, lava piatti (Italian, lit. ‘wash dishes’) In coordinative compounds like parent-child or doctor-patient the heads refer to types of people, but the compound as a whole denotes a relationship between its elements. We saw examples of exocentric subordinative compounds from English, Spanish, and Italian in (28). English has only a few

Lexeme formation: the familiar 49 examples: a pickpocket is not a type of pocket, but a sort of person (who picks pockets). Romance languages have many compounds of this type, however. The different types of compounds are summarized in Figure 3.3. compounds attributive coordinative subordinative endo exo endo exo endo exo windmill dog bed air head bird brain producer-director blue-green truck driver cost containment pickpocket cutpurse parent-child FIGURE 3.3 Types of compounds 3.5 Conversion Although we often form new lexemes by affixation or compounding, in English it is also possible to form new lexemes merely by shifting the category or part of speech of an already existing lexeme without adding an affix. This means of word formation is often referred to as conversion or functional shift. In English, we often create new verbs from nouns, as the examples in (31a) show, but we also do the reverse (31b), and sometimes we can even create new verbs from adjectives (31c): (31) a. table to table bread to bread fish to fish b. to throw a throw to kick a kick to fix a (quick) fix c. cool to cool yellow to yellow When we create new verbs from nouns, the resulting verbs may have a wide range of meanings. For example, to bread is ‘to put bread (crumbs) on something’, but to fish is ‘to take fish from a body of water’. And to clown is ‘to act like a clown’ rather than to put a clown somewhere or take a clown from somewhere! Going in the opposite direction, the meaning of the new word is usually more predictable; that is, when we turn a verb into a noun, the result usually means something like ‘an instance of

50 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY X-ing’, where X is the denotation of the verb. So for example, a throw is ‘an instance of throwing’. English is, of course, not the only language with conversion. Noun to verb conversion occurs frequently in German and Dutch as well, as the examples in (32a–b) show, and verb to noun conversion is said to occur in French, as the examples in (32c) show: (32) a. German Antwort ‘answer’ antwort-en ‘to answer’ Holz ‘wood’ holz-en ‘to fell, cut wood’ Strick ‘cord, string’ strick-en ‘to knit’ b. Dutch fiets ‘bicycle’ fiets-en ‘to bicycle’ hamer ‘hammer’ hamer-en ‘to hammer’ winkel ‘shop’ winkel-en ‘to shop’ c. French gard-er ‘to guard’ garde ‘guard’ visit-er ‘to visit’ visite ‘visit’ There may appear to be a suffix added in the derivation of the verbs in the examples in (32a–b) and one deleted in (32c). But the -en suffix in German and Dutch and the -er suffix in French do not derive the verbs per se – they are inflectional morphemes that signal the infinitive form of the verb. If we assume that conversion involves only the base or root, these examples count as conversion. 3.5.1 What is conversion? Morphologists have been divided on how to analyze conversion. Some argue that conversion is just like affixation, except that the affix is phonologically null – that is, it is unpronounced. When analyzed this way, conversion is called zero-affixation. It might be represented structurally as in (33): (33) N V chair ∅ Other morphologists argue that conversion is different from affixation, and treat it simply as change of category with no accompanying change of form, as we have done here. With this analysis, converted verbs like to chair would not have any internal structure, but would simply be regarded as having been relisted or recategorized in our mental lexicons. We will not decide between these analyses here.

Lexeme formation: the familiar 51 3.6 Minor processes Affixation, compounding, and conversion are the most common ways of forming new words, at least in English (we will see in chapter 5 that there are other means of word formation that languages other than English use). In addition, there are a number of less common ways in which new lexemes may be formed. We provide a survey of them here, without going into great depth on any one of them. 3.6.1 Coinage It is of course possible to make up entirely new words from whole cloth, a process called coinage. However, we rarely coin completely new words, choosing instead to recycle bases and affixes into new combinations. New products are sometimes given coined names like Kodak, Xerox, or Kleenex, and these in turn sometimes come to be used as common nouns: kodak was at one time used for cameras in general, and xerox and kleenex are still used respectively for copiers and facial tissue by some American English speakers. But it’s relatively rare to coin new words. In hundreds of new words archived on the Word Spy website (www.wordspy.com), I was able to find only the following four apparent coinages: (34) blivet ‘an intractable problem’ mung ‘to mess up, to change something so that it no longer works’ grok ‘to understand in a deep and exhaustive manner’ (from Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land) mongo ‘objects retrieved from the garbage’ Why are there so few coinages? Perhaps because the words themselves give no clue to their meaning. Context often clarifies what a word is intended to mean, but without a context to suggest meaning, the words themselves are semantically opaque. It is no wonder that many of the pure coinages that creep into English come from original product names: the association of the coined word with the product makes its meaning clear, and occasionally the word will then be generalized to any instance of that product, even if manufactured by a different company. 3.6.2 Backformation Generally, when we derive words we attach affixes to bases; in other words, the base comes before the word derived by affixation. For example, Challenge Is it possible in English for already compounded or affixed words to undergo conversion? Try to think of examples of words with prefixes or suffixes or compound words that can function as more than one part of speech (for example, as both nouns and verbs).

52 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY we start with the verb write and form the agent noun writer. Sometimes, however, there are words that historically existed as monomorphemic bases, but which ended in a sequence of sounds identical to or reminiscent of that of certain affixes. When native speakers come to perceive these words as being complex rather than simple, they create what is called a backformation. For example, historically the word burglar was monomorphemic. But because its last syllable was phonologically identical to the agentive -er suffix, some English speakers have understood it to be based on a verb to burgle. Arguably for those speakers, then, burglar is no longer a simple word. Similarly, the verb surveil has been created from surveillance and the verb liaise from liaison. At least at first, some native speakers will find the backformations odd-sounding or objectionable. In January, 2007 I heard the governor of Iowa, Tom Vilsack, use the verb incent on National Public Radio; in context, it clearly was a backformation from the noun incentive, and it sounded quite odd at the time. But with time, that feeling of oddness will disappear. Indeed speakers are sometimes surprised to learn that the verb did not exist before the corresponding noun, so ordinary-sounding has the verb come to be. Such is the case for peddle and edit, both of which are historically backformations from peddler and editor, respectively. 3.6.3 Blending Blending is a process of word formation in which parts of lexemes that are not themselves morphemes are combined to form a new lexeme. Familiar examples of blends (sometimes also called portmanteau words) are words like brunch, a combination of breakfast and lunch, or smog, a combination of smoke and fog. While not one of the major ways of forming new words, blending is used quite a bit in English in advertizing, productnaming, and playful language. The Word Spy website lists these blends: (35) skitch ‘to propel oneself while on a skateboard or in-line skates by hanging onto a moving vehicle’ (combination of skate and hitch) spime ‘a theoretical object that can be tracked precisely in space and time over the lifetime of the object’ (combination of space and time) splog ‘a fake blog’ (combination of spam and blog) vortal ‘a vertical portal’ bagonize ‘to wait anxiously for one’s bag to appear on the carousel at the airport’ (combination of bag and agonize) Chrismukkah ‘a holiday celebration that combines elements of Christmas and Hanukkah’ Indeed, the sheer number of words of this sort that can be found in the Word Spy archives suggests the vitality of this process. Note that while most of the time the parts that are fused together to form blends are not themselves morphemes, sometimes a whole base or affix will be used; for

Lexeme formation: the familiar 53 example, Word Spy also lists the word celeblog (‘a blog written by a celebrity’) which is made up of the chunk celeb from celebrity and the word blog; the latter part has become a free morpheme in English in the last few years. 3.6.4 Acronyms and initialisms When the first letters of words that make up a name or a phrase are used to create a new word , the results are called acronyms or initialisms. In acronyms, the new word is pronounced as a word, rather than as a series of letters. For example, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome gives us AIDS, pronounced [eidz]. And self-contained underwater breathing apparatus gives us scuba. Note in the case of scuba, the acronym has become so familiar to English speakers that many do not know that it’s an acronym! My favorite current acronym is the DUMP, a term universally used in Durham, New Hampshire to refer to a local supermarket with the unwittingly unfortunate name ‘the Durham Market Place’. Initialisms are similar to acronyms in that they are composed from the first letters of a phrase, but unlike acronyms, they are pronounced as a series of letters. So most people in the US refer to the Federal Bureau of Investigation as the FBI pronounced [ɛf bi ai]. Other initialisms are PTA for Parent Teacher Association, PR for either ‘public relations’ or ‘personal record’, and NCAA for National College Athletic Association. 3.6.5 Clipping Clipping is a means of creating new words by shortening already existing words. For example, we have info created from information, blog created from web log, or fridge from refrigerator. Universities are fertile grounds for the creation of clippings: students study psych, anthro, soc, and even ling with one prof or another, and if they’re taking a science class, may spend long hours in the lab, which might or might not involve running some stats. Although clippings are often used in a colloquial rather than a formal register, some have attained more neutral status. The word lab, for example, is probably used far more frequently in the US than its longer version laboratory. The word mob is a seventeenth-century clipping from the Latin term mobile vulgus ‘the fickle common people’; the Latin phrase has long been forgotten, but the clipping persists as the normal word for an unruly throng of people. 3.7 How to: morphological analysis So far we have looked mostly at English, where you already have a sense of how to divide words into morphemes. But morphologists are, of course, interested in all sorts of languages, and as this book progresses, you’ll see that we devote increasing attention to languages that will likely be unfamiliar to you. You should therefore begin to get a sense of how to figure out how the word formation system of another language works. How do linguists go about deciding what words are complex in an unfamiliar language, what sorts of processes are involved in creating complex

