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An Introduction to

English Morphology

Words and Their

Structure

Edinburgh University Press

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy

An Introduction to English Morphology

01 pages i-viii prelims 18/10/01 3:42 pm Page i

Edinburgh Textbooks on the English Language

General Editor

Heinz Giegerich, Professor of English Linguistics (University of Edinburgh)

Editorial Board

Laurie Bauer (University of Wellington)

Derek Britton (University of Edinburgh)

Olga Fischer (University of Amsterdam)

Norman Macleod (University of Edinburgh)

Donka Minkova (UCLA)

Katie Wales (University of Leeds)

Anthony Warner (University of York)

An Introduction to English Syntax

Jim Miller

An Introduction to English Phonology

April McMahon

An Introduction to English Morphology

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy

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An Introduction to

English Morphology

Words and Their Structure

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy

Edinburgh University Press

01 pages i-viii prelims 18/10/01 3:42 pm Page iii

To Jeremy

© Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, 2002

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh

Typeset in Janson

by Norman Tilley Graphics and printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin A CIP Record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7486 1327 7 (hardback)

ISBN 0 7486 1326 9 (paperback)

The right of Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy

to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Acknowledgementsviii

1 Introduction 1

Recommendations for reading 3

2 Words, sentences and dictionaries 4

2.1 Words as meaningful building-blocks of language 4

2.2 Words as types and words as tokens 5

2.3 Words with predictable meanings 6

2.4 Non-words with unpredictable meanings 9

2.5 Conclusion: words versus lexical items 12

Exercises 13

Recommendations for reading 14

3 A word and its parts: roots, affixes and their shapes 16

3.1 Taking words apart 16

3.2 Kinds of morpheme: bound versus free 18

3.3 Kinds of morpheme: root, affix, combining form 20

3.4 Morphemes and their allomorphs 21

3.5 Identifying morphemes independently of meaning 23

3.6 Conclusion: ways of classifying word-parts 26

Exercises 27

Recommendations for reading 27

4 A word and its forms: inflection 28

4.1 Words and grammar: lexemes, word forms and

grammatical words 28

4.2 Regular and irregular inflection 31

4.3 Forms of nouns 34

4.4 Forms of pronouns and determiners 38

4.5 Forms of verbs 39

4.6 Forms of adjectives 40

4.7 Conclusion and summary 42

Exercises 42

Recommendations for reading 43

5 A word and its relatives: derivation 44

5.1 Relationships between lexemes 44

5.2 Word classes and conversion 45

5.3 Adverbs derived from adjectives 48

5.4 Nouns derived from nouns 49

5.5 Nouns derived from members of other word classes 50

5.6 Adjectives derived from adjectives 52

5.7 Adjectives derived from members of other word classes 53

5.8 Verbs derived from verbs 54

5.9 Verbs derived from member of other word classes 55

5.10 Conclusion: generality and idiosyncrasy 56

Exercises 57

Recommendations for reading 58

6 Compound words, blends and phrasal words 59

6.1 Compounds versus phrases 59

6.2 Compound verbs 60

6.3 Compound adjectives 61

6.4 Compound nouns 61

6.5 Headed and headless compounds 64

6.6 Blends and acronyms 65

6.7 Compounds containing bound combining forms 66

6.8 Phrasal words 67

6.9 Conclusion 68

Exercises 68

Recommendations for reading 69

7 A word and its structure 71

7.1 Meaning and structure 71

7.2 Affixes as heads 71

7.3 More elaborate word forms: multiple affixation 72

7.4 More elaborate word forms: compounds within

compounds 76

7.5 Apparent mismatches between meaning and structure 79

7.6 Conclusion: structure as guide but not straitjacket 82

Exercises 83

Recommendations for reading 84

viAN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY

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8 Productivity 85

8.1 Introduction: kinds of productivity 85

8.2 Productivity in shape: formal generality and regularity 85

8.3 Productivity in meaning: semantic regularity 88

8.4 Semantic blocking 91

8.5 Productivity in compounding 93

8.6 Measuring productivity: the significance of neologisms 95

8.7 Conclusion: 'productivity" in syntax 97

Exercises 98

Recommendations for reading 99

9 The historical sources of English word formation 100

9.1 Introduction 100

9.2 Germanic, Romance and Greek vocabulary 100

9.3 The rarity of borrowed inflectional morphology 102

9.4 The reduction in inflectional morphology 104

9.5 Characteristics of Germanic and non-Germanic

derivation 106

9.6 Fashions in morphology 108

