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Chapter 2 Derivational Morphology

In the last chapter i talked about how inflexional morphology takes lexemes from the lexicon and prepares them to serve as actual words in actual sentences. In this chapter we're going to look at how derivational morphology actually creates the lexemes that live in the lexicon.

Derivational morphology basically involves two general processes, affixation and compounding. There are derivational affixes just as there are inflexional affixes, and many lexemes in many lan-guages are formed by affixation.

One of the most important things to understand about derivational morphology, as opposed to inflex-ional morphology, is that derivational morphology can significantly change the words it plays around with not only in form but in meaning and category. For instance, it is not at all unusual for deriva-tional affixes to change verbs into nouns or adjectives, adjectives into nouns or verbs, that sort of thing. That's what i mean when i say derivational affixation can change category. Essentially, deriv-ational morphology can take a word from any one of the three categories verb, noun, adjective, and return another, related word in either of the other two categories. In Fig. 2.1 i've given you a bunch of examples of this sort of process taking place in English. In each row of Fig. 2.1, the word farthest to the left is presumed to be the basic lexeme, or root, to which various derivational affixes are being attached; the derivational affixes are printed in boldface.

Verb Noun Adjective Verb Adjective Noun play player playful playfulness teach teacher teachable love lover lovable lovableness friend friendly befriend befriended friendliness grime grimy begrime ring bering beringed beringedness voice voiceless voicelessness beauty beautiful beautify beautification modern modernize modernization passive passivity impetuous impetuosity electric electricity

Fig. 2.1 Category Change Through Derivational Morphology

Of course, not all derivational affixes change category. In particular, negative affixes like un- or dis- serve merely to create nouns, adjectives, or verbs that mean the opposite of the nouns, adjec-tives, or verbs they're formed from, as in (1). The definition of derivational morphology is that it creates new words, new lexemes that didn't exist previously, out of older ones, and accounts for the possibility that different lexemes may be related.

(1) belief unbelief clear unclear interesting uninteresting understand misunderstand interested disinterested respect disrespect obey disobey legal illegal

Roots vs. Stems In Chapter 1 i talked about stems, explaining that a stem is a lexeme to which inflexional affixes can be added to produce word-tokens. In this chapter, as already noted, we are looking at how lexemes stems can be formed and added to the lexicon.

From the point of view of inflexional morphology, a stem is basic; you take the stem as it is stored in the lexicon and add inflexional affixes prefixes, suffixes, infixes, circumfixes, whatever to it. Inflexional morphology is (usually) not interested in the internal structure of the stem to which it is attaching affixes. This is a little bit like saying that to a chemist, atoms are basic; the chemist is in-terested in how whole atoms can be combined with each other. To the physicist, however, an atom is not basic; it's a combination of a nucleus consisting of protons, neutrons, etc., and a number of electrons surrounding the nucleus. Likewise, while from the point of view of inflexional morphology a stem, a lexeme, may be basic, that lexeme may very well have internal structure which, while to-tally irrelevant to inflexional morphology, may be of some importance to derivational morphology. In which case, from the point of view of derivational morphology a stem is not basic. What is basic to derivational morphology is called a root.

The relationship between derivational and inflexional morphology can perhaps be described in terms of a flowchart-type diagram such as that in Fig. 2.2. The processes of derivational morphology may

root

Derivational Morphology

stems/lexemes/lexical words

Inflexional Morphology

w o r d - t o k e n s

Fig. 2.2 Derivational & Inflexional Morphology

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take a single morpheme a root and derive any number of lexemes from it. These derived lex-emes can then serve as stems for the processes of inflexional morphology, which can add various inflexional affixes to them to provide the word-tokens we need in ordinary language use.

It is perfectly possible for a lexeme to be both a stem and a root. We noted in the last chapter that words such as those in (2a) constitute single morphemes. These are lexemes and stems; as noted in Chapter 1, they readily accept the appropriate inflexional morphemes such as the plural marker -s as in (2b). They can also serve as roots for derivational processes forming words such as those in (2c) But it's impossible to analyze them into any simpler morphemes; each of them is a single morpheme on its own. Therefore, it is also a root.

(2) a. cat dog horse boy book bike b. cats dogs horses boys books bikes c. cattiness doghouse horseface boyhood bookish bike path

ungraciousness un- prefix; negative grace root -ious suffix; derives adjectives from nouns -ness suffix; derives abstract nouns from adjectives

indecipherability in- prefix; negative de- prefix; forms verbs of reversal cipher root -able suffix; derives adjectives from verbs -ity suffix; derives abstract nouns from adjectives

antidisestablishmentarianism anti- prefix; against dis- prefix; remove, reverse establish root -ment suffix; derives abstract nouns from verbs -ary suffix; derives adjectives from nouns -an suffix; derives a noun referring to a person associated with the meaning of the stem -ism suffix; derives an abstract noun referring to a political or similar ideology

unmicrowaveability un- prefix; negative microwave root -able suffix; derives adjectives from verbs -ity suffix; derives abstract nouns from adjectives

Fig. 2.3 Some Complex Derived English Stems

On the other hand, in a language like English some lexemes can be morphologically quite complex. Witness the words in Fig. 2.3.1 In each of these four examples, i have highlighted one morpheme by printing it in boldface and labelling it root; this is in each case the root underlying the underlined lexeme above it.