54 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY words, and how to analyze individual words? Consider the words in (36), from the language Dyirbal, a language of the Pama-Nyungan family, formerly spoken in Australia, but now, according to Ethnologue, nearly extinct; data from Dixon (1972: 222–33): (36) a. ɲalŋgaŋunu ‘from a boy’ b. yaɽaŋaru ‘like a man’ c. gugulaŋaru ‘like a platypus’ d. banabaᶁun ‘proper water’ e. waŋalbaᶁun ‘proper boomerang’ f. yaɽabaᶁun ‘proper man’ g. yaɽagabun ‘another man’ h. yaɽaᶁaran ‘two men’ i. baŋguyᶁaran ‘two frogs’ j. yugubila ‘with a stick’ k. waŋalᶁaranbila ‘with two boomerangs’ l. miᶁagabunŋunu ‘from another camp’ m. gugulabaᶁunŋaru ‘like a proper platypus’ n. yaɽagabunᶁaran ‘two other men’ Just by looking at the Dyirbal words (36a) and (36b) and their glosses, you really can’t tell anything. They might be simple or complex, but there’s no way of knowing, because there are no parts of the two words that seem to overlap. But as soon as you look at example (36c) and its gloss, you will notice some overlap with (36b). Both examples share the gloss ‘like a’, and both have some characters at the end that overlap (aŋaru). So you might make a tentative hypothesis that these words are complex, and that they can be broken down into two morphemes, yaɽ  aŋaru and gugul  aŋaru, respectively. You might also hypothesize that yaɽ means ‘man’, gugul means ‘platypus’, and aŋaru means ‘like a’. This is a good first guess, but you should always be prepared to revise your analysis as you look at more data. If you then move on and look at examples (36d–f), you’ll notice that they all share part of their meanings (‘proper’), and the end of each word has the sequence baᶁun. It’s therefore reasonable to make the hypothesis that baᶁun means ‘proper’, and that what’s left over means ‘water’ in (36d), ‘boomerang’ in (36e), and ‘man’ in (36f). But now, we need to look back at our analysis of (36b), because our first hypothesis was that yaɽ meant ‘man’, and what’s left over in (36f) is not yaɽ but yaɽa. We therefore need to go back and revise our analysis of examples (36b) and (36c) to be consistent with what we’ve learned from examples (36d–f ). This means that (36b) should be divided into yaɽaŋaru and (36c) should be divided into gugulaŋaru. What we’ve discovered so far is summarized in (37): (37) yaɽa ‘man’ ŋaru ‘like a’ gugula ‘platypus’ baᶁun ‘proper’ bana ‘water’ gabun ‘another’ waŋal ‘boomerang’ ᶁaran ‘two’

Lexeme formation: the familiar 55 We can now build on this hypothesis to analyze some more data. One strategy that’s often good to use is to look for other words in which you already recognize a piece. Indeed it looks like examples (36g) and (36h) both have the piece yaɽa and a gloss that includes ‘man’. If we subtract this piece, we are left with two more bits we can now identify: gabun probably means ‘another’ and ᶁaran ‘two’. This in turn suggests that we can identify the piece baŋguy as meaning ‘frog’. At this point, we have a good idea how to analyze examples (36b–i), but we still haven’t cracked (36a). Example (36j) is still a problem as well, as so far, it doesn’t overlap with any of the other examples. But as soon as we go on to (36k), we start to get a clue, because there are two morphemes that we can now recognize in this word ‘boomerang’ and ‘two’, leaving only the final bit bila which therefore must mean ‘with’. We can now go back to (36j) and determine that yugu must mean ‘stick’. Example (36l) finally leads us back to example (a): since we can identify a stretch in the middle of (36l) – the morpheme gabun, which we decided means ‘another’– we can guess that miᶁa means ‘camp’ and ŋunu means ‘from’. Why not the opposite, by the way? The reason is that so far it looks like the more semantically contentful morphemes, like ‘man’ and ‘frog’ always come first, and the less contentful come after; we might therefore hypothesize that morphemes like ‘from’ and ‘proper’ are suffixes in Dyirbal. And now we can finally go back to example (36a) and decide that the morpheme for ‘boy’ is ɲalŋga. I leave it to you to analyze the last two examples, and check that our analysis so far is right. I say ‘so far’ because we have only a tiny bit of data to work with here, and every morphological analysis is provisional on checking it against further data. Sometimes there are loose ends left after we’ve analyzed our data as much as we can. One loose end you might notice in our Dyirbal analysis is that it looks like there is no morpheme in any of our data that corresponds to a word like a in English. It’s impossible to know from this little data set whether Dyirbal has anything that corresponds to indefinite articles. Summary In this chapter we have looked at a number of ways in which new words may be formed in languages. Affixed words are formed by word formation rules that make explicit the categorial, semantic, and phonological requirements of particular affixes, and specify the categorial, semantic, and phonological properties of the resulting words. Words formed by affixation have internal structure that may be represented in the form of trees. Similarly, compound words – words composed of two or more free morphemes or bound bases – have internal structure that can be represented in trees. Compounds may be attributive, coordinative, or subordinative, and within these categories compounds may be endocentric or exocentric. We have also looked at conversion, a shift in the category of a lexeme with no accompanying change in form. Finally, we have considered a number of forms of word formation – coinage, blending, clipping, backformation, acronyms and initialisms, that play a minor role, at least in English.

56 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY Exercises 1. Divide the following words into morphemes and label each morpheme as a prefix, suffix, free base, or bound base. hypoallergenic non-morphological telephonic overcompensation reheatability monomaniacal 2. On p. 37 we gave the word formation rules for -ize. Now consider the words below and discuss what other sorts of restrictions we would have to add to our rules for -ize. catechize, evangelize, antagonize, metabolize, epitomize 3. Using the data below, try to write a word formation rule for the suffix -able. Consider what category it attaches to, and what part of speech the resulting words belong to. Does it seem to have any phonological or semantic restrictions? Then draw the word trees for the words unwashable and rewashable. washable *yawnable dryable *arriveable heatable *fallable readable *blinkable loveable knowable 4. The word unwindable is potentially ambiguous. What are its two possible meanings? Draw two tree structures and show which meaning goes with each structure. 5. The linguist Laurence Horn has argued (2002) that the prefix un- really does attach to nouns, contrary to what we said in section 3.2. He has collected such examples as undeath, uncountry, uncopier, unphilosophy, and unpublicity. Can you think of or find other examples where un- has attached to nouns? What do you think these un-nouns mean? (You can use a dictionary to help think of examples.) 6. In section 3.3, we discussed the meanings (or lack thereof) of bases like -ceive, -mit, and -port, but not the meanings of the prefixes with which they combine. Consider the prefixes re- and de- in words like report, deport, receive, deceive, remit, and demit. Do these seem to be the same prefixes as the re- and de- in rewash, rewind, reload or debug, de-ice, derail? Why or why not? 7. How many meanings can you come up with for the complex compound miniature poodle groomer manual? Try to draw the trees that correspond to each meaning you’ve come up with. 8. Classify the compounds below as either root or synthetic, as attributive, coordinative, or subordinative, and as either endocentric or exocentric. Example: book shelf is an endocentric attributive root compound; truck driver is an endocentric subordinate synthetic compound.

