Riassunto esame Lingua Inglese 2, docente Mochi, libro consigliato Word Formation in English I, Plag

Riassunto esame lingua inglese 2

Docente Mochi, libro consigliato Word Formation in English, I. Plag (tutti i capitoli).

1 - Basic concept

1.1 What is a word?

You might first think of the word as a unit in the writing system, the orthographic word. You can say that a word is an uninterrupted string of letters, which is preceded by a blank space and followed either by a blank space or by a punctuation mark.

We have two problems:

• The first one is the orthography is often variable. Es: “girlfriend” is also “girl-friend” and “girl friend”.
• The second problem is that may not coincide with our intuitions. A compound word “girlfriend” is considerate as one word, but it should be spelled without a blank space separating the elements that together make up the compound.

Every word can have only one main stress as indicated by the acute accents (‘). The main stressed syllable, which is the most prominent one in a word. Stressed syllables being pronounced louder, with higher pitch, or with longer duration. Longer words often have additional stresses, so-called secondary stresses.

There are some cases in which word integrity is violated: the plural of son-in-law is sons-in-low.

The semantic definition of “word”: a word may always express a unified concept, not every unified concept is expressed by one word.

Properties of words:

• Words are entities having a part of speech specification.
• Words are syntactic atoms.
• Words (usually) have one main stress.
• Words (usually) are indivisible units.

1.2 Studying word-formation

a. Employee
b. Apartment building
c. Chair
Inventor
Greenhouse
Neighbour
Inability
Team manager
Matter
Meaningless
Truck driver
Brow
Great
Suddenness
Blackboard
Promise
Unhappy
Son-in-law
Discuss
Decolonialization
Pickpocket

In columns a and b we find words that are obviously composed by putting together smaller elements to form larger words with more complex meanings.

Decolonialization can be segmented into the smallest parts de-, colony, -al, .ize and –ation; we can decompose complex words into their smallest meaningful units. These are called morphemes.

The words in column c cannot be decomposed into smaller meaningful units; they consist of only one morpheme. Some morphemes can occur only of attached to some other morphemes. Such morphemes are called bound morphemes in contrast to free morphemes.

The part of word, which an affix is attached to, is called base. We will use the term root to refer to bases that cannot be analysed further into morphemes.

It is also possible to combine two bases, a process we already know as compounding. The word in b are cases in point.

Concatenation is linking together bases and affixes as in a chain (catena).

There are also other non-concatenative ways to form morphologically complex words. We can turn nouns into verbs.

a. Ron (Aron)
b. Condo (condominium)
Liz (Elisabeth)
Demo (demonstration)
Mike (Michael)
Disco (discotheque)
Trish (Patricia)
Lab (laboratory)

This type of word formation is called truncation with the term clipping also being used.

Some truncation and affixation can occur together, so-called diminutives.

c. Mandy (Amanda)
Andy (Andrew)
Charlie (Charles)
Patty (Patricia)
Robbie (Roberta)

We also find so-called blends, which are amalgamations of parts of different words, such as smog (smoke/fog) or modem (modulator/demodulator).

Blends based on orthography are called acronyms, which are coined by combining the initial letters of compounds or phrases into a pronounceable new word (NATO, UNESCO).

1.3 Inflection and derivation

Inflection is part of the grammar on the one hand, and derivation and compounding as part of word-formation.

The most crucial difference is that inflectional morphemes encode grammatical categories such as plural, person, tense or case. These categories are relevant for the building of sentences and are referred to by the grammar.

Semantic opacity: if you consider the meaning of interview and the meaning of the ingredient morphemes inter- and view, you can observe that the meaning of interview is not the sum of the meaning of its parts.

Derivation
- Encodes lexical meaning
- Is not syntactically relevant
- Can occur inside derivation
- Often changes the part of speech
- Is often semantically opaque
- Is often restricted in its productivity
- Is not restricted to suffixation

Inflection
- Encodes grammatical categories
- Is syntactically relevant
- Occurs outside all derivation
- Does not change part of speech
- Is rarely semantically opaque
- Is fully productive
- Always suffixation (in English)

2 - Studying complex words

2.1 The morpheme as the minimal linguistic sign

It is a unit of form and meaning a sign.

Morphemes have a meaning that is expressed in the physical form of sound waves or by the black marks on paper which call letters. The part of morpheme we have referred to as its “form” is also called morph, a term coined on the basis of the Greek word for “form, figure”.

That sound sequence (Ʌŋ) stands for the meaning “not” is a pure convention of English, and in a different language (and speech community) the same string of sounds may represent another meaning or no meaning at all.

In complex words at least one morpheme is combined with another morpheme. This creates a derived word, a new complex sign.

The meaning of the new complex sign unhappy can be predicted from the meaning of its parts. Linguistic expressions such as unhappy, whose meaning is a function of the meaning of its parts, are called compositional.

