Word Formation in English

Word-formation in English
by
Ingo Plag
Universität Siegen
in press
Cambridge University Press
Series ‘Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics’
Draft version of September 27, 2002
i
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction .......................................................................................................... 1
1. Basic concepts 	 
1.1. What is a word? 	 4
1.2. Studying word-formation 	
1.3. Inflection and derivation 	
1.4. Summary 	
Further reading 	23
Exercises 	
2. Studying complex words 	
2.1. Identifying morphemes 	
2.1.1. The morpheme as the minimal linguistic sign 	
2.1.2. Problems with the morpheme: the mapping of
form and meaning	27
2.2. Allomorphy 	
2.3. Establishing word-formation rules 	
2.4. Multiple affixation 	
2.5. Summary 	
Further reading 	
Exercises 	
3. Productivity and the mental lexicon 	1
3.1. Introduction: What is productivity? 	551
3.2. Possible and actual words 	1
3.3. Complex words in the lexicon 	
3.4. Measuring productivity 	
1 Pages 55-57 appear twice due to software-induced layout-alterations that occur when the word for
windows files are converted into PDF.
ii
3.5. Constraining productivity 	73
3.5.1. Pragmatic restrictions 	
3.5.2. Structural restrictions 	
3.5.3. Blocking 	
3.6. Summary 	
Further reading 	85
Exercises 	
4. Affixation 	
4.1. What is an affix? 	
4.2. How to investigate affixes: More on methodology 	
4.3. General properties of English affixation 	
4.4. Suffixes 	109
4.4.1. Nominal suffixes 	
4.4.2. Verbal suffixes 	
4.4.3. Adjectival suffixes 	
4.4.4. Adverbial suffixes 	
4.5. Prefixes 	
4.6. Infixation 	
4.7. Summary 	
Further reading 	131
Exercises 	
5. Derivation without affixation 	
5.1. Conversion 	
5.1.1. The directionality of conversion 	
5.1.2. Conversion or zero-affixation? 	
5.1.3. Conversion: Syntactic or morphological? 	143
5.2. Prosodic morphology 	
5.2.1. Truncations: Truncated names,
-y diminutives and clippings 	
5.2.2. Blends 	
iii
5.3. Abbreviations and acronyms 	
5.4. Summary 	
Further reading 	
Exercises 	
6. Compounding 	
6.1. Recognizing compounds 	
6.1.1. What are compounds made of? 	
6.1.2. More on the structure of compounds:
the notion of head 	
6.1.3. Stress in compounds 	
6.1.4. Summary 	
6.2. An inventory of compounding patterns 	
6.3. Nominal compounds 	
6.3.1 Headedness 	
6.3.2. Interpreting nominal compounds 	
6.4. Adjectival compounds	194
6.5. Verbal compounds 	
6.6. Neo-classical compounds 	
6.7. Compounding: syntax or morphology? 	
6.8. Summary 	
Further reading 	
Exercises 	
7. Theoretical issues: modeling word -formation 	
7.1. Introduction: Why theory? 	
7.2. The phonology-morphology interaction: lexical phonology 	
7.2.1. An outline of the theory of lexical phonology 	
7.2.2. Basic insights of lexical phonology 	
7.2.3. Problems with lexical phonology 	
7.2.4. Alternative theories	222
7.3. The nature of word-formation rules 	
iv
7.3.1. The problem: word -based versus morpheme-based
morphology 	
7.3.2. Morpheme-based morphology 	
7.3.3. Word-based morphology 	
7.3.4. Synthesis 	243
Further reading 	244
Exercises
References 	
v
ABBREVIATIONS AND NOTATIONAL CONVENTIONS
A	adjective
AP	adjectival phrase
Adv	adverb
C	consonant
I	pragmatic potentiality
LCS	lexical conceptual structure n1	hapax legomenon
N	noun
N	number of observations
NP	noun phrase
OT	Optimality Theory
P	productivity in the narrow sense
P*	global productivity PP	prepositional phrase PrWd	prosodic word
SPE	Chomsky and Halle 1968, see references
UBH	unitary base hypothesis UOH	unitary output hypothesis V	verb
V	vowel
VP	verb phrase
V	extent of use
WFR	word formation rule
#	word boundary
.	syllable boundary
|	in the context of
vi
 	orthographic representation
/	/	phonological (i.e. underlying) representation
[
]
phonetic representation
*
impossible word
!