9.7 Conclusion: history and structure 110

Exercises 111

Recommendations for reading 113

10 Conclusion: words in English and in languages generally 114

10.1 A puzzle: disentangling lexemes, word forms and

lexical items 114

10.2 Lexemes and lexical items: possible reasons for their

overlap in English 115

10.3 Lexemes and lexical items: the situation outside

English 116

10.4 Lexemes and word forms: the situation outside

English 118

Recommendations for reading 119

Discussion of the exercises120

Glossary141

References148

Index150

CONTENTSvii

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Heinz Giegerich for inviting me to write this book, and him and Laurie Bauer for useful comments on a draft version. I must admit that, when I set out to write what is intended as an introductory text on an extremely well-described language, I did not expect to learn anything new myself; but I have enjoyed discovering and rediscovering both new and old questions that arise from the study of morphology and its interaction with syntax and the lexicon, even if I cannot claim to have provided any conclusive new answers. The Library of the University of Canterbury has, as always, been efficient in supplying research material. I would also like to thank my partner Jeremy Carstairs-McCarthy for constant support and help. viii

1Introduction

The term 'word" is part of everyone"s vocabulary. We all think we understand what words are. What"s more, we are right to think this, at some level. In this book I will not suggest that our ordinary notion of the word needs to be replaced with something radically different. Rather, I want to show how our ordinary notion can be made more precise. This will involve teasing apart the bundle of ingredients that go to make up the notion, showing how these ingredients interact, and introducing ways of talking about each one separately. After reading this book, you will still go on using the term 'word" in talking about language, both in everyday conversation and in more formal contexts, such as literary criticism or English language study; but I hope that, in these more formal contexts, you will talk about words more confidently, knowing exactly which ingredients of the notion you have in mind at any one time, and able where necessary to use appropriate terminology in order to make your meaning absolutely clear. This is a textbook for students of the English language or of English literature, not primarily for students of linguistics. Nevertheless, what I say will be consistent with mainstream linguistic views on word- structure, so any readers who go on to more advanced linguistics will not encounter too many inconsistencies. A good way of teasing apart the ingredients in the notion 'word" is by explicitly contrasting them. Here are the contrasts that we will be looking at, and the chapters where they will be discussed: • words as units of meaningversusunits of sentence structure(Chapters 2, 6, 7) • words as pronounceableentities ('word forms") versus more abstract entities (sets of word forms) (Chapters 3, 4, 5) •inflectionally relatedword forms (forms ofthe same'word") versus deriva- tionally relatedwords (different'words" with a shared base) (Chapters 4, 5) 1

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• the distinction between compound wordsandphrases(Chapters 6, 7) • the relationship between the internal structureof a word and its mean- ing(Chapter 7) •productiveversusunproductiveword-forming processes (Chapter 8) • historical reasons for some of the contemporary divisions within English morphology, especially GermanicversusRomanceword- formation processes (Chapter 9). These various contrasts impact on one another in various ways. For example, if one takes the view that the distinction between compound words and phrases is unimportant, or is even perhaps a bogus distinction fundamentally, this will have a considerable effect on how one views the word as a unit of sentence-structure. Linguistic scholars who specialise in the study of words (so-called 'morphologists") devote considerable effort to working out the implications of different ways of formulating these distinctions, as they strive to discover the best way (that is, the most illuminating way, or the way that seems to accord most accurately with people"s implicit knowledge of their native languages). We will not be exploring the technical ramifications of these efforts in this book. Never- theless, I will need to ensure that the way I draw the distinctions here yields a coherent overall picture, and some cross-referencing between chapters will be necessary for that. Each of Chapters 2 to 9 inclusive is provided with exercises. This is designed to make the book suitable for a course extending over about tenquotesdbs_dbs50.pdfusesText_50

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