There are a few things that i particularly want to point out in connection with these examples of complex lexemes. One is that, in the analysis of antidisestablishmentarianism, in my short note explaining the use of the suffix -an, i mention the stem. This is in reference to the stem to which the suffix is attached; in this case, antidisestablishmentary. The status stem like the synony-mous status lexeme belongs not only to the underlined words, the final result of (in these cases) fairly extended derivational processes; it can be used for any stage in the sequence. As already indi-cated, a root may itself qualify as a stem. The addition of each derivational affix creates a new stem, to which new derivational affixes can be added. Of course, if each of these, including the root itself, qualifies as a stem, this implies that it should be possible to attach inflexional affixes to them as well. This is, in theory, true; it's limited only by the admitted fact that English has relatively little in the way of inflexional morphology. I've tried to demonstrate the kinds of possibilities implicit in this approach by the derivational field shown in Fig. 2.4,2 which includes some inflected forms (indica-ted by the broken arrows) of the stems in question.

ungracefulnesses ungracefulness ungracefully

ungraceful gracefully gracefulness gracefulnesses

disgracefulnesses disgraces graceful graces

disgracefulness grace's gracelessly

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disgraceful disgrace (N) GRACE graceless

disgracefully disgrace (V) grace (V) gracelessness

disgraced disgracing graced graces gracing

disgraces gracious gracelessnesses

ungracious graciously graciousness

ungraciousnesses ungraciousness ungraciously graciousnesses

Fig. 2.4 Derivatives of a Single Root

1Some adopted, with thanks, from Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (William Morrow: 1994), p.129. 2Adapted from J. Tournier's Introduction descriptive la lexicogntique de l'anglais contemporaine (Champion-Slatkine: 1985).

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I have said that the difference between a root and a stem is that, while a stem may incorporate any number of morphemes, a root is by definition a single morpheme and therefore cannot be broken down into smaller morphemes.

It is sometimes debatable whether a given lexeme can or cannot be broken down into smaller mor-phemes. Consider, to take an example from Fig. 2.3, the word microwave. In Fig. 2.3, i identified this word as the root of the noun unmicrowavability. But is microwave really a single morpheme? From the point of view of etymology, that is, the history of the word, it can be analyzed into two smaller parts, the prefix micro- meaning small and the word wave. In this case, wave has the same meaning () that it has in the expressions radio wave or light wave: a type of electromag-netic radiation (). Microwaves are called microwaves because they are shorter than ordi-nary radio waves (it's all relative, of course; they're still quite a bit longer than light waves). So isn't it more correct to say that in this case the root is really wave, with the stem microwave being derived from it by the addition of the prefix micro-?

Historically, this would be quite correct. But we're not concerned here with the history of the word. Matters of language history will come up in Part II, in Section 9, the very last section of this book. Here in this first part of the book, i'm concerned primarily with how language lives and functions within the minds of its individual users. And to the best of my knowledge, most English speakers do not tend to think of microwaves as a kind of wave, or of the word microwave as being derived from the word wave. For most English speakers, in fact, the noun microwave refers not to a type of electromagnetic radiation but to a machine that lives in one's kitchen; and the verb microwave refers to the act of using this machine to warm up one's food. And it is specifically from the verb that the noun unmicrowavability is derived; it means the quality of being unsuitable for micro-waving, for warming up in a microwave oven.

The analyses i've given in Fig. 2.3 are pretty one-dimensional; they tell you that these words are formed from the morphemes given and that these morphemes occur in a certain order, left to right, but they say nothing about the order in which the derivational affixes are actually added to previous stems or in which each sequence of complex stems is built up. We will have more to say about the details of how complex lexemes are composed in Chapter 10, but for the moment i will show you in Fig. 2.5 the sequence of derivation of one of the words in Fig. 2.3. Each line in Fig. 2.5 represents a distinct lexeme, a distinct stem, derived from the stem above it by the addition of the affix indicated by the plus (+) sign; there are good reasons for believing that, in the derivation of undecipherability, the affixes are added in precisely this order.

cipher a secret code; writing a message in code de+cipher recover a plain text from a coded message decipher+able able to be deciphered in+decipherable impossible to decipher indecipherabil+ity the quality of being indecipherable

Fig. 2.5 Sequence of Derivation of a Complex Stem

Another way of representing this analysis is by means of the tree diagram in Fig. 2.6, in which the addition of each derivational affix results in a new node which is labelled with the part of speech (N for noun, A for adjective, V for verb) that results from the addition of that affix. At the lowest level, i have labelled the root cipher as both a noun and a verb; this is because, at least historically, the verb cipher () is based directly on the noun cipher (). The topmost node is labelled N, indicating that indecipherability is a noun. Tree diagrams are very useful in many branches of linguistics; we'll see more of them in Chapters 8 and 22.

N

A

A

V

V

N

in- de- cipher -able -ity

Fig. 2.6 Tree-Diagram Analysis of a Complex Stem

Productivity An important issue with derivational affixes is their degree of productivity. Some affixes are more productive than others, meaning they are used more freely. What does that mean, you may ask. Does it mean that productive affixes are used in more words than non-productive ones? Sometimes this is true; however, a more important distinction has to do with the difference (already mentioned with regard to the analysis of possible roots) between history and current usage: More productive affixes can still be used to create new words today, while less productive ones may have been used in the past to create a lot of words, but aren't used much any longer.