possible, but unattested word
Introduction:
What this book is about and how it can be used
The existence of words is usually taken for granted by the speakers of a language. To speak and understand a language means - among many other things - knowing the words of that language. The average speaker knows thousands of words, and new words enter our minds and our language on a daily basis. This book is about words. More specifically, it deals with the internal structure of complex words, i.e. words that are composed of more than one meaningful element. Take, for example, the very word meaningful, which could be argued to consist of two elements, meaning and -ful,
or even three, mean, -ing, and -ful. We will address the question of how such words
are related to other words and how the language allows speakers to create new words. For example, meaningful seems to be clearly related to colorful, but perhaps less so to awful or plentiful. And, given that meaningful may be paraphrased as ‘having
(a definite) meaning’, and colorful as ‘having (bright or many different) colors’, we could ask whether it is also possible to create the word coffeeful, meaning ‘having coffee’. Under the assumption that language is a rule-governed system, it should be possible to find meaningful answers to such questions.
This area of study is traditionally referred to as word-formation and the present book is mainly concerned with word -formation in one particular language, English. As a textbook for an undergraduate readership it presupposes very little or
no	prior	knowledge	of	linguistics	and	introduces	and	explains	linguistic
terminology and theoretical apparatus as we go along.
The purpose of the book is to enable the students to engage in (and enjoy!) their own analyses of English (or other languages’) complex word s. After having worked with the book, the reader should be familiar with the necessary and most recent methodological tools to obtain relevant data (introspection, electronic text collections, various types of dictionaries, basic psycholinguistic experiments, internet resources), should be able to systematically analyze their data and to relate their findings to theoretical problems and debates. The book is not written in the
perspective of a particular theoretical framework and draws on insights from various research traditions.
Word-formation in English can be used as a textbook for a course on word - formation (or the word-formation parts of morphology courses), as a source-book for teachers, for student research projects, as a book for self-study by more advanced students (e.g. for their exam preparation), and as an up-to-date reference concerning selected word -formation processes in English for a more general readership.
For each chapter there are a number of basic and more advanced exercises, which are suitable for in-class work or as students’ homework. The more advanced exercises include proper research tasks, which also give the students the opportunity
to use the different methodological tools introduced in the text. Students can control their learning success by comparing their results with the answer key provided at
the end of the book. The answer key features two kinds of answers. Basic exercises always receive definite answers, while for the more advanced tasks sometimes no
‘correct’ answers are given. Instead, methodological problems and possible lines of analysis are discussed. Each chapter is also followed by a list of recommended further readings.
Those who consult the book as a general reference on English word -formation may check author, subject and affix indices and the bibliography in order to quickly find what they need. Chapter 3 introduces most recent developments in research methodology, and short descriptions of individual affixes are located in chapter 4
As every reader knows, English is spoken by hundreds of millions speakers and there exist numerous varieties of English around the world. The variety that has been taken as a reference for this book is General American English. The reason for this choice is purely practical, it is the variety the author knows best. With regard to most of the phenomena discussed in this book, different varieties of English pattern very much alike. However, especially concerning aspects of pronunciation there are sometimes remarkable, though perhaps minor, differences observable between different varieties. Mostly for reasons of space, but also due to the lack of pertinent studies, these differences will not be discussed here. However, I hope that the book will enable the readers to adapt and relate the findings presented with reference to American English to the variety of English they are most familiar with.
The structure of the book is as follows. Chapters 1 through 3 introduce the basic notions needed for the study and description of word -internal structure (chapter 1), the problems that arise with the implementation of the said notions in the actual analysis of complex words in English (chapter 2), and one of the central problems in word -formation, productivity (chapter 3). The descriptively oriented chapters 4 through 6 deal with the different kinds of word-formation processes that can be found in English: chapter 4 discusses affixation, chapter 5 non-affixational processes, chapter 6 compounding. Chapter 7 is devoted to two theoretical issues,
the role of phonology in word-formation, and the nature of word-formation rules.