Lexeme formation: the familiar 57 oil burner lighthouse blue blood hell raiser scholar athlete blue-eyed pickpocket house-hunting 9. Many languages use compounding as a strategy for forming new words. Consider the data below and try to determine: (a) which element is the head, (b) whether the resulting compounds are endocentric or exocentric. a. Kannada (Dravidian) (Sridhar 1990) a: Du-ma:tu ‘speak word’ ‘colloquial speech’ siDi-maddu ‘explode chemical’ ‘explosive (i.e. chemical that explodes)’ maduve a:gu ‘marriage become’ ‘to get married’ santo:Sa paDu ‘happiness feel’ ‘rejoice’ kittaLe haNNu ‘orange fruit’ ‘tangerine’ b. Maori (Polynesian) (Bauer 1993) ipu para ‘container waste’ ‘rubbish bin’ apuru teepu ‘cushion table’ ‘desk pad’ wai mangu ‘water black’ ‘ink’ whaka-koi pene ‘cause.sharp pen’ ‘pencil sharpener’ 10. Consider the following noun/verb conversion pairs in English. In each case decide whether the noun was converted from the verb or vice versa. Give arguments based on meaning to support your choices. bug to bug kick to kick saddle to saddle howl to howl yawn to yawn book to book (e.g. a table in a restaurant) 11. Take a look at the words you (and your classmates) have collected so far in your Word Logs. Can you classify them according to the means of word formation used to create them? Does any one means of word formation predominate? If so, think about why this might be. 12. Data analysis: Samoan (Mosel and Hovdhaugen 1992: 176). Divide the following words into morphemes and propose a meaning for each morpheme: fa’aga’o ‘to apply grease to’ fa’amāsima ‘to salt’ fa’apata ‘to butter’ fa’apauta ‘to apply power’ fa’asuka ‘to sweeten, to apply sugar’ fa’atiapula ‘to plant taro-tops’

For Matthew Young man going east

CHAPTER 4 In this chapter you will learn about productivity – the extent to which word formation rules can give rise to new words. ◆ We will consider what factors contribute to productivity, what restricts the productivity of word formation processes, and how we can measure productivity. ◆ We will look at how the productivity of a word formation process can change over time. ◆ And we will consider how speakers of a language can use even unproductive word formation processes to create new words for humorous or playful effects. CHAPTER OUTLINE productivity transparency lexicalization compositional frequency creativity KEY TERMS Productivity and creativity

60 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY 4.1 Introduction Consider the examples in (1): (1) a. warm warmth true truth b. modern modernity pure purity c. happy happiness dark darkness In each case, we have adjectives and nouns that are derived from them (all cases of transposition, by the way). As a first pass, we might hypothesize the three rules of lexeme formation in (2): (2) a. Rule for -th: -th attaches to adjectives, and creates nouns. For a base meaning ‘X’, the derived noun means ‘the state of being X’. b. Rule for -ity: -ity attaches to adjectives, and creates nouns. For a base meaning ‘X’, the derived noun means ‘the state of being X’. c. Rule for -ness: -ness attaches to adjectives, and creates nouns. For a base meaning ‘X’, the derived noun means ‘the state of being X’. Now consider the list of adjectives in (3). If you had to make a noun from each of these, which of the three suffixes would you choose (note that you might be able to use more than one in some cases)? (3) lovely cool crude evil googleable rustic musty inconsequential feline toxic bovine Chances are that there are some of these words that you would choose to use -ity with (I choose crude, toxic, googleable, rustic, inconsequential, maybe feline), and others that you would use -ness with (for me, lovely, cool, evil, musty, probably bovine). Your choices might be slightly different from mine, but I’d be willing to predict that you didn’t choose to use -th with any of these adjectives. What does this mean? In some cases, we can look at words, decide that they are complex, and isolate particular affixes. But when it comes to

Productivity and creativity 61 using those affixes to create new lexemes, we have the sense that they are no longer part of our active repertoire for forming new words. We have no trouble using other affixes, however, even if we’ve never seen them on particular bases; for example, you may never have seen a noun form of the word bovine, but you have no trouble forming the word bovineness (or maybe bovinity, or maybe even both). Processes of lexeme formation that can be used by native speakers to form new lexemes are called productive. Those that can no longer be used by native speakers, are unproductive; so although we might recognize the -th in warmth as a suffix, we never make use of it in making new words. The suffixes -ity and -ness, on the other hand, can still be used, although perhaps not to the same degree. Most morphologists agree that productivity is not an all-or-nothing matter. Some processes of lexeme formation, like affixation of -th, are truly unproductive, but for those processes that are productive, we have the sense that some are more productive than others. In this chapter we will explore in some detail what we mean by productivity, and look at a number of factors that contribute to productivity. We will also look at several ways in which productivity can be measured. 4.2 Factors contributing to productivity A number of factors contribute to the degree to which we can use morphological processes to create new lexemes (see figure 4.1). One factor is what is called transparency. Words formed with transparent processes can be easily segmented, such that there is a one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning. In other words, when we transparency frequency of base productivity usefulness FIGURE 4.1 Factors contributing to productivity

62 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY attach an affix to a base, the phonological form (the pronunciation) of both morphemes stays the same, and the meaning of the derived word is exactly what we would expect by adding the meaning of the affix to that of the base. Let’s look further at the case of -ness and -ity, this time considering the additional examples in (4): (4) a. candid candidness pink pinkness hardy hardiness common commonness ticklish ticklishness cunning cunningness horrible horribleness pure pureness odd oddness b. crude crudity odd oddity pure purity dense density rustic rusticity timid timidity grammatical grammaticality local locality available availability senile senility In all the -ness examples in (4a), it is easy to divide the complex words into base and suffix. The base is always pronounced in the derived word as it is in isolation. And the suffix always creates a noun meaning ‘state of being “adjective”’, whatever the adjective. Words formed with -ness are perfectly transparent. The suffix -ity is somewhat less transparent. Although you don’t see this when words are written in English orthography, when you pronounce them, you see that -ity often has the effect of changing the phonological form of its base – sometimes its stress pattern, and sometimes both stress and phonological segments in the base. So timid in isolation is pronounced with stress on the first syllable (TImid), but when -ity is added, stress shifts to its second syllable (tiMIDity). And with the base rustic, in addition to a shift in stress from first to second syllable, the final [k] of the base becomes [s] when -ity is added. Further, some of the words formed with -ity have meanings that cannot be arrived at by combining the meaning of the base with that of the suffix. An oddity, for example, is not merely ‘the state of being odd’ (we would probably prefer the word oddness for that meaning), but a person or thing that is odd. And a locality is not ‘the state of being local’, but a place or area. Finally, consider the examples in (5): (5) verity dexterity authority

Productivity and creativity 63 In the first two examples, -ity occurs on bound bases ver, dexter. In the third, it’s not clear exactly how to analyze the derived word. Although it appears to be a combination of author and -ity, there are two problems with this analysis. First, as a free base author is a noun, and -ity typically attaches to adjectives, rather than nouns. And second, it’s not clear what the independent meaning of the base is; certainly the meaning ‘professional writer’ does not seem to be part of the meaning of authority. We never find -ness, however, on bound bases, nor do we find it on bases that are not adjectives. All of this adds up to a conclusion that the suffixation of -ness is a much more transparent process than the suffixation of -ity, and this in turn suggests that -ness is a more productive affix than -ity. Hand in hand with the notion of transparency comes the related notion of lexicalization. When derived words take on meanings that are not transparent – that cannot be made up of the sum of their parts – we say that the meaning of the word has become lexicalized. Meanings of complex words that are predictable as the sum of their parts are said to be compositional. Lexicalized words have meanings that are non-compositional. So the words oddity and locality that we looked at above have developed lexicalized or non-compositional meanings. Sometimes the meanings of derived words have drifted so far from their compositional meanings that it’s quite difficult to imagine the compositional meaning for them. Consider, for example, the word transmission, which denotes a part of a car. It takes a bit of thought to realize that the car part in question is so-called because it transmits power from the engine to the wheels. Transparency is not the only factor that contributes to productivity. Another factor that is important is what we might call frequency of base type. By this, I mean the number of different bases that might be available for affixes to attach to, thus resulting in new words. If an affix attaches only to a limited range of bases, it has less possibility of giving rise to lots of new words, and it will therefore be less productive. Consider, for example, the suffix -esque in English, which means something like ‘having the style of ’ (Marchand 1969: 286). It attaches to nouns, but mostly to concrete ones (statuesque), and in fact, most often to proper names (Kafkaesque, Reaganesque). Indeed, although it attaches pretty freely to names, it seems most comfortable on names that have at least two syllables (?Bushesque, ?Blairesque). Compared to a suffix that could attach to any noun at all, -esque would be less productive. The final factor that contributes to productivity is what we might call usefulness. A process of lexeme formation is useful to the extent that speakers of a language need new words of a particular sort. It’s always useful, for example, to be able to form a noun meaning ‘the state of being X’ from an adjective, whatever X means, so both -ness and -ity are highly useful affixes. On the other hand, consider the suffix -ess in English. It used to be useful to be able to coin words referring to jobs performed by women or positions held by women (stewardess, murderess, authoress). But with the rise of feminism and efforts to promote gender-neutral language,