For instance, in English we have a number of suffixes that form abstract nouns from more concrete nouns or adjectives. Some of these are -ness, -ity, and -hood. In the right-hand column of Fig. 2.1 you see some examples of -ness, such as playfulness, and lovableness; you also see some exam-ples of -ity, such as impetuousity and electricity; productivity itself is also an example, of course. In (3) i give you some examples of -hood; but actually, there aren't a lot of words made with -hood

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in modern English, and most of those that are have been around for awhile. We don't use the suffix -hood much to create new words, at least not in the dialects of English i'm most familiar with. In technical terms, it is not as productive as -ness or -ity.

(3) manhood neighbourhood parenthood personhood

There are limits on the productivity of the suffix -ity; although it generally converts adjectives into nouns, as in the examples in (4), there are some adjectives to which it will not attach. For instance, as shown in (5) there is no word *fiercity from fierce, although fierceness is not only a possible but an actual English word. Part of the problem with *fiercity is that there is already an English word ferocity, formed by the suffix -ity from a root very close to fierce, that means exactly what *fiercity would mean if there were such a word. I would say that -ity is a suffix that was more productive at a certain time in the past than it is now, and most of the English words that include it were coined at a time when it was more productive.3

(4) a. scarce scarcity b. sincere sincerity

(5) fierce *fiercity fierceness ferocity

On the other hand, some derivational affixes are extremely productive. -ness is definitely one of the more productive affixes in Modern English. Another is the suffix -er, added to verbs to form nouns meaning person who does the action referred to by the verbal stem. These nouns are called agent-ive nouns or agent nouns. I've given you a bunch of examples in (6), together with the verbs from which they're derived.

(6) Verb Agentive Noun Verb Agentive Noun write writer kill killer play player win winner run runner farm farmer open opener scrape scraper xerox xeroxer

The real point of (6) is not just the relatively large number of words in English that are formed using the suffix -er. It's that new ones are being added to this list quite frequently. There are at most a very few verbs in English that cannot take the suffix -er i think i would have trouble accepting words like *be-er, *have-er, *can-er.4 But apart from this very limited set of exceptions, as far as i can tell, once you know that something is a verb you know that the suffix -er can be added to it

3A few years ago i tried to coin the word baroquity from the adjective baroque; several of the people i tried this word out on were uncomfortable with it, although i still like it. 4The words caner and canner do exist in English, but they are not derived from the modal verb can. Canner is derived from a different verb can that is itself ultimately derived from the noun can referring to a metal container for food. To can something is to be put it in a can, and a canner would be someone (or, possibly, a machine) that does this. Caner derives ultimately from the noun cane () through a verb cane that refers either to the making of furniture with cane or the use of cane as an instrument of punishment.

to form an agent noun. There's an example of this sort of thing at the bottom of the left-hand side of the list in (6). Xerox is the name of a company that makes photocopy machines. Their photocopy machines have justly become so famous that nowadays much to the Xerox company's chagrin a lot of English speakers use the word xerox to refer not just to a photocopy machine made by the Xerox company but to any photocopy machine. And the word has become a verb; we often say to xerox meaning to photocopy. Now, as soon as xerox became a verb, it became possible to have a noun xeroxer, meaning usually the person in our office who is responsible for doing all the photo-copying, often also meaning the person who is responsible for taking care of the photocopy ma-chine. And indeed it is so; the word exists, and as far as i know began to be used not long after xerox began being used as a verb.

Affixes like -ness and -er are so productive that one is apt to find a new word using one or another of them any day. Another example is the suffix -ize, used to form verbs, usually from adjective stems. Recently i was reading a brochure and came across the word cyrillicize, meaning to con-vert the spelling of some word, typically a name, into the Cyrillic alphabet used in Russia and other Eastern European countries. Although i've had plenty of opportunity, i don't remember ever seeing this verb before, and i suspect the writer made it up on the spot. Yet it was immediately obvious to me what was meant. That's the power of a highly productive derivational suffix like -ize.

Some derivational processes are so productive that (rather like the verbs in incorporating languages that we looked at at the end of the last chapter) they can swallow up whole phrases as well as words. This is what seems to be happening in the passage in (7), quoted from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. During a conversation with my wife, i came up with the word unputdownability, meaning a quality manifest by a book that is so exciting or interesting that you are unable or unwilling to put it down. I've provided in (8) a tree-diagram analysis of this word, in the manner used in Fig. 2.6. As i hope is clear from this analysis, unputdownability is derived from the complex verb put down

(7) What is an un-birthday present? N A present given when it isn't your birthday, of course. A

(8) unputdownability A

V

un- put down -able -ity

I experienced a more extreme example of this kind of thing a few weeks before i left the States to come to Taiwan in 1997. I came home from some errand to find our landlady (()) busy about our yard. When i asked her what she was doing, she said, I'm de-dead-branchifying this tree. Now, in saying that, she was creating a new word on the model of the established Modern English word de-icing or de-ice, which means to remove the ice, usually from a car or a road. This verb is formed by the negative prefix de-, which not only means not but, especially when attached to verbs, means remove, take away. But note that, although ice is usually a noun in English, it is also a verb; we can ice a cake, and, more appropriately, we can ice something by freezing it. So, like cipher in Fig. 2.6, ice is already a verb before receiving the negative prefix de-. Dead branch,

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on the other hand, isn't a verb; it's not even a word; it's a noun with a modifying adjective what in the tree-diagram in (9) i have labelled N.5 So what my landlady did was to convert that whole phrase into a verb by means of the highly productive suffix -ify, then add to that rather complex verb the prefix de-, to get a very complex expression meaning to remove the dead branches from.6 Now bear in mind, our landlady is not a linguist. She's a very intelligent and well-educated person who likes to play word-games, but she's not, so to speak, a professional at it as i am. But this kind of trick works for her as well as it would for me. This is just another example of how creatively we human beings all of us use language.

