Word-formation Types Research Articles

The Slavic Languages by Roland Sussex , Paul Cubberley (review)

SEER, Vol. 86,No. 3, July 2008 Reviews Sussex, Roland and Cubberley, Paul. The Slavic Languages. Cambridge Language Surveys. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2006. xix + 638 pp. Map. Tables. Figures. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. ?85.00. The authors nail their colours to themast right from the startof thisbook by declaring 'Slavic comprises 13 languages split into three groups: South Slav ic, which includes Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian. ..' (p. i), although many regard these three as variants of one language. Obviously political as well as linguistic criteria affect the choice. However, the authors take a thoroughly linguistic approach to their survey of the structure of the Slavonic languages, principally thosewith official status.They begin with an introduction detailing how they approached the study and examining the languages of the South, East and West Slavs, their variants and nomenclature, and their genetic clas sification and typology.There follow eleven chapters covering their linguistic evolution, genetic affiliation and classification, their socio-historical evolution, theirphonology, theirmorphophonology, their inflectionalmorphology, their syntactic categories and morphosyntax, their sentence structure, their word formation, their lexis, their dialects, and some socio-linguistic issues. Three appendices give abbreviations, orthography and transliteration, and resources for studying Slavonic linguistics.Although written by two leading scholars in the traditional format for linguistic studies (withnumbered examples and several levels of numbered headings), the work is accessible to the more general reader 'with some competence in descriptive linguistics' (p. 13) and is quite comprehensive despite some selectiveness. It will certainly be welcomed by scholars and students of theSlavonic languages and other linguisticians and linguistswho need an entrypoint into the Slavonic field. The first two chapters deal with the prehistory of Slavonic, its connection with Indo-European and Baltic, the phonology, morphology and syntax of Proto-Slavonic, the subdivision of Slavonic, which examines the main features of each of the three families of Slavonic languages, and the socio-historical evolution of the three families: South Slavonic (Old Church Slavonic and Church Slavonic, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian, and Slovenian), East Slavonic (Russian, Ukrainian and Belaru sian) and West Slavonic (Polish, Upper and Lower Sorbian, Kashubian and Slovincian, Polabian, Czech and Slovak). An overview is presented at the end of each chapter. The third chapter examines the development of the Proto-Slavonic vowel and consonant systems, sound combinations and suprasegmental features (stress, quantity, tone), together with the modern vowel and consonant sys tems (phonemes, phonetics) and suprasegmentals. Starting with an overview, the chapter on morphophonology deals with separate and combined vowel and consonant alternations and themorphological typology of alternations (noun, adjective and verb inflexions and word formation). There is a section on morphophonology and Slavonic orthographies. The chapter on 514 SEER, 86, 3, JULY 2008 morphology begins with an overview before coveringmorphological categories and structures,morphological word classes, inflectional categories (number, case, definiteness and deixis, gender, person, tense, aspect, voice and mood) and paradigms (nouns, the adjective and determiner declension, firstand second person pronouns and the reflexive pronoun, numerals and verbs, including athematic and auxiliary verbs). The sixth chapter covers syntactic units, syntactic roles and relations (concord, agreement, government and case) and the syntax and morphosyntax of aspect. The chapter on sentence structure begins with an overview and covers definiteness, questions, negation, imperatives, passives, conditionals, possession, coordinate and subordinate constructions, and specific construc tion types (pronouns and anaphora, reflexives, apersonal and impersonal constructions, indirect speech, participial and gerundial constructions, and ellipsis and deletion), together with word order and the Prague School's concept of functional sentence perspective. As various types of word formation (e.g. prefixation, suffixation, root combination, mixed types) are looked at in nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and other parts of speech, morphophonological features of word forma tion are also examined. The next chapter considers patterns of lexis, lexical composition and sources in the modern Slavonic languages, coexistent lexical strata (e.g. Church Slavonic and Russian inRussian, Russian and Turkish in Bulgarian), root exploitation (including lexical specialization and verbs of motion), lexical innovations, both indigenous (e.g. compounding, abbreviated words) and externally influenced (borrowing, caiques), and post-Communist lexis. The tenth chapter, after an overview, examines dialects of the main South, East and West Slavonic languages, while the final chapter...