64 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY such words have fallen into disuse, and the need for new words using this suffix has almost died out. Consequently the affix has become far less productive, perhaps completely unproductive. 4.3 Restrictions on productivity As we saw above, the more limitations there are on the bases available to a lexeme formation process, the less productive it will be. In this section, we will explore different kinds of restrictions that may apply to lexeme formation processes. We have actually looked at some such restrictions in chapter 3 (section 3.2), when we learned how to write lexeme formation rules. We learned that there could be different sorts of restrictions on what sorts of base an affix might attach to, including: •categorial restrictions: Almost all affixes are restricted to bases of specific categories. For example, -ity and -ness attach to adjectives, -ize attaches to nouns and adjectives, or un- attaches to adjectives or verbs. •phonological restrictions: Sometimes affixes will attach only to bases that fit certain phonological patterns. For example, -ize prefers nouns and adjectives that consist of two or more syllables, where the final syllable does not bear primary stress. The suffix -en, which forms verbs from adjectives, attaches only to bases that end in obstruents (stops, fricatives, and affricates). So we can get darken, brighten, and deafen but *slimmen and *tallen, which end in sonorant consonants, are impossible. •the meaning of the base: For example, negative un- prefers bases that are not themselves negative in meaning. We find unlovely but not *unugly, unhappy but not *unsad. To these sorts of restrictions we might add: •etymological restrictions: Some affixes are restricted to particular subclasses of bases. For example, there are affixes in English that prefer to attach to bases that are native – for example the suffix -en that forms adjectives from nouns (wooden, waxen but not *metalen or *carbonen). On the other hand, another suffix -ic that forms adjectives from nouns (parasitic, dramatic) will not attach to native bases, only to bases that are borrowed into English from French or Latin. •syntactic restrictions: Sometimes affixes are sensitive to syntactic properties of their bases. For example, the suffix -able generally attaches to transitive verbs, specifically verbs that can be passivized. So from the transitive verb love we can get loveable, but from the intransitive verb snore there is no *snorable. •pragmatic restrictions: Bauer (2001: 135) gives the following example. In Dyirbal, there is a suffix -ginay that means ‘covered with’. Although there might conceivably be a use for a word meaning something like

Productivity and creativity 65 ‘covered with honey’, in fact, the suffix occurs in Dyirbal only on bases that denote things that are “dirty or unpleasant” (Dixon 1972: 223), like gunaginay, which means ‘covered with feces’. What’s considered dirty or unpleasant might to some extent be a function of cultural beliefs. We might expect there to be an inverse correlation between the number of restrictions and the productivity of a lexeme formation process: the more restrictions apply, the fewer bases it will have available to it, and the fewer words it will be able to derive. The restrictions above pertain to inputs to lexeme formation rules. But it’s also possible for there to be restrictions specifically on the output of rules. For example, certain sorts of complex words can be restricted in register. Baayen (1989: 24–5) notes that the suffix -erd in Dutch forms “jocular and often slightly pejorative personal names.” For example, from the adjective bang ‘afraid’ we get bangerd ‘fraidy-cat’ and from dik ‘fat’ we get dikkerd ‘fatty’. Baayen points out that although there are a lot of adjectives that might give rise to pejorative names for people, words formed with the suffix are confined to use in spoken, as opposed to written, language and therefore the output of this lexeme formation process is restricted. 4.4 How to: finding words Thinking about productivity requires us to look not just at a few examples of words that have a particular prefix or suffix, but at lots and lots of examples. You might wonder how morphologists go about finding all the words with one affix or another. For prefixes, of course, we can look in a dictionary and find words formed with that prefix alphabetized more or less together. I say “more or less” because sometimes non-prefixed words will intervene alphabetically between forms with a prefix (for example, prelude intervenes between preloved and premarital in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary). But in a normal dictionary, words with suffixes are alphabetized according to their bases. Nevertheless, there are at least two ways of finding all the words with a particular suffix. The first is to look in a backwards word list like Lehnert (1971). A backwards word list gives words alphabetized starting with the last letter, rather than the first. So all the words with -ity or -ness can be found together. A few of the -ity words to be found in Lehnert (1971: 584) are shown in the sidebar. You’ll notice that using a backwards word list is not a perfect tool: such word lists simply alphabetize words from the end to the beginning, so any word ending in -ity will occur in the list, not just words that really have the suffix -ity. In the list I give here, in addition to real -ity words like oddity and rancidity, we find ‘junk’ like rumti-iddity (spelled two different ways!); a bit earlier in the list we would have found the word city which of course also ends in the sequence of letters ity. In the list here, we also find the word acidity, plus four other derivatives of it (subacidity, nonacidity, hypoacidity, hyperacidity). So if you work with a backwards word list, be prepared to go through it word by word and check whether you really have an example paucity raucity caducity rumti-iddity rumpt-iddity quiddity oddity heredity rabidity morbidity turbidity acidity subacidity placidity nonacidity hypoacidity hyperacidity flaccidity rancidity viscidity lucidity

66 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY of the suffix you’re looking for, and whether you really just have one example, as opposed to several derivatives of the same word. It is also possible to find words with a particular suffix by using the OED On line. To do so, instead of typing a whole word in the Find Word box, type the suffix preceded by *. The asterisk is what’s called a ‘Wild Card’. It stands for any characters that precede the ones that you’re looking for. Again, you’ll get a long list which contains many words with the suffix in question, plus a lot of ‘junk’. As with the backwards word list, you’ll need to be prepared to go through by hand and weed out those examples that don’t really contain the suffix you’re interested in. 4.5 Ways of measuring productivity We have seen that the productivity of lexeme formation processes depends on a variety of factors, including restrictions on possible bases, usefulness of the words formed, and the transparency of the process. Looking at these factors can give us some sense of how productive a process might be, but can we do better and actually measure productivity? Is it possible to compare the productivity of different processes? If so, how might we go about making such measurements? Challenge One conceivable way of measuring the productivity of a lexeme formation process might be to count up all the items formed with that process that can be found in a good dictionary. Most morphologists think that this is not a good way of measuring productivity. Think of as many reasons as you can why they should think so. It’s not hard to think of reasons why counting items in a dictionary wouldn’t be an accurate way of estimating productivity. For one thing, counting items that are already in the dictionary doesn’t really tell us anything about how many new words might be created with a lexeme formation process, and it’s the possibility of creating new forms that’s most important in making processes productive. Further, the most productive of lexeme formation processes are ones that are phonologically and semantically transparent. If the words resulting from these processes are perfectly transparent in meaning, then it’s unlikely that dictionaries will need to record them! On the other hand, less productive processes, as we’ve seen, frequently have outputs that are less transparent (more lexicalized), and therefore have more need to be listed in the dictionary. So simple counting might give a paradoxical result: less productive processes would be represented by more entries in the dictionary than more productive processes! Morphologists have therefore tried hard to come up with other ways of measuring productivity. One suggestion (Aronoff 1976) was to make a ratio of the number of actual words formed with an affix to the number of bases to which that affix could potentially attach.