(9) I'm de-dead branch-ifying this tree. V

V

N

de- dead branch -ify

Backformation Another indication of the creative power of productivity is a phenomenon called backformation. This is a historical process and in that sense perhaps belongs more properly when we talk about the history of languages and how and why languages change in Section 9. But i'm going to mention it here. Backformation is essentially the reversal of a productive derivational process; it involves ta-king a word that already exists in the language and that at least appears on the surface to include a derivational affix, and removing that affix to reveal an apparently simpler word that nevertheless hasn't existed in the language previously. I've got some examples in (10). Notice that what we have here are pairs of verbs and what at least appear to be agent nouns derived from them. But in each case the agent noun has been around longer, at least in English. In some cases, the agent noun real-ly was derived from the indicated verb but not in English; rather, the derivation happened in some other language which happened to have the same, or nearly the same, agentive suffix -er. In other cases, such as burglar, the noun in question was not derived from any verb at all.

(10) Verb Agentive noun Verb Agentive Noun peddle pedlar beg beggar hawk hawker scavenge scavenger swindle swindler edit editor burgle burglar sculpt sculptor lase laser

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5Technically, that's called an N-bar, but you don't need to know that. 6I immediately told her that sentence was going into this text.

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Most of these nouns came into English many centuries ago, and their associated verbs were formed some time later and added to the language's vocabulary. But the last entry in the left-hand column is an interesting case of a similar process happening within the past half century. The word laser is what's properly referred to as an acronym, a word made up of the initials of a longer expression, as shown in (11). Laser technology developed in the late 50's and early 60's, and that's how old this word is. As you can see from (11), the last two letters of the word laser have nothing to do, at least as far as their origin is concerned, with the agentive suffix -er. That doesn't matter. Once the word was settled into the English language by the mid-60's, there was really nothing to stop people who design and work with lasers to come up with a verb lase, as in this gas lases well, meaning when properly treated it will efficiently generate a beam of coherent light, a laser-beam.

(11) Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation = laser

The examples in (10), therefore, are presented in a manner that is not true to their history; the layout in (10) suggests that the nouns were formed from the verbs, whereas in fact historically the opposite is the case. In (12) i've given you some further examples of backformation in English with the true historical process more correctly displayed. Again, we have a set of nouns, each of which ends with what most English speakers would unhesitatingly recognize as a productive derivative affix, in this case the suffix -ion as in institution or contribution or formation. And, because of this parallel, English speakers have seen fit to treat the verbs in (12) as legitimate verbs and as the stems from which these nouns are derived. Now, legitimate verbs they are; we use them all, and if the commu-nity of English speakers says they're legitimate then no one can disagree with us. But they aren't the stems from which these nouns are derived; quite the contrary, at least as far as English is concerned. As mentioned earlier, some of these -ion nouns are in fact derived from verbs, but in some other lan-guage. For instance, resurrection comes to English ultimately from Latin, which has a derivational suffix something like -ion,7 and in that language the noun resurrection actually was derived from a verb resurrex, meaning roughly to stand up again. But the English verb resurrect did not come directly from Latin or any other language; it was derived in English by the removal of what appeared to be a derivational affix. Some of the other verbs in this list, such as electrocute, televise, and emote are much more recent than resurrect, indicating that this process continues in our own time.

(12) Noun Backformed Verb Noun Backformed Verb resurrection resurrect vivisection vivisect electrocution electrocute television televise emotion emote donation donate backformation backform

The last entry in the left-hand column in (12) is included as a commentary from a professional lin-guist both on backformation and on my profession. Among linguists specializing in this kind of thing, you can increasingly hear the use of the verb backform. But backformation is not derived from any such verb. Backformation is derived from the word formation by the prefix back. It's true that formation itself is derived from a verb form, but the prefix back was never attached directly to the verb form to form backform. Backform is derived from backformation, which

7Actually, it's more like -tion.

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itself is of course a piece of technical jargon in linguistics just as laser is a piece of technical jargon in physics and technology, and so in both cases the derived verb is even more a piece of technical jargon.

Just as another example of backformation in the history of English, this one involving an apparent inflexional affix instead of a derivational one, i offer you the progression in (13). Back in the Middle Ages there was no word pea in English referring to a kind of vegetable. Instead, there was the word pease, which referred to a collection of the little green spheres that this plant produces; you'd have a bowl or a basket of these little things, and the whole thing was called pease. Eventually, that word was reinterpreted as a plural involving the usual English plural suffix -s, which invited us to come up with the singular form pea to refer to each individual kernal.

(13) pease > peas > pea ()

In spite of what i've said, backformation is neither regular nor completely productive. The proces-ses shown in (14) have never taken place.8 Which is interesting because, like resurrection, these words really were derived from verbs by means of the -able suffix but not in English. Unless i'm much mistaken, malleable and feasible came from French; French has a derivational suffix al-most identical to the English -able9 and at least at one time French had verbs from which these two adjectives were derived. But English borrowed the adjectives, not the verbs, and has never bothered to coin the verbs.

(14) malleable *malley feasible *fease

The point of this discussion of backformation here is that backformation depends on the recognition of productivity. Because it's so easy to form new words by the addition (in English) of affixes like -able, in-, -ness, de-, and -er, English-speakers tend to assume when they encounter a word that seems to include one of these affixes that the stem resulting from the deletion of that affix must also be a legitimate lexeme in the language. But this can only happen if English-speakers recognize these affixes and others like them as particularly productive, as freely attachable (and, by extension, detachable) to any stems that meet their conditions.