The author welcomes comments and feedback on all aspects of this book, especially from students. Without students telling their teachers what is good for them (i.e. for the students), teaching cannot become as effective and enjoyable as it should be for for both teachers and teachees (oops, was that a possible word of English?).
1.	BASIC CONCEPTS
Outline
This chapter introduces basic concepts needed for the study and description of morphologically complex words. Since this is a book about the particular branch of morphology called word- formation, we will first take a look at the notion of ‘word’. We will then turn to a first analysis of
the kinds of phenomena that fall into the domain of word-formation, before we finally discuss how word-formation can be distinguished from the other sub-branch of morphology, inflection.
1. What is a word?
It has been estimated that average speakers of a language know from 45,000 to 60,000 words. This means that we as speakers must have stored these words somewhere in our heads, our so-called mental lexicon. But what exactly is it that we have stored? What do we mean when we speak of ‘words’?
In non-technical every-day talk, we speak about ‘words’ without ever thinking
that this could be a problematic notion. In this section we will see that, perhaps contra our first intuitive feeling, the ‘word’ as a linguistic unit deserves some attention, because it is not as straightforward as one might expect.
If you had to define what a word is, you might first think of the word as a unit
in the writing system, the so-called orthographic word. You could say, for example, that a word is an uninterrupted string of letters which is preceded by a blank space and followed either by a blank space or a punctuation mark. At first sight, this looks like a good definition that can be easily applied, as we can see in the sentence in example (1):
(1)	Linguistics is a fascinating subject.
We count 5 orthographic words: there are five uninterrupted strings of letters, all of which are preceded by a blank space, four of which are also followe d by a blank space, one of which is followed by a period. This count is also in accordance with our intuitive feeling of what a word is. Even without this somewhat formal and technical definition, you might want to argue, you could have told that the sente nce
in (1) contains five words. However, things are not always as straightforward. Consider the following example, and try to determine how many words there are:
(2)	Benjamin’s girlfriend lives in a high-rise apartment building
Your result depends on a number of assumptions. If you consider apostrophies to be punctuation	marks,	Benjamin's constitutes two (orthographic) words. If not, Benjamin's is one word. If you consider a hyphen a punctuation mark, high-rise is two (orthographic) words, otherwise it's one (orthographic) word. The last two strings, apartment building, are easy to classify, they are two (orthographic) words, whereas girlfriend must be considered one (orthographic) word. However, there are two basic problems with our orthographic analysis. The first one is that orthography is often variable. Thus, girlfriend is also attested with the spellings , and even
 (fish brackets are used to indicate spellings, i.e. letters). Such variable spellings are rather common (cf. word-formation, word formation, and wordformation, all
of them attested), and even where the spelling is conventionalized, similar words are often spelled differently, as evidenced with grapefruit vs. passion fruit. For our problem of defining what a word is, such cases are rather annoying. The notion of what a word is, should, after all, not depend on the fancies of individual writers or
the arbitrariness of the English spelling system. The second problem with the orthographically defined word is that it may not always coincide with our intuitions. Thus, most of us would probably agree that girlfriend is a word (i.e. one word) which consists of two words (girl and friend), a so-called compound. If compounds are one word, they should be spelled without a blank space separating the elements that together make up the compound. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The compound apartment building, for example, has a blank space between apartment and building.
To summarize our discussion of purely orthographic criteria of wordhood, we must say that these criteria are not entirely reliable. Furthermore, a purely orthographic notion of word would have the disadvantage of implying that illiterate speakers would have no idea about what a word might be. This is plainly false.
What, might you ask, is responsible for our intuitions about what a word is, if not the orthography? It has been argued that the word could be defined in four other ways: in terms of sound structure (i.e. phonologically), in terms of its internal integrity, in terms of meaning (i.e. semantically), or in terms of sentence structure (i.e. syntactically). We will discuss each in turn.