Not even all complex words are compositional; the meaning of the prefix inter- can be paraphrased as “between”, but the verb interview does not mean “view between” but something like “have a formal conversation”. And while late means “after the due time”, the adverb lately does not have the compositional meaning “in a late manner” but is best paraphrased as “recently”.

The first phenomenon, which appears somewhat problematic for our notion of the morpheme, is conversion, the process by which words are derived from other words without any visible marking. This would force us to recognize morphemes, which have no morph; this problem can be solved by assuming that zero-forms are also possible elements in language. In this view, the verb water is derived from the noun water by adding to the base noun water a zero-form with the meaning “apply X”. We could speak of the presence of a zero-morph in the case of conversion (zero-derivation for conversion).

While affixational processes usually make it easy to find the different morphemes and determine their meaning and form, non-affixational processes do not lend themselves to a straightforward analysis in terms of morphemes.

It could be argued that fell is derived from fall by the addition of a so-called causative morpheme “make X”. It is expressed merely by the vowel change and not by any affix, a similar kind of process. The addition of meaning by means of vowel alternation is evidenced in English in certain cases of past-tense formation and of plural marking on nouns.

Another problem of the morpheme is that in some expressions there is more than one form signifying a certain meaning, so-called extended exponence because the forms that represent the morpheme extend across more than one element.

To account for cases of extended exponence we have to allow morphemes to be discontinuous. In other words, we have to allow for the meaning of a morpheme to be realized by more than one morph, by a form of BE and –ING.

Another oft-cited problem of the morpheme is that there are frequently parts of words that invite morphological segmentation, but do not carry any meaning.

The evidence we have collected so far amounts to the conclusion that at least infer, confer, prefer and refer are monomorphemic words.

2.2 Allomorphy

Such different morphs representing the same morpheme are called allomorphs and when different morphs realize one and the same morpheme the phenomenon is known as allomorphy.

On a more abstract level, we can say that it is the sound structure that conditions the distribution of the allomorphs, so determines which allomorph has to be used in a given linguistic context. This is called phonological conditioning.

Allomorphy is also rather frequent in English derivation, and both bases and affixes can be affected by it. In all cases involving affixes, there is more than one base allomorph, and the appropriate allomorph is dependent on the kind of suffix attached to it. We can thus state that there are not only obligatorily bound morphemes, but also obligatorily bound morphs, or rather specific realizations of a morpheme that only occur in contexts where the morpheme is combined with another morpheme.

a. The allomorphy of adjectival –al/-ar
Cause + al causal
Inflection + al inflectional
Distribution + al distributional
Pole + al polar
Nodule + al nodular
Cellule + al cellular

The data in (a) show some adjectives derived from nouns by the suffixation of all-ar. Both suffixes mean the same thing and their phonetic resemblance strongly suggests that they are allomorphs of one morpheme.

We could say that our suffix surfaces as –ar after (l), and –al in all other cases. This is a case of phonological conditioning of suffix; a dissimilation of the final sound of the suffix. The opposite process, assimilation, can also be observed, for example with the regular English past-tense ending. Conversely, the insertion of (ə) with words ending in (r) and (d) can be analysed as a case of dissimilation.

Where a variant (-ar) is exclusively found in one environment, whereas the other variant (-al) is exclusively found in a different environment, is called complementary distribution.

Such predictable changes in the realization of a morpheme are called morphonological alternation.

2.3 Establishing word-formation rules

There must be some kind of system in speakers’ minds that is responsible for that, the so-called word-formation rules.

The most obvious observation is that un- cannot attach to just any other morpheme, but only to certain ones. In those cases where it can attach, it adds a negative meaning to the base. The straightforward generalization to account for this pattern is that un- attaches to adjectives but not to nouns or verbs.

Furthermore, un- can only attach to words, not to bound morphemes.

We can summarize these observations and formulate a word-formation rule as in below. In order to be applied correctly, the rule must at least contain information about the phonology, its semantics, and possible base morphemes.

We can verify the accuracy of the rule by testing it against further data. The rule makes the interesting prediction that all adjectives can be prefixed with un-, and that no verb and no noun can take un-. If there are words that do not behave according to the hypothesized rule, the hypothesis is falsified and we must either abandon our rule or refine it in such a way that it makes more accurate predictions.

While the vast majority of un- derivatives behave according to our word-formation rule, there are a number of words that go against it.

b. Nouns
Unbelief
Unease
Untruth

c. Word-formation rule for the prefix un-
Phonology /Ʌŋ/X
Semantics “not X”
Unsaddle
Unplug
Base X = adjective

Verbs
Undo
Unfold
Undress
Unmask
Unearth

Semantically, the base words belief, ease and truth are all abstract nouns, but not all abstract nouns can take un-, which suggests that the words in (b.) are perhaps individual exceptions to our rule. However, the meaning of un- in all three forms can be paraphrased as “lack of” which is a clear generalization. This meaning is slightly different, though, from the meaning of un- which is given in (c) as “not”.