Limits on Productivity No matter how productive they may be, however, derivational affixes usually have some constraint on their application. Typically, a derivational affix can only attached to a certain kind of stem; for instance, -ness can only be attached to adjectives. And there are restrictions that are narrower than that. Let's look at (15) and consider the suffix -able, which forms adjectives out of verbs. -able is

8I've given you Chinese equivalents of the adjectives malleable and feasible, in case you're not acquainted with these words. 9In fact, we got the suffix itself from French, as we shall see in Chapter 23.

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extremely productive. You can see in (15) that there are many adjectives formed with it. If you look down at the bottom of the left-hand column, you will see that it is approximately as productive as the agent-noun suffix -er, which as mentioned in connection with (6) could be added freely even to a brand new verb like xerox. Fleeb is not a word in actual English. But there is experimental evidence to show that, if you take a bunch of English-speaking children and introduce them to the imaginary word fleeb in a context that lets them know that it's a verb, they immediately understand that, if fleeb is a verb, than fleebable is a perfectly legitimate adjective. This is the standard test for the maximal degree of productivity for a derivational affix.

(15) Verb Adjective Verb Adjective read readable wash washable break breakable drink drinkable move movable dye dyable fleeb fleebable

But now consider the cases in (16). It is impossible to derive adjectives from the verbs in (16) by means of the suffix -able that's what the stars mean; they mean that the forms diable, cryable, goable, and sleepable are not acceptable English words, even though they're formed in exactly the same way as the perfectly acceptable adjectives in (15).10 What's wrong with the verbs in (16), or with the suffix -able that it can't attach to them?

(16) die *diable go *goable cry *cryable sleep *sleepable

The answer, as far as anyone has been able to tell, is that -able is a suffix that forms adjectives out of verbs but it can only be attached to transitive verb () stems. This is reasonable, when you think about it. What does an adjective in -able mean? Consider the examples readable, break-able, washable. We say that a book is readable; we say that a mirror is breakable; we say that a shirt is washable; right? But a book is something that is read, something that reading is done to; the book itself doesn't read. A shirt is something that can be washed, something that washing can be done to; it doesn't itself wash other things. And when we say that a mirror is breakable, we are say-ing that we can break that mirror, that the mirror can be broken, not that it can break something else. In each case, the noun that is modified by the -able adjective corresponds to the object (), not the subject (), of the verb from which that adjective is derived. So, if an -able adjective is used to describe a possible object of the verb from which it is derived, then that verb must be tran-sitive, it must be itself capable of taking an object.

This hypothesis is confirmed by a couple of apparent counterexamples to the claim that only transi-tive verbs may serve as hosts for the suffix -able. Consider the words walkable and runnable. These are acceptable English words, obviously derived from the verbs walk and run. Now, walk

10I included in (14) a verb that is pronounced exactly like die to show that an adjective in -able could be formed from that verb, even though it can't from die.

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and run in their most normal usages are not transitive; one normally says just i walk or he ran. But if you look at (1718), you can see that walkable and runnable aren't really exceptions to the rule at all. The verbs walk and run do have transitive senses, as demonstrated in (18) and it is precisely those transitive senses that provide the basis for the adjectives walkable and runnable, as is clear from (17). If we say the dog is walkable, we are talking about something that can be done to the dog, not something the dog can do; likewise, to say the race is runnable is not to say something about anything the race does but rather that people are able to do in the context of the race.

(17) a. The dog is walkable. b. The race is runnable.

(18) a. She walked the dog. b. He ran the race.

Classes of Derivational Affixes Before going on to talk about compounding, i'm going to take a few minutes to tell you about an in-teresting complication in the grammar of derivational affixes. There is evidence that not all deriva-tional affixes are alike from the point of view of grammar. In particular, they seem to fall into two classes, which unfortunately have been given the rather unimaginative and unilluminating labels Class I and Class II affixes.11 The difference can be seen in the different behaviour of the English suffixes -able and -ion, which attach to verb stems to form, respectively, adjectives and nouns. In (19) i've given you a few examples of each affix attached to a verb, and i've underlined the stressed syllable in each case. You'll notice that when the suffix -able is added to a verb stem, the stress stays on the same syllable that it appears on when the stem surfaces in its basic, verbal self. But the suffix -ion has the property of dragging the stress toward itself, so that the stress falls on the last syllable before the suffix, no matter where it falls on the verb.

(19) Verb -able Adjective -ion Noun irritate irritable irritation appreciate appreciable appreciation investigate investig(at)able investigation

In (20) i've given you similar examples, this time involving the suffixes -ness and -ity, both of which form nouns out of adjectives. As you can see, -ness behaves like -able with regard to stress, while -ity behaves like -ion. Morphologists are generally agreed that the English suffixes -ion and -ity be-long together in Class I while -able and -ness belong together in Class II, and part of the difference is this affect or lack of affect on stress.

(20) Adjective -ness Noun -ity Noun luminous luminousness luminosity passive passiveness passivity impetuous impetuousness impetuosity

11The morphologist Elizabeth Selkirk has proposed calling them respectively root and word affixes, which i feel is more descriptive of what's at issue, but unfortunately so far as i know her proposal has not caught on.