How marginal are phrasal compounds? Generalized insertion, expressivity, and I/Q-interaction

For several reasons, phrasal compounds like I-told-you-so attitude are a typical case of a marginal type of word-formation: (i) integration of a phrase into the word should not be allowed (violation of the No Phrase Constraint), (ii) lexical integrity is weakened (violation of the Principle of Lexical Integrity), (iii) they display an expressive flavour typical of marginal morphology. Using the mixed model of Ackema and Neeleman (2004) that allows for insertion from phrasal syntax into word syntax (Generalized Insertion) it is shown that phrasal compounds are by no means marginal from a purely theoretical point of view. However, the expressivity of marginal compounds has to be explained. Drawing on experimental data, it is shown that ad hoc phrasal compounds are understandable and witty to a high degree. These results are explained within the Presumptive Meanings approach of Levinson (2000) that develops the notion of Generalized Conversational Implicature (GCI). It is shown that the expressivity of ad hoc phrasal compounds stems from a word-level conflict between observing the I-principle (that favours the enrichment of underdetermined structures) on the one hand, and the Q-principle (that requires maximal information) on the other.

Arabic morphology: diminutive verbs and diminutive nouns in San’ani Arabic

Word formation in Arabic has traditionally been assumed to involve interdigitation of a consonantal root with a vocalic pattern. This view is adopted by a large number of modern generative morphologists. More recently, however, several morphologists have argued that words in Semitic are formed from fully vocalised stems. In this paper, I argue that in San'ani (the dialect of San'a), and in some other Arabic dialects, there is a class of verbs that have as part of either their denotations or connotations a diminutive sense. I then consider diminutive nouns in the dialect. On the basis of semantic and phonological relationships between diminutive verbs and their non-diminutive counterparts, as well as native speakers' explanations of certain diminutive verbs, and the relationship between diminutive nouns and their non-diminutive counterparts, I argue that while some derivational processes take the root as the basic morphological unit, phonological and semantic similarities between certain stems can only be accounted for by derivation from a fully vocalised stem. I therefore conclude that both root-based and stem-based types of word formation occur.

Yearbook of Morphology 1999 (review)

Reviewed by: Yearbook of morphology 1999 ed. by Geert Booij, Jaap van Marle Edward J. Vajda Yearbook of morphology 1999. Ed. by Geert Booij and Jaap van Marle. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001. Pp. 319. ISBN 079236631X. $157.50 (Hb). This Yearbook volume contains eleven articles, five on diachronic aspects of morphology, the rest dealing with miscellaneous topics. The data derives mainly from Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages. Martin Haspelmath is guest editor for the section on diachronic morphology. The articles here focus mainly on the motivation behind morphological change, or on the notion of which formal elements in a word (stem vs. affix, phonological stem trait vs. inflection) actually convey semantic content. Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy’s ‘Umlaut as signans and signatum: Synchronic and diachronic aspects’ (1–23) explores an instance where a phonological trait has come to express informational content. In ‘What sort of thing is a derivational affix? Diachronic evidence from Romanian and Spanish’ (25–52), Martin Maiden makes a similar argument for the function of derivational affixes, which, contrary to some claims (cf. Robert Beard, Lexeme morpheme base morphology, New York: SUNY Press, 1995), are shown not to be semantically vacuous. In ‘The development of “junk”: Irregularization strategies of have and say in the Germanic languages’ (53–74), Damaris NÜbling analyzes how these originally weak verbs became irregular across the various Germanic languages. Elisabetta Magni’s ‘Paradigm organization and lexical connections in the development of the Italian passato remoto’ (75–96) explores cognitive motivations for the development of irregular preterite forms. Elke Ronneberger-Sibold’s ‘On useful darkness: Loss and destruction of transparency by linguistic change, borrowing, and word creation’ (97–120) likewise deals with speaker awareness of phonological processes—a factor that manifests itself in speaker preference for specific types of word formation. The volume’s remaining six articles cover a range of topics, most dealing with cognitive processing. Marco Baroni’s ‘The representation of prefixed forms in the Italian lexicon’ (121–52) uses the distribution of intervocalic [s] and [z] allophones in Northern Italian dialects as evidence for whether speakers have come to regard certain historically prefixed stems as monomorphemic. In ‘On inherent inflection feeding derivation in Polish’ (153–83), Bożena Cetnarowska argues that in certain Polish word forms derivation must be able to follow as well as precede inflection. This raises interesting questions about the notion of lexical stem. In ‘The processing of interfixed German compounds’ (184–220), Wolfgang U. Dressler, Gary Libben, Jacqueline Stark, Christiane Pons, and Gonia Jarema explore the cognitive processing of compound words such as leben-s-lang ‘life-long’. Andrew Hippisley’s ‘Word formation rules in a default inheritance framework: A network morphology account of Russian personal nouns’ (221–61) provides an excellent encapsulation of network morphology, as well as a convincing account of how affix rivalry and exceptionality can be simultaneously accommodated in a theory of word form creation. Steven G. LaPointe’s ‘Stem selection and OT’ (263–97) gives an optimality theory account of stem and affix allomorphy, based on data from a variety of languages, including Korean and Cherokee. The book’s final article, Irit Meir’s ‘Verb classifiers as noun incorporation in Israeli sign language’ (299–319), argues that certain hand gestures bear striking similarities to the properties of certain types of noun incorporation. This excellent study is a welcome inclusion here for the new dimension it adds to understanding the essence of morphological structure shorn of the epiphenomenon of sound. All of these articles reflect the ‘cutting edge’ of morphological research, making this volume, like its predecessors in the same series, an important acquisition for any linguist or librarian serious about keeping pace with morphological theory. Edward J. Vajda Western Washington University Copyright © 2005 Linguistic Society of America