Productivity and creativity 67 Challenge Consider the suffix -esque that we mentioned in section 4.2 above. The Oxford English Dictionary lists approximately 220 words with this suffix. Can you come up with a ratio that would estimate the productivity of -esque using Aronoff’s measure? Why not? Most morphologists see several problems with Aronoff’s way of measuring productivity. First, all of the problems we mentioned above with counting items in a dictionary (or corpus) apply to this measure as well. In addition, it’s not clear that we can ever know for sure how many potential bases there are for a given lexeme formation process. If -esque can attach to any name (or at least to any name with two or more syllables), how would we ever know that we’d amassed all possible names? A somewhat more sophisticated – but still not perfect – measure of productivity proposed by Baayen (1989) capitalizes on what we know about the token frequency of derived words. Remember from chapter 1 the distinction between types and tokens: if we’re counting types in a corpus or language sample we look for each different word and count it once, no matter how many times it appears, but if we’re looking at tokens we count up all the separate occurrences of that word in a particular corpus. The number of separate occurrences of a word in the corpus is the token frequency of that word. An important observation that has been made about lexeme formation processes is that the less productive they are, the less transparent the words formed by those processes, and the less transparent the words, the higher their mean token frequency in a corpus. In other words, words formed with less productive suffixes are often more lexicalized in meaning and will often display many tokens in a corpus. The more productive a process is, the more new words it will give rise to and the more chance that these items will occur in a corpus with a very low token frequency, sometimes only once. One way of measuring the productivity of specific lexeme formation processes is to capitalize on this observation. To do so, we take a corpus, count up all tokens of all words formed with a particular affix, and then see how many of those words occur only once in the corpus (a type with token frequency of one in a corpus is called a hapax legomenon or sometimes just a hapax). The ratio of hapaxes to all tokens tells us something about productivity. Using this measure confirms, for example, our intuition that -ness is more productive that -ity (Baayen and Lieber 1991). 4.6 Historical changes in productivity It should not come as a surprise at this point that lexeme formation processes may change their degree of productivity over time. Consider, for example, the suffix -dom in English, which attaches (mostly) to nouns

68 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY and forms nouns. We find it in such words as chiefdom, fandom, and stardom. Not too much work has been done on methods of measuring productivity over time, but here is one very rough idea of how to do it. With some care, it’s possible to find all the words in the OED with the suffix -dom and take note of when they were first cited (in other words, the year of the first quotation the OED gives for their use). We can then count up how many -dom words were first cited in each century. If we also know how many citations there are in the OED for each century (not every century has the same number of citations), we can calculate what percentage of them are first citations with -dom. For example, if the OED gives 28,698 citations dating from the thirteenth century, and seven of them are the first citations of words with -dom, then the -dom citations represent 0.0243% of all the citations. I’ve calculated these percentages for each century, and then plotted them on a graph, as you can see in figure 4.2. FIGURE 4.2 Comparative percentages of first citations of -dom per century 0 0.01 0.02 0.03 0.04 0.05 0.06 12th 13th 14th 15th 16th 17th 18th 19th The suffix -dom is a very old one, going back to the beginnings of English, and indeed further back into the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family, from which English descends.1 We can see that after an initially very productive period in the twelfth century, -dom seems to have dropped off in productivity from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries. But its productivity rises again precipitously in the nineteenth century. In fact, we can see from figure 4.3 that if we look in detail at the percentage of first citations per decade in the nineteenth century, the suffix gained steadily in productivity as the century progressed (with an odd blip in the 1870s), and peaked in the 1880s. Exactly why the productivity of the suffix should start to rise after centuries of minimal productivity is unclear. Wentworth (1941) notices the same trend that I’ve shown here, and points out that particular 1. Figure 4.2 starts with the twelfth century because that is the first century for which we have the number of citations in the OED. Many thanks to Charlotte Brewer of Oxford University for sharing these data with me.

Productivity and creativity 69 nineteenth-century authors seem especially prone to coin new words with the suffix: Thomas Carlyle and William Makepeace Thackeray in Britain, Mark Twain and Sinclair Lewis in the United States. But whether they are the cause of the rise or a reflection of something that was happening in the language at large is impossible to say. Bauer (2001) points out that in the nineteenth century, the kind of bases available to the suffix -dom seemed to expand drastically. Where it was confined for many centuries to bases referring to important types of people (lord, king, master, pope, earl, but also martyr and witch) or a few adjectives (wise, rich, free), in the nineteenth century it began to appear with more frequency on names for animals (puppy, dog, butterfly, centaur) and a wide variety of common nouns (school, twaddle, leaf, magazine, jelly, cotton, fossil). But why, exactly, its range of bases expanded at this point is still a mystery. By the way, when he wrote in the early 1940s Wentworth was convinced that the productivity of -dom did not drop from the turn of the twentieth century on, as figure 4.3 suggests: in addition to scrutinizing the OED, as I have done here, he checked through other dictionaries and collected his own examples, and his study turned up quite a few words. Still, the OED has not added a huge number of examples since Wentworth wrote his article, and it appears that although -dom is still quite productive, it does not now enjoy the enormous popularity it did during the 1880s. This is just one suffix in just one language, but we would expect that other word formation processes could be tracked in a similar way, showing the different processes most active in a language at any given time. 1810–1819 1820–1829 1830–1839 1840–1849 1850–1859 1860–1869 1870–1879 1880–1889 1890–1899 0.01 0 0.02 0.03 0.04 0.05 0.06 0.07 0.08 FIGURE 4.3 Comparative percentages of first citations of words with -dom per decade in the nineteenth century

70 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY 4.7 Productivity versus creativity Some morphologists make a distinction between morphological productivity and morphological creativity. When processes of lexeme formation are truly productive, we use them to create new words without noticing that we do so. Similarly, when hearers are exposed to a productively formed complex word, they understand it, but usually don’t note that it’s a new word (at least for them). This is not to say that speakers and hearers never notice productively formed new words, just that often such words slip by without notice. Morphological creativity, in contrast, is the domain of unproductive processes like suffixation of -th or marginal lexeme formation processes like blending or backformation. It occurs when speakers use such processes consciously to form new words, often to be humorous or playful or to draw attention to those words for other reasons. For example, speakers might use the unproductive suffix -th to form an adjective like coolth (in contrast to warmth), consciously trying to be clever or witty. Another example might be the suffix -some that occurs in English in words like twosome, threesome, and foursome. Theoretically this suffix might be infinitely productive because its bases are cardinal numbers. But it’s really only attached to the numbers two through four or five. We would probably only coin a new word like seventeensome if we were trying to be funny. Such a use would be creative, rather than productive use of this lexeme formation process. Let’s now look more closely at the case of blending in English. Blending, as we saw in Chapter 3, is the creation of new words by putting together parts of words that are not themselves morphemes. Relatively few blended words have become lexicalized words in English (brunch, smog), but the technique is frequently used for coining words by advertizers and the media, precisely because such words are noticeable. McDonald’s, for example, creates a word like menunaire from menu and millionaire to catch your eye (or ear), and make you pay attention to their pitch. Websites that track new words often have a disproportionate number of blends, and most of those words are culled from the popular press. For example, in the new words posted on the Word Spy website (www.wordspy.com) from May 28 to July 10, 2007, there were six blends: (6) locavore blend of local and herbi-/carnivore ‘someone who likes to eat locally produced food’ carbage blend of car and garbage ‘the trash that accumulates in one’s car’ blogebrity blend of blog and celebrity ‘a famous blogger’ boyzilian blend of boy and Brazilian ‘a kind of bikini wax for men’ gorno blend of gore and porno ‘extremely violent movie’ exergaming blend of exercise and gaming ‘activity combining exercise and gaming’ All six of these words were found in popular media – newspapers such as Newsday and The Plain Dealer, wire services (Associated Press), or magazines

Productivity and creativity 71 (The Economist). All were intended to catch the reader’s eye and therefore make for lively reading, and we might deem them successful because they found their way to Word Spy. In contrast, websites like Word Spy don’t pick up other new words with -ness. Word-spotters are far less likely to notice new forms that come from truly productive lexeme formation processes than new blends or the sporadic creative coinages that still come from unproductive processes. As Bauer (2001) points out, however, it is not always possible to draw a sharp line between productivity and creativity. Take the diminutive suffix -let in English (booklet, wavelet, eyelet). A look at the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that this suffix enjoyed a vogue in the nineteenth century (over 200 first attestations in this century), but declined markedly in its productivity in the twentieth century (only 21 first attestations). Although these numbers may be a function of the current state of the dictionary – the third edition, which is likely to add new forms, is as yet incomplete – the numbers are still suggestive.2 The apparent marked decline in productivity may account for my sense that when a new form with -let is coined, it often sounds self-conscious. For example, in my household a very small poodle is referred to as a poodlet and a very small beagle as a beaglet; these forms are meant to be amusing, and I doubt that they would slip through unnoticed by anyone who heard us using them. Similarly, in a biography of Julia Child (great TV chef and cookbook author), her husband is quoted as referring to her as his wifelet – surely meant to be funny, as Julia was over six feet tall!3 If I’m right about this, this suffix may have slipped below the line of productivity, with new forms being marginal, and therefore perceived as creative. 2. A check of the all the newly added entries from 2000–2007 shows no new forms with the suffix -let. 3. Laura Shapiro, Julia Child. Viking, 2007. Summary In this chapter we have explored the notion of productivity – the extent to which lexeme formation processes can be used to create new words. We have seen that several factors contribute to productivity: the phonological and semantic transparency of the process, the size of the pool of bases it can apply to, and its usefulness. We have seen as well that there can be different sorts of restrictions on lexeme formation processes that result in a decrease in productivity. Among these are categorial, phonological, semantic, syntactic, etymological, and pragmatic restrictions. We have looked as well at ways in which we can measure productivity. Finally, we have seen that even unproductive and marginal processes can still give rise to occasional new formations, a phenomenon that we called creativity.