STo say 'the dog is walkable' is not the same thing is saying 'the dog can walk'. Wolves can walk too. The difference, as a friend has pointed out to me, is that the typical domestic dog is likely to consider a stroll around 5 or 6 city blocks plenty of exercise, while a wolf might think nothing of a morning stroll of 20 or 30 km! From a human's point of view, the dog may be walkable, but the wolf definitely is not.

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Another factor in the difference between Class I and Class II derivational affixes is that, while both may be added to the same stem, they have to be added in that order. Words like ridiculousness and activityless are perfectly fine; in these words, a Class I affix is attached first, forming the words ridiculous and activity respectively, and a Class II affix is then added to that derived word. But you can't put them on in the opposite order. See what happens in (21) when we try to add either a Class I or a Class II suffix to a word that already has a Class II suffix on it. The Class II suffix -ness goes on just fine, but the Class I suffix -ity can't be added after the Class II suffixes -less or -ish.

(21) Adjective -ness Noun -ity Noun tasteless tastelessness *tastelessity voiceless voicelessness *voicelessity boyish boyishness *boyishity bookish bookishness *bookishity

Compounding

Compounding is a process that, as far as i know, exists in all human languages; it involves joining together two or more lexemes that could, at least in theory, exist on their own, and forming a new lexeme from the combination.

As you can see from (22), English orthography tends to prefer keeping the members of compounds separate at least to the extent of putting spaces between them, especially when they get complex. Sailboat is itself a compound, but it's relatively short and it has only two elements and it's been around for a long time. The other, longer expressions in (22) are perfectly good English expressions, but we tend to prefer to spell them as indicated, with spaces between the individual elements, even though each of them can be viewed as a single lexeme. Another example of this sort of thing is shown in (23). Originally the expression blackboard was spelled as two words. As it became more and more commonly used, however, it started being hyphenated. Nowadays it's usually spelled as a single word. One consideration promoting this change is that blackboards, in the sense of large sheets that can be written on with chalk and that get hung up on classroom walls, aren't always black; in my experience at least, they're often green. Spelling the expression as a single word allows us to use it to refer to the classroom implement even when it isn't black, while nowadays the two-word spelling usually means a board that is (literally) black.

(22) sailboat sailboat rigging sailboat rigging design sailboat rigging design training sailboat rigging design training institute

(23) black board black-board blackboard

German, as you may know, feels differently about this. It has no compunction about running words together visually as well as structurally; witness the examples in (24).

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(24) Unfallversicherungspflicht obligation to insure against accidents Nachtschattengewchse plants that grow, bloom, etc. during the night

Bound Roots A moment ago i said that the elements used to form a compound could in theory stand on their own as independent lexemes; the distinction between affixation and compounding in derivational morpho-logy is rather fuzzy, at least with regard to the issue of bound vs. free morphs. You'll remember that in Chapter 1 i mentioned the distinction between bound and free morphs; a free morph is one that can stand on its own as a full-fledged word while a bound morph has to be attached to some other mor-pheme in order to function properly; the examples i gave were the word cat and the plural marker -s. And you'll remember that i mentioned that affixes are by definition bound morphs. That goes for derivational affixes as well as inflexional affixes. I mentioned also that, in some languages, an inflexional stem a lexeme may also be bound, in the sense that it needs to have some inflexional affix attached to it before it can surface as a usable word. But there are morphemes in some langua-ges that are not free but which we hesitate to regard as either affixes or lexemes in the strict sense.

The morphemes in question are often, at least by English-speaking grammarians, called cran morphs. The reason for this expression has to do with a set of words in English referring to different kinds of berries. The English name for a specific kind of edible berry typically consists of a compound of the generic word berry with some distinguishing characteristic. Some examples are given in (25).

(25) blueberry raspberry strawberry cranberry

Now, blueberry is pretty obvious. The objects in question are berries and they are blue, or at least a sort of bluish-purple. Calling them blueberries is transparently descriptive. There is in English a word blue, referring to a particular colour, just as there is a word berry, and this is obviously just a compound of those two words. No problem.

Raspberry is a little harder to analyze as a compound. There is a word rasp () in English, but what does it have to do with raspberry? Well, i suppose it could be argued that rasps are sharp little things with sharp little teeth on them, and raspberries have a rather sharp, tart taste, but that explanation has always sounded rather far-fetched to me.12

Strawberry is worse. There is a word straw () in English, but it clearly has nothing to do with strawberry. Although the word feels like a compound, just as much as blueberry does, it isn't really analyzable as such.

And now we get to cranberry. Again, it feels like a compound, but of what? Take the morpheme berry away, and what's left? There is no word cran in standard English. So is it an affix? But what does it mean? Remember our definition: a morpheme is supposed to have a consistent meaning, consistent in all the words of which it may form a part. But cran only occurs in this one word, and

12My dictionary says raspberry is actually a backformation from the Middle English name of a kind of sweet wine. Obviously, most English-speakers can't be expected to know this, so the derivation of the word raspberry remains pretty opaque to most of us.

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in a few others that are obvious derivatives of it. Therefore, the only meaning that can be assigned to it is something like that which distinguishes cranberries from other kinds of berries, which is pretty circular, if you ask me.

And so linguists have coined the term cran morphs.13 A cran morph is a bound morph which is used in so few words as we say, it is so unproductive that no consistent meaning can reasona-bly be attached to it apart from the definitions of the actual words of which it forms a part.