You might have thought that the blank spaces in writing reflect pauses in the spoken language, and that perhaps one could define the word as a unit in speech surrounded by pauses. However, if you carefully listen to naturally occurring speech you will realize that speakers do not make pauses before or after each word. Perhaps we could say that words can be surrounded by potential pauses in speech. This criterion works much better, but it runs into problems because speakers can and
do make pauses not only between words but also between syllables, for example for emphasis.
But there is another way of how the sound structure can tell us something about the nature of the word as a linguistic unit. Think of stress. In many languages (including English) the word is the unit that is crucial for the occurrence and distribution of stress. Spoken in isolation, every word can have only one main stress,
as indicated by the acute accents (´) in the data presented in (3) below (note that we
speak of linguistic ‘data’ when we refer to language examples to be analyzed).
(3)
cárpenter
téxtbook
wáter
análysis
féderal
sýllable
móther
understánd
The main stressed syllable is the syllable which is the most prominent one in a word.
Prominence of a syllable is a function of loudness, pitch and duration, with stressed syllables being pronounced louder, with higher pitch, or with longer duration than
the neighboring syllable(s). Longer words often have additional, weaker stresses, so- called secondary stresses, which we ignore here for simplicity’s sake. The words in
(4) now show that the phonologically defined word is not always identical with the orthographically defined word.
(4)	Bénjamin's gírlfriend
apártment building
While apártment building is two orthographic words, it is only one word in terms of stress behavior. The same would hold for other compounds like trável agency, wéather forecast, spáce shuttle, etc. We see that in these examples the phonological definition of
‘word‘ comes closer to our intuition of what a word should be.
We have to take into consideration, however, that not all words carry stress. For example, function words like articles or auxiliaries are usually unstressed (a cár,
the dóg, Máry has a dóg) or even severely reduced (Jane’s in the garden, I’ll be there). Hence, the stress criterion is not readily applicable to function words and to words that hang on to other words, so-called clitics (e.g. ‘ve, ‘s, ‘ll).
Let us now consider the integrity criterion, which says that the word is an indivisible unit into which no intervening material may be inserted. If some modificational element is added to a word, it must be done at the edges, but never inside the word. For example, plural endings such as -s in girls, negative elements such as un- in uncommon or endings that create verbs out of adjectives (such as -ize in colonialize) never occur inside the word they modify, but are added either before or after the word. Hence, the impossibility of formations such as *gi-s-rl, *com-un-mon,
*col-ize-onial (note that the asterisk indicates impossible words, i.e. words that are not formed in accordance with the morphological rules of the language in question).
However, there are some cases in which word integrity is violated. For example, the plural of son-in-law is not *son-in-laws but sons-in-law. Under the assumption that son-in-law is one word (i.e. some kind of compound), the plural ending is inserted inside the word and not at the end. Apart from certain
compounds, we can find other words that violate the integrity criterion for words. For example, in creations like abso-bloody-lutely, the element bloody is inserted inside
the word, and not, as we would expect, at one of the edges. In fact, it is impossible to add bloody before or after absolutely in order to achieve the same effect. Absolutely bloody would mean something completely different, and *bloody absolutely seems utterly strange and, above all, uninterpretable.
We can conclude that there are certain, though marginal counterexamples to
the integrity criterion, but surely these cases should be regarded as the proverbial exceptions that prove the rule.
The semantic definition of word states that a word expresses a unified semantic concept. Although this may be true for most words (even for son-in-law, which is ill-behaved with regard to the integrity criterion), it is not sufficient in order
to differentiate between words and non-words. The simple reason is that not every unified semantic concept corresponds to one word in a given language. Consider, for example, the smell of fresh rain in a forest in the fall. Certainly a unified concept, but
we would not consider the smell of fresh rain in a forest in the fall a word. In fact, English simply has no single word for this concept. A similar problem arises with phrases like the woman who lives next door. This phrase refers to a particular person and should therefore be considered as something expressing a unified concept. This concept is however expressed by more than one word. We learn from this example that although a word may always express a unified concept, not every unified concept is expressed by one word. Hence the criterion is not very helpful in distinguishing between words and larger units that are not words. An additional problem arises from the notion of ‘unified semantic concept’ itself, which seems to be rather vague. For example, does the complicated word conventionalization really express a unified concept? If we paraphrase it as ‘the act or result of making something conventional’,
it is not entirely clear whether this should still be regarded as a ‘unified concept’. Before taking the semantic definition of word seriously, it would be necessary to define exactly what ‘unified concept’ means.