A note on dependent compounds and the function of the morpheme -s in English

This paper deals with a specific type of word formation in Modern English, the noun + s + noun compound, in which {-s-} functions as a special component, namely as what we call a pseudo-morpheme. This pseudo-morpheme of English has remained relatively neglected by linguists. Our discussion focusses on the origin and function of compounds with {-s-}, and a comparison is made with compounds without {-s-}.

On some issues of an onomasiological approach to productivity

The paper discusses some moot points of recent discussions on productivity in word-formation and proposes an approach different from the mainstream generative theories. The most influential works in this field only cover the productivity of affixes, which contradicts the generally accepted scope of word-formation which also includes other word-formation processes. It may be proposed that rather than an affix-driven theory of productivity a rule-driven theory is required to cover the whole stock of complex words. An onomasiological approach to productivity, based on the notion of Word-Formation Type Cluster, is proposed to meet this objective. Another neglected problem in the current discussions on productivity is its extra-linguistic context. The paper points out some sociolinguistic factors which a comprehensive theory of productivity should reflect.

The role of position class in Ket verb morphophonology

Each Ket verb lexically determines the morpheme positions its subject/object agreement markers will occupy (Vajda 2000a), raising an interesting question about the division between derivation and inflection in this language. Stump (1997) showed that inflectional morphology in all languages is “templatic” according to Simpson and Withgott's (1986) definition, but suggested a non-trivial distinction may exist between “templatic” and “non-templatic” forms of derivation. Vajda (2000a, 2001, 2002) argued that Ket actant agreement patterns use inflection position selection as a component of derivation. The present article examines the various morphophonemic strategies that identify position-class configuration in this unusual type of word formation, demonstrating that rules based on position class (which I call “morphotactic rules”) elegantly account for many hitherto puzzling features of Ket verb structure.

Lexical composition and the production of compounds: Evidence from errors in naming

Whether the production of a morphologically complex word recruits compositional procedures appears to depend on the properties of the particular word-formation process at hand. Since the types of word formation that appear to enlist composition include regular inflection and productive derivation, an argument can be made for the role of morphological productivity in determining the approach taken to lexical production. However, morphological productivity typically entails semantic compositionality, so it could be that compositional procedures are exploited only when the meaning of the complex word is exhaustively characterised in terms of the meanings of its immediate morphological constituents. It is argued here that the lexical production system takes a compositional approach to processing morphologically complex forms in cases of productive word formation even if the semantics of the word cannot be derived formally from the meaning of its constituents. Evidence is presented from a case of acquired naming impairment in a patient whose ability to name objects with compound names is particularly disrupted.

The balance of storage and computation in morphological processing: the role of word formation type, affixal homonymy, and productivity.