There is another kind of complication that arises from the facts of language history. Consider the words in (26). In the first four lines, we seem to have pairs of words sharing the same prefixes and having different roots; in some cases, the prefixes are readily recognizable as occurring in other English words as well: return, perform, compass, etc. In the last line, there's another pair of words that seem to involve the same roots as the words above them along with other prefixes that, again, are recognizable as occurring in other English words: defend, deposit, advise, address. All of which encourages us to identify ceive and mit as roots. But what do they mean? And how come they don't actually occur as independent words in English?

(26) receive remit transceive transmit perceive permit conceive commit deceive admit

The answer is rather like that to the problem of the non-existence of the verbs *fease and *malley mentioned earlier (cf. (14)). The words in (26) all came into English as loans from Latin. In Latin, they were all coined by normal means of word-formation, by the adding of productive prefixes to roots and ceive and mit do in fact represent honest-to-God roots in Latin. But English never borrowed those roots by themselves from Latin, and has never bothered to recover them by backfor-mation, at least in part because although the words in each of the two columns in (26) seem to be obviously related to each other morphologically (and in fact are related historically), their meanings have changed so much over the centuries that it's now impossible to come up with a common mean-ing that could be assigned to their putative roots. What do the meanings of receive, perceive, and deceive have to do with each other?

I've said that all languages engage in compounding. But there are subtle differences in how they go about it. Consider the English and German words skyscraper and Wolkenkratzer in (27). Besides meaning the same thing, they are very similar in structure. Each word consists of a noun followed by an agent-noun which itself is derived from a verb meaning scrape or scratch. The differences, besides the obvious superficial differences in vocabulary, are that first of all, the English word speaks of something a building so tall that it (supposedly) can touch, and scrape, the sky; the German

13In the process, of course, we have actually elevated the element cran to the status of an actual word, although it's a word of pretty restricted usage.

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word, perhaps a little more conservatively, speaks instead of a building that can scratch the clouds. Secondly, the German word refers to the clouds in the plural; Wolken is the plural of Wolke, meaning cloud. German grammar tends to prefer using plural forms in these kinds of compounds, while English prefers singulars.

(27) skyscraper Wolkenkratzer gratte-ciel

It is understandable that the English and German words should have very similar structures; after all, historically English and German are merely two dialects of the same language, and these simi-larities continue to manifest themselves even in words like skyscraper or Wolkenkratzer, which were coined long after the two languages separated. Consider now the equivalent word in a more distantly related language, French. In French a skyscraper is called gratte-ciel. Here we have exact-ly the same idea as the English word ciel means sky and gratter means scratch.14 But the structure is quite different. First of all, whereas in English and German the verbal element scraper or Kratzer comes at the end of the compound, in French it comes at the beginning; this is typical of French. Secondly, in the English and German words the verbal element, as i called it, isn't actual-ly a verb but an agent-noun derived from a verb; in French it actually is a verb, not a derivative. We shall discuss this difference further in Chapter 10, when we discuss how the meanings of words are related to their form.

Does Chinese have Morphology?

OK, i've been talking about a lot of different languages, but i haven't said much about your own yet, have i? To quote the angels in the Bible, Fear not () Like the angels, what i am about to say is likely to be rather controversial, but i for one am convinced that it is true. Does Chinese have any morphology? As admittedly one single linguist who is not by any means fluent in the language but wrestles with it on a day-to-day basis, i think i can confidently say it most certainly does. Frankly, it amazes me to come across statements to the contrary, some of them by intelligent people, some of whom are competent linguists.

It is true that, with the possible exception of the element men used to mark plurals on personal pronouns and occasionally on nouns referring to human beings, Chinese has nothing that can be recognized as inflexional morphology; even though Chinese verbs are susceptible to marking for aspect and negation, the relevant markers are, with some reason, regarded as separate words. And when it is reported that Chinese has no morphology, i strongly suspect that this is what is meant, that Chinese has no inflexional morphology. But i have done my best in this section to make clear to you that linguistic morphology involves both inflexion and derivation, and the derivational mor-phology of Chinese is, to me, quite impressive; i'm finding it quite a challenge to get the hang of all of your compound verbs, like those in (28), and the methods by which they are coined.

14In fact, English scratch, German kratzen, and French gratter are all derived historically from the same verb.

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(28)

From what i have learned so far of the language, it is apparent that Chinese includes some deriva-tional affixes, such as those in (29). While it may be true that these are not necessarily bound morphs in the strict sense, they do seem to be used an awful lot in at least colloquial Mandarin as suffixes; i'll get back to this in a minute.

(29)

And there seem to be a goodly number of bound morphs too. I've provided in Fig. 2.7 a partial list of morphemes that are classed as bound by Jerome L. Packard, a leading expert in this area.15 In labelling these morphemes as bound, Packard is claiming that they cant occur just any old where; they always occur associated with one or another of a small, limited number of other morphemes.

It's important to understand a few things about a list like this. First of all, Packard (and, by extension, ) is talking about Modern Mandarin, not Classical Chinese. He admits (p.67) that e.g. was perfectly acceptable as a free word in the classical Chinese language, meaning that if you look through the body (or corpus, to use the technical term) of Classical Chinese literature you will un-doubtedly find plenty of examples of being used freely, without being bound to any of the mor-phemes listed alongside it in Fig. 2.7. That isn't relevant to Packard's claim (though it would certainly be of interest to the student of the history of the Chinese language); he's talking about Mandarin Chinese as it is used nowadays, at the beginning of the 21st century, by native speakers thereof.