This leaves us with the syntactically-oriented criterion of wordhood. Words
are usually cons idered to be syntactic atoms, i.e. the smallest elements in a sentence. Words belong to certain syntactic classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions etc.),
which are called parts of speech, word classes or syntactic categories. The position
in which a given word may occur in a sentence is determined by the syntactic rules
of a language. These rules make reference to words and the class they belong to. For example, the is said to belong to the class called articles, and there are rules which determine where in a sentence such words, i.e. articles, may occur (usually before nouns and their modifiers, as in the big house). We can therefore test whether something is a word by checking whether it belongs to such a word class. If the item
in question, for example, follows the rules for nouns, it should be a noun, hence a word. Or consider the fact that only words (and groups of words), but no smaller units can be moved to a different position in the sentence. For example, in ‘yes/no’ questions, the auxiliary verb does not occur in its usual position but is moved to the beginning of the sentence (You can read my textbook vs. Can you read my textbook?). Thus syntactic criteria can help to determine the wordhood of a given entity.
To summarize our discussion of the possible definition of word we can say that, in spite of the intuitive appeal of the notion of ‘word’, it is sometimes not easy
to decide whether a given string of sounds (or letters) should be regarded as a word
or not. In the treatment above, we have concentrated on the discussion of such problematic cases. In most cases, however, the stress criterion, the integrity criterion and the syntactic criteria lead to sufficiently clear results. The properties of words
are summarized in (5):
(5)	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 (no intervening material possible)
Unfortunately, there is yet another problem with the word word itself, namely its ambiguity. Thus, even if we have unequivocally decided that a given string is a word, some insecurity remains about what exactly we refer to when we say things like
(6)
a.
“The word be occurs twice in the sentence.”
b.
[D´w„dbi´k„ztwaIsInD´sent´ns]
The utterance in (6), given in both its orthographic and its phonetic representation,
can be understood in different ways, it is ambiguous in a number of ways. First,
 or the sounds [bi] may refer to the letters or the sounds which they stand for. Then sentence (6) would, for example, be true for every written sentence in which the string occurs twice. Referring to the spoken equivalent of (6a), represented by the phonetic transcription in (6b), (6) would be true for any sentence in which the string of sounds [bi] occurs twice. In this case, [bi] could refer to two different ‘words’, e.g. bee and be. The next possible interpretation is that in (6) we refer to the grammatically specified form be, i.e. the infinitive, imperative or subjunctive form of the linking verb BE. Such a grammatically specified form is called the grammatical word (or morphosyntactic word). Under this reading, (6) would be true of any sentence containing two infinitive, two imperative or two subjunctive forms of be, but would not be true of a sentence which contains any of the forms am, is, are, was, were.
To complicate matters further, even the same form can stand for more than
one different grammatical word. Thus, the word-form be is used for three different grammatical words, expressing subjunctive infinitive or imperative, respectively. This brings us to the last possible interpretation, namely that (6) may refer to the linking verb BE in general, as we would find it in a dictionary entry, abstracting away from the different word-forms in which the word BE occurs (am, is, are, was, were, be, been). Under this reading, (6) would be true for any sentence containing any two word-forms of the linking verb, i.e. am, is, are, was, were, and be. Under this interpretation, am, is, are, was, were, be and been are regarded as realizations of an abstract morphological entity. Such abstract entities are called lexemes. Coming back
to our previous example of be and bee, we could now say that BE and BEE are two different lexemes that simply sound the same (usually small capitals are used when writing about lexemes). In technical terms, they are homophonous words, or simply homophones.