This article is concerned with the way in which the balance of storage-storing and processing words through full-form representations-and computation-storing and processing words through morpheme-based representations-in lexical processing in the visual modality is affected by the following 3 factors: word formation type (roughly, inflection vs. derivation), productivity, and affixal homonymy. Experimental results for 5 different Dutch suffixes, combined with previous results obtained for 4 comparable Finnish suffixes (R. Bertram, M. Laine, & K. Karvinen, 1999) and 2 Dutch suffixes (R. H. Baayen, T. Dijkstra, & R. Schreuder, 1997), show that none of these factors in isolation is a reliable cross-linguistic predictor of the balance of storage and computation. The authors offer a general framework that outlines how morphological processing is influenced by the interaction of word formation type, productivity, and affixal homonymy.

The balance of storage and computation in morphological processing: The role of word formation type, affixal homonymy, and productivity.

This article is concerned with the way in which the balance of storage-storing and processing words through full-form representations-and computation-storing and processing words through morpheme-based representations-in lexical processing in the visual modality is affected by the following 3 factors: word formation type (roughly, inflection vs. derivation), productivity, and affixal homonymy. Experimental results for 5 different Dutch suffixes, combined with previous results obtained for 4 comparable Finnish suffixes (R. Bertram, M. Laine, & K. Karvinen, 1999) and 2 Dutch suffixes (R. H. Baayen, T. Dijkstra, & R. Schreuder, 1997), show that none of these factors in isolation is a reliable cross-linguistic predictor of the balance of storage and computation. The authors offer a general framework that outlines how morphological processing is influenced by the interaction of word formation type, productivity, and affixal homonymy.

Affixal Homonymy triggers full-form storage, even with inflected words, even in a morphologically rich language

This paper investigates whether affixal homonymy, the phenomenon that one affix form serves two or more semantic/syntactic functions, affects lexical processing of inflected words in a similar way for a morphologically rich language such as Finnish as for morphologically restricted languages such as Dutch and English. For the latter two languages, there is evidence that affixal homonymy triggers full-form storage for inflected words (Bertram, R., Schreuder, R., and Baayen, R. H. (in press). The balance of storage and computation in morphological processing: the role of word formation type, affixal homonymy, and productivity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition; Sereno and Jongman (1997). Processing of English inflectional morphology. Memory and Cognition, 25, 425–437). Two visual lexical decision experiments show the same pattern for Finnish. Apparently, the substantially richer morphology in Finnish does not prevent full-form storage for inflected words when the affix is homonymic.

THE INTERPLAY OF WORD FORMATION TYPE, AFFIXAL HOMONYMY, AND PRODUCTIVITY IN LEXICAL PROCESSING : EVIDENCE FROM A MORPHOLOGICALLY RICH LANGUAGE

This study addresses the role of three factors in morphological processing of visually presented words in Finnish: word formation type (inflection versus derivation), productivity, and affixal homonymy. Three visual lexical decision experiments show that complex words can be processed slower, equally fast, or even faster than comparable monomorphemic word forms. We will argue that this diverse pattern of results reflects the ways different complex words are stored and processed. Moreover, it indicates that the balance of storage and computation crucially depends on the interplay of the three above-mentioned factors. Surprisingly, our results converge in a manner consistent with data obtained from a typologically very different language, namely Dutch.

Prosodic faithfulness and correspondence: Evidence from a Japanese argot

This paper develops a comprehensive optimality-theoretic analysis of a Japanese reversing argot. Similar to other types of prosodic-morphological word formation, the argot shows the activation of constraints defining phonological unmarkedness. This manifests itself in the emergence of optimal prosodic form, within the limits imposed by a game-specific reversal requirement. The latter is formally characterized as Cross-Anchoring, a playful variation of the normal correspondence-theoretic anchoring constraints that are part of the phonological grammar. Under the combined pressure of Cross-Anchoring and high-ranking prosodic form constraints, the argot distorts each ordinary-language base word in the way, otherwise echoing it as faithfully as possible. As an important theoretical result, the analysis presents empirical evidence that prosodic faithfulness needs to be gauged in terms of foot-structural roles and not (or not exclusively) in terms of whole foot-sized constituents. Overall, the study demonstrates that the notion of minimal distortion operative in argot formation is none else but the principle of violation of a set of ranked constraints, the fundamental tenet of Optimality Theory.