72 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY Exercises 1. Which of the following derived words with the suffix -ity have lexicalized (non-compositional) meanings. Hint: some have both. Fill in the grid below: Compositional? Compositional Non-compositional Yes/No meaning meaning a. curiosity b. solidity c. publicity d. sexuality e. visibility f. facility 2. Consider the examples in (a)–(c) below. Each set involves a lexeme formation process that takes nouns as base and produces adjectives. On the basis of these examples, compare the three lexeme formation processes in terms of their transparency. Remember that transparency involves both compositionality of meaning and the phonological stability of the base (that is, the base is pronounced the same way in isolation and in the derived word): a. -ish girlish kittenish sheepish loutish babyish b. -ic cyclic metallic economic totemic organic c. -al herbal global homicidal glacial clinical 3. In this chapter, we have looked exclusively at productivity as it concerns derivational processes. We can, however, also compare the productivity of various types of compounding. English has compounds that consist of two nouns (dog bed, windmill), two adjectives (bittersweet, blue-green), and two verbs (blow dry, stir fry). Are all three types of compounding equally productive? (Hint: one way to start is by thinking of examples of NN, AA, and VV, and seeing which type gives you the most difficulty.) Give as much evidence as you can for your answer.

4. Look at the words you’ve collected in your Word Log. How many of them are formed with affixes? Which affixes? How many are formed by compounding or conversion? What does this tell you about the productivity of various processes in present-day English? 5. The graph in figure 4.4 shows percentages of first citations in the OED with the suffixes -esque, -ship, -let, and -hood. Make some observations on the patterns that you observe in the graph. How good a view of the comparative productivity of these suffixes do you think this chart gives? Take into consideration what we have said in this chapter about basing estimates of productivity on material in a dictionary. 6. Using the OED On-line, do a Wild Card search for words ending in the suffix -eer (as in charioteer or mountaineer). Look at the first 50 hits and divide them into two lists, one of words that you think really have the suffix -eer, and another of ‘junk’. Then try to formulate a word formation rule for -eer on the basis of the examples you’ve gathered. Productivity and creativity 73 FIGURE 4.4 Percentages of first citations in the OED of suffixes -dom, -esque, -ship, -let, -hood.

For Matthew Young man going east

CHAPTER 5 In this chapter you will learn about kinds of affixes other than prefixes and suffixes, including infixes and circumfixes. ◆ We will look at kinds of word formation that may be new to you: ablaut, umlaut, and consonant mutation, reduplication, and templatic morphology. ◆ And you will get further practice in morphological analysis. CHAPTER OUTLINE infix circumfix internal stem change ablaut consonant mutation templatic morphology reduplication KEY TERMS Lexeme formation: further afield

76 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY 5.1 Introduction Take a look at the data in (1): (1) a. Tagalog (Schachter and Otanes 1972: 356) ganda ‘beauty’ gumanda ‘become beautiful’ hirap ‘difficulty’ humirap ‘become difficult’ b. Manchu (Haenisch 1961: 34) haha ‘man’ hehe ‘woman’ ama ‘father’ eme ‘mother amila ‘cock’ emile ‘hen’ c. Samoan (Mosel and Hovdhaugen 1992: 227) a’a ‘kick’ a’aa’a ‘kick repeatedly’ ‘etu ‘limp’ ‘etu‘etu ‘limp repeatedly’ fo’i ‘return’ fo’ifo’i ‘keep going back’ These examples should look quite different from the kinds of morphology that we’ve concentrated on so far: prefixation, suffixation, compounding, and conversion. In (1a), it looks like a morpheme has been inserted right into a base to form a verb. In (1b), vowels have changed to form the female correlates of male nouns, and in (1c), segments of the base are repeated to form what’s called the frequentative form of the verb (for a verb meaning X, this form means ‘X repeatedly’). Prefixation, suffixation, compounding, and conversion may be the main ways of forming new words in English and many other languages, but there’s a much wider world out there, and there are types of morphology that do not figure in English at all, or figure only in the most minor ways. In this chapter we’ll expand our horizons by surveying a number of morphological processes that we have not yet encountered: different kinds of affixes, internal stem changes to consonants and vowels, reduplication, and templatic morphology. Our concentration will be on the structural aspects of morphology – the kinds of rules that languages can make use of to form new words – as opposed to the semantic or grammatical aspects. Our aim here is to characterize a sort of universal toolbag of rules which languages may make use of in word formation. 5.2 Affixes: beyond prefixes and suffixes As we saw in chapter 3, prefixes and suffixes are types of affixes that respectively go before or after a base. These are not the only positions in which affixes can occur. This section will look at these different sorts of affixes. 5.2.1 Infixes Infixes are affixes that are inserted right into a root or base. We saw an example in (1a) above. In Tagalog, a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken in the Philippines, it is possible to form intransitive verbs meaning ‘become X’

Lexeme formation: further afield 77 from adjectives by inserting the morpheme -um- after the first consonant of the adjective root. Example (2) shows how the words can be broken down: (2) g-um-anda become beautiful h-um-irap become difficult Another example of infixation can be found in Karok (a nearly extinct Hokan language, formerly spoken in northern California). In Karok, a form of verb called the intensive is created by infixing the morpheme -eg- after the first consonant or cluster of consonants in the root, as in (3): (3) Karok (Garrett 2001: 269) Base verb Intensive la:y- ‘to pass’ l-eg-a:y ɬkyorkʷ- ‘to watch’ ɬky-eg-orkʷ koʔmoy- ‘to hear’ k-eg-oʔmoy trahk- ‘to fetch water’ tr-eg-ahk Both examples of infixation that we’ve seen so far have had the infix right after the first consonant or consonant cluster of the base, but sometimes infixes can come near the end of the base as well. As the examples in (4) illustrate, in Hua, a Trans-New Guinea language, the negative infix -‘a- comes before the last syllable of the verb root: (4) Hua (Haiman 1980: 195) zgavo ‘embrace’ zga-‘a-vo ‘not embrace’ harupo ‘slip’ haru-‘a-po ‘not slip’ rvato- ‘be nigh’ rva-‘a-to ‘not be nigh’ Infixation in English? English doesn’t have any productive processes of infixation, but there’s one marginal process that comes close, which is affectionately referred to by morphologists as “fuckin’ infixation.” In colloquial spoken English, we will often take our favorite taboo word or expletive – in American English fucking, goddam, or frigging, in British English bloody – and insert it into a base word: abso-fuckin-lutely fan-bloody-tastic Ala-friggin’-bama This kind of infixation is used to emphasize a word, to make it stronger. What’s particularly interesting is that we can’t insert fuckin just anywhere in a word. In other words, there are phonological restrictions

78 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY 5.2.2 Circumfixes Another type of affix that occurs in languages is the circumfix. A circumfix consists of two parts – a prefix and a suffix that together create a new lexeme from a base. We don’t consider the prefix and suffix to be separate, because neither by itself creates that type of lexeme, or perhaps anything at all. This kind of affixation is a form of parasynthesis, a phenomenon in which a particular morphological category is signaled by the simultaneous presence of two morphemes. One example of a circumfix can be found in Dutch, although Booij (2002: 119) says that it’s no longer productive. In Dutch, to form a collective noun from a count noun, the morpheme ge- is affixed before the base and -te after the base: (5) berg ‘mountain’ ge-berg-te ‘mountain chain’ vogel ‘bird’ ge-vogel-te ‘flock of birds’ Neither geberg nor bergte alone forms a word – it’s only the presence of both parts that signals the collective meaning. Another example can be found in Tagalog (Malayo-Polynesian), where adding ka before and an after a noun base X makes a noun meaning ‘group of X’: (6) Tagalog (Schachter and Otanes 1972: 101) Intsik ‘Chinese person’ ka-intsik-an ‘the Chinese’ pulo ‘island’ ka-pulu-an ‘archipelago’ Tagalog ‘Tagalog person’ ka-tagalog-an ‘the Tagalogs’ Again, neither ka  noun, nor noun  an, has its own meaning in these words. on the insertion of expletives. Try inserting your favorite expletive into the following words: Winnepesaukee elementary onomatopoeia Now think of some other words, and try to infix fuckin’. Can you begin to see a pattern to where the expletive is inserted? Can you figure out what conditions the placement of the expletive? Challenge Remember that in chapter 3 we learned to draw word trees. Review chapter 3, section 2 and think about how we would have to draw word trees for words with circumfixes.