The fact that the interpretation “lack of X” occurs with nouns and the interpretation “not X” with adjectives might however be taken as a hint that the two cases can be unified into one, with slightly different interpretation following from the difference in the part of speech of the base.

The verb undo does not mean, “not do”, the verb unfold does not mean, “not fold”.

Un- attachment mostly creates derivatives that express a contrary contrast on a bi-dimensional scale of “more or less”, so, a contrast between gradable adjectives and their respective opposites, as in happy – unhappy, clear – unclear, comfortable – uncomfortable. There are two other kinds of opposites that are usually not expressive through un- prefixation, namely contradictories and complementaries. Contradictory expressions exclude one another, and there is no room between. Complementarity is a semantic relation in which one expression stands in a complementary contrast to a whole set of other, related expressions.

The only interpretation possible for a combination of negative and adjectival meaning is that the derived form denotes the absence of the property denoted by the adjective. With abstract nouns, a similar inferencing procedure applies. The derivative is automatically interpreted as “lack of X” because this is the only way to make sense out of the composition of general negative meaning and the meaning of abstract noun. With verbs denoting a goal-oriented action, negation is automatically interpreted as reversal or removal.

Obviously, there must be a restriction at work that only allows as bases verbs denoting an action which can be reversed or which involves a participant that can be removed.

The attachment of nominal –th can be said to be lexically conditioned (or lexically governed), which means that the possibility to take –th must be listed with each individual lexical item that has this possibility. It is impossible to define the class of –th taking adjectives by some independent property that all possible bases have and all impossible bases don’t have. Strictly speaking then, we are not dealing with a rule that can be used to form new words, but with a rule that simply generalizes over the structure of a set of existing complex words. Such rules are sometimes referred to as redundancy rules or word-structure rules.

So that we will often use the term “word formation process” to refer to both kinds of rule.

Sometimes new complex words are derived without an existing word-formation rule, but formed on the basis of a single (or very few) model words.

The process by which these words came into being is called analogy.

Quite often, words are analogically derived by deleting a suffix (or supposed suffix), a process called back-formation. An example: the verb edit which was derived from the word editor by deleting –or on the basis of a proportional analogy with word pairs such as actor-act.

In such cases, the dividing line between analogical patterns and word-formation rules is hard to draw.

Based on such reasoning, some scholars have developed theories that abandon the concept of rule entirely and replace it by the notion of analogy. First, it is unclear how the systematic restrictions emerge that are characteristic of derivational processes and which in a rule-based framework are an integral part of the rule. Second, it is unclear why certain analogies are often made while others are never made.

2.4 Multiple affixation

Many complex words contain more than two morphemes.

The relationship between the three morphemes can also be represented by brackets or by a tree diagram. This structure is supported by the semantic analysis, but also by the fact that –un only attaches to verbs if the action or process denoted by the verb can be reversed.

a. [re-[organize-ation]
b. [de-[centralize-ation]]
Organization
Centralization
Re- organize -ation
De- centralize -ation
[[re-organize]-ation]
[[de-centralize]-ation]
Reorganize
Decentralize
Re- organize -ation
De- centralize -ation

Both are possible interpretations with only an extremely subtle difference in meaning (if detectable at all). Furthermore, some complex words with more than one affix seem to have come into being through the simultaneous attachment of two affixes. A case in point is decaffeinate, for which, at the time of creation, neither caffeinate was available as a base word (for the prefixation of de-), nor “decaffein”. Such forms are called parasynthetic formations, and the process of simultaneous multiple affixation is parasynthesis.

3 - Productivity and the mental lexicon

In this chapter we will look at the mechanisms that are responsible for the fact that some affixes can easily be used to coin new words while other affixes cannot.

3.1 Introducing: what is productivity?

We can distinguish between redundancy rules that describe the relationship between existing words and word-formation rules that can in addition be used to create new words. Any theory of word-formation would therefore ideally not only describe existing complex words but also determine which kinds of derivatives could be formed by the speakers according to the regularities and conditions of the rules of their language. In other words, any word-formation theory should make predictions about which words are possible in a language and which words are not.

Some affixes are often used to create new words, the property of an affix to be used to coin new complex words is referred to as the productivity of that affix.

Nominal –th can only attach to a small number of specified words, but this suffix can therefore be considered unproductive.

For example, the suffix –ness gives rise to many more new words than, for example, the suffix –ish. The obvious question now is which mechanisms are responsible for the productivity of a word-formation rule.

3.2 Possible and actual words

We have seen that un- can be freely attached to most adjectives, but not all, that un- occurs with nouns, but only with very few, and then un- can occur with verbs, but by no means with all verbs.

Often, word-formation rules that look straightforward and adequate at first sight turn out to be problematic upon closer inspection.

Another typical problem with many postulated word-formation rules