English Word Formation and its Pedagogical Implications for EFL

English word-formation is usually taken for-granted by teachers and planners, and words are still assigned to classes (noun, verb, adverb, adjective…) by a technique which goes back for two millennia (Matthew, 1974). This paper has two aims: first to review types of English word-formation and, second, to discuss the need for word-formation teaching in EFL.

Blends Are Increasing

IN THIS ERA of word creation, greater than ever before because of the many new inventions, discoveries, and developments in all fields, we find that blends are on the increase. New situations, new objects, new processes, new experiences of all types demand new words. Before the middle of the nineteenth century this type of word formation was somewhat rare. The usual citations one finds are Edmund Spenser's wrizzled (probably wrinkled + frizzled), Shakespeare's glaze (glare + gaze), and Lewis Carroll's slithy (slimy + lithe), chortle (chuckle + snort), snark (snake + shark), and galumph (gallop + triumph). These telescoped words, especially the humorous creations, were formerly referred to as portmanteau words because of Lewis Carroll's explanation in Through the Looking-Glass that they were formed by fitting two words into one, as clothes are fitted into a portmanteau or traveling bag. Linguists, however, more often refer to these words as blends. This process is in frequent use today, especially by magazine and newspaper writers and in forming trade names, as evidenced in the list below.1 Blends occur in many fields; those reported here are distributed among the following fields (with the number in each field in parentheses): fashion (60); sports, travel, and entertainment (54); science and technology (44); air and space (5); home (37); political issues (15); education (3); art (7); high fidelity (13); youth (8); drug addiction (2); sex (7); health (5); miscellaneous (45). One of the great producers of blends is Time magazine. From this list of 306, 47 are from Time. These coinages often blend the first sounds of one word with the last sounds of another if some element of sound is common to both, as in the case of bullionaire (bullion + billionaire) or rat-a-tattoo (rat-a-tat + tattoo). In some cases a complete word is incorporated in the new creation, as in ambisextrous (sex + ambidextrous), soundsational (sound + sensational), rendezwoo (rendezvous + woo). A combining form is sometimes used instead of a word, as in celebriana (celebrity + -ana) and Thermotainer (thermo+ retainer). At times the first syllable or middle syllable of a word is employed, as illustrated by

The Accentuation of Russian Words

This paper reviews the accentual patterns found in the various inflectional paradigms of Russian and develops a number of rules to characterize these patterns. It then surveys the most common accentual patterns found in different types of word formation, and discusses the manner in which the rules developed in the first part of the paper account for these patterns. A number of theoretical issues in phonology (cyclic rule application, the role of disjunctive ordering, etc.) are briefly discussed, as are certain accentual phenomena in other, mainly Slavic, languages.*

The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-Formation

The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-Formation

How We Noun-Incorporate in English

*he vwoman-brings), containing the primary suffix [-ehkwe:we:-] 'woman': [ihkwe:wa] 'woman'; or Nahuatl [ni-naka-kwa] 'I meat-eat,' in which [naka-] is a prefix representing the noun [naka-tl] 'meat. On occasion, English equivalents of the type of I meat-eat have been criticized for following their originals too closely: for example, Gladys A. Reichard's translation of a certain Coeur-d'Alene verb, of which it has been said 'A literal rendering such as he was ear-sprinkled (565), out of context, means practically nothing.'2 However, such a criticism as the one just quoted falls rather wide of the mark, in that noun incorporation is not rare or meaningless in English, especially in that of the past fifty years. Recently I have been collecting examples of this type of word formation, more or less as they chanced to come my way, either in conversation or in reading. I have not always been able to note them down; I append here a list of those of which I have preserved a record. In each entry, the order of the material is: standard orthographical form, indication of the source, citation of the context (phrase or sentence) in which the form occurred, and indication of place and date. The abbreviation Cony. = 'in personal conversation'; Disc., 'remarks made by informant in discussion of the formation'; Gen., 'heard generally.' Informants were all speakers of American English, except those specified as Australian (Austr.). Conversational informants' names are not given, but their ages, at the time of notation, are indicated in parentheses.3 If a form occurred in print, I have preserved the original spacing and hyphenation (or absence thereof); in transcribing forms noted down from speech, I have consistently used a hyphen between the constituent parts. I have considered a form as being a noun-incorporating verb if