In everyday speech, these rather subtle ambiguities in our use of the term
‘word’ are easily tolerated and are often not even noticed, but when discussing linguistics, it is sometimes necessary to be more explicit about what exactly one talks about. Having discussed what we can mean when we speak of ‘words’, we may now turn to the question what exactly we are dealing with in the study of word- formation.
2. Studying word-formation
As the term ‘word-formation’ suggests, we are dealing with the formation of words, but what does that mean? Let us look at a number of words that fall into the domain
of word-formation and a number of words that do not:
(7)	a.	employee	b.	apartment building	c.	chair
inventor
greenhouse
neighbor
inability
team manager
matter
meaningless	truck driver	brow
suddenness
blackboard
great
unhappy
son-in-law
promise
decolonialization
pickpocket
discuss
In columns (7a) and (7b) we find words that are obviously composed by putting
together smaller elements to form larger words with more complex meanings. We can say that we are dealing with morphologically complex words. For example, employee can be analyzed as being composed of the verb employ and the ending -ee,
the adjective unhappy can be analyzed as being derived from the adjective happy by
the attachment of the element un-, and decolonialization can be segmented into the smallest parts de-, colony, -al, -ize, and -ation. We can thus decompose complex words into their smallest meaningful units. These units are called morphemes.
In contrast to those in (7a) and (7b), the words in (7c) cannot be decomposed into smaller meaningful units, they consist of only one morpheme, they are mono - morphemic. Neighbor, for example, is not composed of neighb- and -or, although the word looks rather similar to a word such as inventor. Inventor (‘someone who invents (something)’) is decomposable into two morphemes, because both invent- and -or are meaningful elements, wheras neithe r neighb- nor -or carry any meaning in neighbor (a neighbor is not someone who neighbs, whatever that may be...).
As we can see from the complex words in (7a) and (7b), some morphemes can occur only if attached to some other morpheme(s). Such morphemes are called bound morphemes, in contrast to free morphemes, which do occur on their own. Some bound morphemes, for example un-, must always be attached before the central meaningful element of the word, the so-called root, stem or base, whereas other bound morphemes, such as -ity, -ness, or -less, must follow the root. Using Latin-influenced terminology, un- is called a prefix, -ity a suffix, with affix being the cover term for all bound morphemes that attach to roots. Note that there are also bound roots, i.e. roots that only occur in combination with some other bound morpheme. Examples of bound roots are often of Latin origin, e.g. later- (as in combination with the adjectival suffix -al), circul- (as in circulate, circulation, circulatory, circular), approb- (as in approbate, approbation, approbatory, approbator), simul- (as in simulant, simulate, simulation), but occasional native bound roots can also be found (e.g. hap-, as in hapless).
Before we turn to the application of the terms introduced in this secti on, we
should perhaps clarify the distinction between ‘root’, ‘stem’ and ‘base’, because these terms are not always clearly defined in the morphological literature and are therefore a potential source of confusion. One reason for this lamentable lack of clarity is that languages differ remarkably in their morphological make-up, so that different terminologies reflect different organizational principles in the different languages. The part of a word which an affix is attached to is called base. We will use the term root to refer to bases that cannot be analyzed further into morphemes. The term ‘stem’ is usually used for bases of inflections, and occasionally also for
bases of derivational affixes. To avoid terminological confusion, we will avoid the use of the term ‘stem’ altogether and speak of ‘roots’ and ‘bases’ only.
The term root is used when we want to explicitly refer to the indivisible central part of a complex word. In all other cases, where the status of a form as indivisible or not is not at issue, we can just speak of bases or base-words. The derived word is often referred to as a derivative. The base of the suffix -al in the derivative colonial is colony, the base of the suffix -ize in the derivative colonialize is colonial, the base of -ation in the derivative colonialization is colonialize. In the case of colonial the base is a root, in the other cases it is not. The terminological distinctions
are again illustrated in (8):
(8)	derivative of -ize/base of -ation
colony	-al	-ize	-ation
root/base of -al
derivative of -al/base of -ize
derivative of -ation
While suffixes and prefixes are very common in English, there are also rare cases of affixes that cannot be considered prefixes or suffixes, because they are inserted not at
the boundary of