Lexeme formation: further afield 79 5.2.3 Other kinds of affix Occasionally in the literature on morphology we find reference to several other types of affix. For the most part, in this book we use different terms for these particular morphological processes, so here I will just mention the terms and refer you to the sections of this book where they are discussed: •interfixes: These are what we have called linking elements. See chapter 3, section 3. •simulfixes: This is another term for internal stem changes, which we will discuss in section 5.3. •transfixes: These are what we will call templatic morphology. See section 5.5 below. 5.3 Internal stem change Most of the forms of lexeme formation that we’ve looked at so far have involved adding something to a base (or combining bases).1 Some languages, however, have means of lexeme formation that involve changing the quality of an internal vowel or consonant of a base, root, or stem; sometimes this internal change occurs alone, and sometimes in conjunction with affixation of some sort. Such processes are called internal stem change or apophony. 5.3.1 Vowel changes: ablaut and umlaut Example (7) gives some words where internal vowels change: (7) a. Manchu (Haenisch 1961: 34) haha ‘man’ hehe ‘woman’ ama ‘father’ eme ‘mother amila ‘cock’ emile ‘hen’ b. Muskogee (Haas 1940: 143) nis ‘to buy it’ Stem class I ní:s ‘to buy it’ Stem class III ni:s ‘to buy it’ Stem class IV c. German (Lederer 1969: 25) Bruder ‘brother’ Brüderlein ‘brother-dimin.’ Frau ‘woman’ Fräulein ‘woman-dimin.’ In Manchu, in forming the female equivalent of a male noun, back vowels become front vowels. In Muskogee, verb stems have five forms each of which can be used in a number of verbal contexts (completive, incompletive, durative, and so on). Three of these forms are differentiated by the length and tonal patterns on their vowels. For class I, stems have short vowels and no special tonal accent. Class III stems have long vowels and falling tonal accents, and class IV have long vowels and no special accent. Morphological processes that affect the quality, quantity, or tonal patterns of vowels are often referred to as ablaut. A note on English Ablaut figures in a minor way in the morphology of English as well, as we can see in the past and past participle forms of verbs like sing (past sang, past pple. sung) or sit (past and past pple. sat). Since ablaut figures only in inflectional forms of English, though, we will postpone further discussion of it until chapter 6. 1. The exception here is conversion, which we discussed in chapter 3.

80 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY In German, when certain suffixes like the diminutive suffix -lein are added to a stem, the stem vowel becomes a front vowel. Historically, this fronting was a phonological process that occurred when a following suffix itself contained a front vowel; this process is called umlaut. Over time, the front vowels were lost in some suffixes or became back vowels, as is the case with the diminutive suffix -lein (pronounced [lain]). 5.3.2 Consonant mutation In some languages morphological processes are signaled by changes in consonants rather than vowels in the base, root, or stem. Such processes are called consonant mutations. As with the vowel processes noted above, consonant mutations may occur alone or in conjunction with prefixes or suffixes. (8) a. Seereer-Siin (McLaughlin 2000: 335) odon ‘mouth’ ondon ‘mouth-dimin.’ okawul ‘griot’ oŋ gawul ‘griot-dimin.’ opaɗ ‘slave’ ombaɗ ‘slave-dimin.’ b. Chemehuevi (Press 1979: 21–2) punikai ‘see’ navunika ‘see-reflexive’ tɨka ‘eat’ narɨka ‘eat-reflexive’ koa ‘cut’ naɣoa ‘cut-reflexive’ In (8a), in the West Atlantic language Seereer-Siin, some noun diminutives are formed by replacing the first stop consonant in the stem, for example [p, k, d] in the words in (8a), with the corresponding prenasalized stop ([mb, ŋ g, nd]). And in Chemehuevi, illustrated in (8b), the reflexive of a verb is formed by prefixing na- and changing the initial stop consonant of the root to a voiced continuant ([p] becomes [v], [t] becomes [r], and [k] becomes [ɣ]). 5.4 Reduplication Reduplication is a morphological process in which all or part of the base is repeated. Some examples are given in (9): (9) a. Hausa (Newman 2000: 42) bāya ‘behind’ bāya bāya ‘a bit behind’ gàba ‘forward’ gàba gàba ‘a bit forward’ ƙasà ‘below’ ƙasà ƙasà ‘a bit below’ b. Samoan (Mosel and Hovdhaugen 1992: 229) ‘apa ‘beat, lash’ ‘apa‘apa ‘wing, fin’ au ‘flow on, roll on’ auau ‘current’ solo ‘wipe, dry’ solosolo ‘handkerchief’ (9a) and (9b) illustrate full reduplication, a process by which an entire base is repeated. In the case of Hausa, full reduplication is used to form what’s Another note on English You might be interested to know that a historical process of umlaut is responsible for such singular/plural pairs in English as foot ~ feet or goose ~ geese. In earlier stages of English, the singular of the noun ‘foot’ was fot and its plural foti (similarly gos sg. ~ gosi pl.). The high front vowel of the plural suffix caused the vowel of the base to become front (so the singular and plural were then fot ~ feti and gos ~ gesi). The plural suffix was eventually lost, leaving the difference in vowels as the only signal of plurality in those words.

Lexeme formation: further afield 81 called an attenuative, which is a form meaning ‘sort of’ or ‘ a little bit’. In Samoan full reduplication is used to form nouns from verbs. Samoan also has partial reduplication in which only part of the base is repeated: (10) Samoan (Mosel and Hovdhaugen 1992: 223) lafo ‘plot of land’ lalafo ‘clear land’ lago ‘pillow, bolster’ lalago ‘rest, keep steady’ pine ‘pin, peg’ pipine ‘secure with pegs’ In (10) you can see that partial reduplication in Samoan repeats the first consonant and vowel of the base; this process derives verbs from nouns. Partial reduplication need not repeat the initial part of a base; it may also in some languages repeat the final part of the base, as the example from Teton Dakota in (11) illustrates: (11) Dakota (Teton) (Shaw 1980: 321) waksà ‘cut with sawing motion’ waksà-ksà ‘slice up’ wačhí ‘dance’ wačhíčhi ‘jump up and down’ In this dialect of Dakota, the final syllable of the verb root can be reduplicated to indicate iterative or repetitive action. Challenge Consider the following examples from English: willy-nilly hocus-pocus mumbo-jumbo hanky-panky hodge-podge handy-dandy hoity-toity helter-skelter Can you think of more examples of this sort? Do you think that English has a process of reduplication? If so, is it productive? If not, why not? 5.5 Templatic morphology Consider the data in (12): (12) Arabic (McCarthy 1979: 244; 1981: 374) katab ‘wrote’ kattab ‘caused to write’ kaatab ‘corresponded’ ktatab ‘wrote, copied’ kutib ‘was written’ (perfective passive)

82 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY All of the words in (12) have something to do with writing, and all share the consonants ktb, although in a couple of the forms, there’s more than one t. All the active verb forms have the vowel a; the passive verb form has the vowels ui. Each word has a different pattern of vowels and consonants, and each expresses a slightly different concept. What we find in Arabic is called templatic or root and pattern morphology. In Arabic, the root of a word typically consists of three consonants (like ktb), the triliteral root, which supply the core meaning. These three consonants may be interspersed with vowels in a number of different ways to modify the meaning of the root. The precise pattern of consonants and vowels – sometimes called the template – can be associated with specific meanings. For example, the pattern CVCVC simply means ‘write’, but the pattern CVCCVC adds a causative meaning, and the pattern CVVCVC a reciprocal meaning (we can take correspond to mean something like ‘write to each other’). Each of these template patterns is called a binyan (a term which comes from traditional Hebrew grammar). The specific vowels that get interspersed between the consonants in these patterns can contribute inflectional meanings; so the vowel a is used in active forms, and the vowels ui in passive forms. Roots in Arabic are occasionally called transfixes because some morphologists look at them as affixes that occur discontinuously across the word. Root and pattern morphology is very characteristic of the Semitic family of languages, which includes Arabic and Hebrew. But it can also be found in other languages, for example the Uto-Aztecan language Cupeño, a nearly extinct language of Southern California. Cupeño verbs can have a form called the habilitative, which means something like ‘can V’: (13) Cupeño (McCarthy 1984: 309) a. čál ‘husk’ čáʔaʔal ‘can husk’ téw ‘see’ téʔeʔew ‘can see’ hǝl y ǝ́p ‘hiccup’ hǝl y ǝ́ʔǝʔǝp ‘can hiccup’ kǝláw ‘gather wood’ kǝláʔaʔaw ‘can gather wood’ b. páčik ‘leach acorns’ páčiʔik ‘can leach acorns’ čáṣpǝl ‘mend’ čáṣpǝʔǝl ‘can mend’ One way of looking at the habilitative forms in Cupeño is that they conform to templates like those in (14): (14) Template for Cupeño habilitatives a. (CV)CVʔVʔVC b. CVC(C)VʔVC If the only or the second vowel is the stressed vowel, as is the case in the examples in (13a), the habilitative form adds two more syllables, each of which start with [ʔ]. The final vowel of the stem is spread to the new syllables. The situation is slightly different if the first vowel of two is the stressed vowel, as the examples in (13b) show. In that case, the template has only one more syllable than the stem, again with the glottal stop as the consonant, and the vowel supplied by the last stem vowel.