Bound Morph Morphemes to which it typically attaches

--, -, -, -, -, -

-, -, -

-, -, -, -, -, -

-, -, -

-, -, -, -

-, -

-, -, -, -

Fig. 2.7 Examples of Bound Morphs in Mandarin

15Cf. his book The Morphology of Chinese: A Linguistic and Cognitive Approach (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), especially pp. 67 ff.

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Secondly, Packard is talking only about Mandarin Chinese, not about any of the other ; a mor-pheme may be free in one but bound in another.16 Thirdly, Packard claims that is a bound morph in its most basic meaning of tree or wood but acknowledges that it is free in the derived meaning of numb as in ;17 likewise, is bound when it means labour, art, or industry but free when it means work or job. He believes that these are really examples of polysemy one word or morpheme being listed in the lexicon more than once, or (another way of thinking of it) two different lexical entries being identical in their pronunciation and written representation.18

For what it's worth, my own (very limited) experience of modern Mandarin Chinese confirms Packard's judgments in this area. I never hear the morphemes , , , or except in combinations like , , , , or but i do hear those combinations a lot! And i distinctly remember one occasion when i was asking a friend for her daughters name, and i said, ?, and she corrected me, saying . From experiences like this, i conclude, as does Packard, that in modern Mandarin there is no word ; may be a but it is not a ; according to Packard, these are the technical terms traditionally used in Chinese linguistics. The English equivalent would be to say that is a morpheme but not a word.

In this connection, there's something i've avoided pointing out throughout this section, partly because it's rather obvious but also partly because this seems to be the most appropriate point to mention it. I've talked about prefixes and suffixes; there are inflexional prefixes and suffixes, and there are deri-vational prefixes and suffixes. It's worth noting that in all cases, a prefix is a prefix and a suffix is a suffix. For instance, in English we have a prefix un- as in the words in (30a); the strings in (30b) don't exist in English, precisely because un- is a prefix, not a suffix, and given the rules of English grammar can never function as a suffix.19

(30) a. uneaten unadmired ungrammatical b. *eatenun *admiredun *grammaticalun

So far in my admittedly very limited experience of the language, i have the impression that Chinese has very few constraints of this kind. For instance, i notice that both members of the pairs in (31)

16On the basis of my experience in Hong Kong in the summer of 2001, i suspect that may be free in Mandarin but not in Cantonese. 17And, of course, Packard is also talking specifically about Mandarin Chinese as used on the Mainland, not in Taiwan, where, one of my students informs me, is the commonly-used word for numb, not . 18Examples in English would be the separate entries for the noun present () and the adjective present (), or the general sense of the word love and the specialized sense in tennis, where it means a score of 0. 19This is not to say that in some other language there may not be a suffix expressing negativity; while i don't know of any offhand, i wouldn't be at all surprised if such languages exist. Likewise, i'm not claiming that some other language might have a suffix of the form -un; i'm sure such languages exist. I'm talking here about a peculiar fact of English grammar.

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exist; it's not clear to me how much they differ in meaning. However, while i quite frequently come across the expression in (32a), i would be very much surprised if i ever encountered the one in (32b).

(31) a. b. c.

(32) a. *

It's partly for this reason that i have the impression that most Chinese morphology has to do with compounding; the possibility of the existence in the same language of both forms in the pairs in (31) is the sort of thing one might expect from compounding processes; similar things are not unheard of in other languages. The impossibility of (32b), on the other hand, strongly suggests that in (32a) and many similar expressions is a suffix, not an independent element.

I mentioned earlier that, as far as i can tell, the morphemes listed in Fig. 2.7 seem only to occur, at least in modern Chinese, in compounds. Jerry Norman has noted the apparent existence in Chinese of a few morphemes consisting of two syllables;20 cf. (33). It is not clear to me whether these are truly single morphemes, or whether we're dealing here with something along the lines of cran morphs morphemes that exist only in these combinations. I note that, according to at least one of my dictionaries, the morpheme , and possibly as well, does seem to have independent existence in the language.

(33)

I will mention here an issue that will be discussed further in Chapter 5. It has been traditional to translate the Chinese expression into English as word. However, strictly speaking it is more correct to understand the Chinese as equivalent to the English morpheme.21 This brings us back to the issue raised in the introduction to this first section of the textbook, What is a word? What qualifies as a word?

There is evidence that people fluent in Chinese regard some elements within a compound as more closely bound together than others, regard some compounds as composed of units that are larger than the basic morphemic level; to put it another way, Chinese-speakers seem to recognize a level of organization somewhere between the whole phrase or compound expression and the individual morpheme (). I've noticed especially that some longer compound expressions in Chinese can be abbreviated. For instance, here in Taipei the institutions officially known by the names in (34a) are routinely referred to by the abbreviations in (34b). And on exams for this course i routinely see stu-dents writing (35b) for the course title rather than the fuller (35a). To me at least, this constitutes fairly strong circumstantial evidence that Chinese-speakers, at least here in Taiwan, at some semi-

20Jerry Norman, Chinese (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 89. 21Of course, the average English-speaker isn't familiar with the technical term morpheme, so for practical purposes the more usual translation word must be maintained.

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conscious level regard the expressions in (36) as real things that are as distinct from the longer phra-ses they may be used in as they obviously are from individual . I don't know if you have a formal term for intermediate-level units such as those in (36); speaking as a Westerner who's used to com-pound words, i have no trouble at all thinking of these as words, each of which is a compound of two or three morphemes.

(34) a. b.

(35) a. b.

(36)

Roots vs. StemsProductivityBackformationLimits on Productivity

Classes of Derivational AffixesCompoundingBound Roots

Does Chinese have Morphology?