Lexeme formation: further afield 83 A final example of templatic morphology comes from another Native American language, Sierra Miwok (Penutian family, spoken in California). In this language, new words can be derived by adding a suffix which then supplies a specific template for the base. Consider the examples in (15): (15) Sierra Miwok (Smith 1985: 365, 371–2) a. peṭja ‘drop several things’ peeṭaj -tee-ny ‘string out’ halki ‘hunt’ haalik -tee-ny ‘hunt along a trail’ b. hulaw ‘forget’ hulwaw-we ‘be late’ ʔokiih ‘beg for food’ ʔokhih-he ‘be pitiful’ c. hywaat- ‘run’ hywattatt ‘run around’ hyleet ‘fly, be in the air’ hylettett ‘flop about (fish)’ The examples in (15a) show that the suffix -tee-ny, which forms what Smith calls the ‘linear distributive’, makes the verb stem conform to a template of the form CVVCVC. The forms in (15b) have a suffix with the form Ce, where the C is the last consonant of the verb stem. In addition, the verb stem is made to conform to the pattern CVCCVC. Finally, in (15c) verb stems are made into derived forms that mean something like ‘X around’ just by making them conform to a template that looks like CVCVCCVCC, with no suffix added. Summary In this chapter we have completed our survey of the different types of rules that can be used in forming new lexemes in the languages of the world. We have gone beyond prefixation, suffixation, compounding, and conversion to add new types of affixes (infixes, circumfixes), and new processes like internal stem change (ablaut, umlaut, and consonant mutation), reduplication (full and partial), and templatic morphology. Exercises 1. The Austronesian language Leti has a process that derives nouns meaning ‘the act of V-ing’ from verbs. Consider the data below (from Blevins 1999: 390): kakri ‘cry’ kniakri ‘the act of crying’ pali ‘float’ pniali ‘the act of floating’ sai ‘climb’ sniai ‘the act of climbing’ teti ‘chop’ tnieti ‘the act of chopping’ vaka ‘ask (for)’ vniaka ‘the act of asking’ va-nunsu ‘knead’ vnianunsu ‘massage’  ‘the act of kneading’ a. Divide the Leti words in the second column into morphemes, and give the meaning of each morpheme. b. What is the morphological rule that creates nouns from verbs in Leti? What kind of a rule is it?

84 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY c. Now consider the following forms: atu ‘know’ niatu ‘knowledge’  ‘the act of knowing’ odi ‘carry’ niodi ‘the act of carrying’ osri ‘hunt’ niosri ‘hunt’  ‘the act of hunting’ Divide these new words into morphemes and discuss what changes you need to make to the morphological rule you wrote for part (b) in order to account for this new data. 2. The examples below are from the Native American language Yurok (data from Garrett 2001: 274): kep’eɬ ‘housepit’ kep’kep’eɬ ‘there are several housepits’ ket’ul ‘there’s a lake’ ket’ket’ul ‘there’s a series of lakes’ pegon ‘to split’ pegpegon ‘to split in several places’ siton ‘to crack’ (intrans.) sitsiton ‘to crack several times’ tekun ‘to be stuck tektekun ‘to be stuck together in together’ several places’ Write a word formation rule that derives the Yurok forms in the second column from the corresponding base in the first column. Make sure to include both the structural and semantic effects of the rule. What kind of a morphological rule is this? 3. Consider the data below from the Dravidian language Kannada (data from Sridhar 1990: 268): a:Ta ‘game’ a:Ta-gi:Ta ‘games and the like’ huli ‘tiger’ huli-gili ‘tigers and the like’ sphu:rti ‘inspiration’ sphu:rti-gi:rti ‘inspiration, etc.’ autaNa ‘banquet’ autaNa-gi:taNa ‘banquet, etc.’ Try to write a morphological rule that derives the words in the second column from the bases in the first column. What kind of morphological rule is this? How does it differ from other morphological rules we’ve looked at in this chapter? 4. In the South Munda language Gtaʔ a number of different forms can be derived from a noun base, as the examples here show (data from McCarthy 1983): kitoŋ ‘god’ kataŋ ‘being with powers equal to ‘kitoŋ’’ kitiŋ ‘being smaller, weaker than ‘kitoŋ’’ kutaŋ ‘being other than ‘kitoŋ’’ (e.g., spirits, ghosts) kesu ‘wrapper worn against cold’ kasa ‘cloth equivalent to ‘kesu’ in size and texture’ kisi ‘small or thin piece of cloth’ kusa ‘any other material useable against cold’ Propose an analysis of this process. What kind of word formation rule is at work here? 5. The following words, taken from Yu (2004: 620) are characteristic of the speech of the character Homer Simpson from the animated TV show The Simpsons. In this data, Homer Simpson seems to display a process of infixation: saxomaphone ‘saxophone’ Missimassippi ‘Mississippi’ telemaphone ‘telephone’ Alamabama ‘Alabama’

Lexeme formation: further afield 85 wondermaful ‘wonderful’ diamalectic ‘dialectic’ feudamalism ‘feudalism’ Michamalangelo ‘Michaelangelo’ secrematery ‘secretary’ terrimatory ‘territory’ Is this like real cases of infixation that we saw in this chapter? If so, why? If not, why not? Try to formulate a precise rule for Homer Simpson infixation. 6. The following examples from the Semitic language Amharic illustrate a form of language disguise or play language (like Pig Latin) used by young women in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa (McCarthy 1984: 306): gwaro ‘backyard’ gwayrǝr gɩn ‘but’ gaynǝn mǝtt’a ‘come’ mayt’ǝt kɩfu ‘cruel’ kayfǝf hǝd ‘go’ haydǝd man ‘who’ maynǝn Figure out the morphological rule that creates the play language version (the third column) of the Amharic words. What kind of morphological rule is this? 7. Consider the following, from the Muskogean language Alabama (Hardy and Montler 1988: 394): salatli ‘slide once’ salaali ‘slide repeatedly’ haatanatli ‘turn around once’ haatanaali ‘turn around repeatedly’ noktiƚifka ‘choke once’ noktiƚiika ‘choke repeatedly’ Describe the word formation process that derives the words in the second column from those in the first column. What kind of morphological process is this? 8. The following data come from the Muskogean language Koasati (Kimball 1991: 351). Write a word formation rule for the process that they illustrate: molápkan ‘to gleam’ molalápkan ‘to flash’ bolótin ‘to shake’ bololótin ‘to shake with fear’ wacíplin ‘to feel a wacicíplin ‘to feel repeated stabbing pain’ stabbing pains’ konótlin ‘to roll’ kononó:tlin ‘to quiver fatly’ watóhlin ‘to clabber’ watotóhlin ‘to jiggle like jello’

For Matthew Young man going east

CHAPTER 6 In this chapter you will learn about inflection, the sort of morphology that expresses grammatical distinctions. ◆ We will look at a wide variety of types of inflection, both familiar and unfamiliar, including number, person, gender and noun class, case, tense and aspect, voice, mood and modality. ◆ We will learn what morphologists mean by a ‘paradigm’ and look at patterns within paradigms. ◆ And we will consider whether it is always clear where to draw the line between inflection and derivation. CHAPTER OUTLINE person number gender case tense aspect inherent contextual paradigm KEY TERMS Inflection