Complex Words in English

Valerie Adams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317891550
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Complex Words in English presents a comprehensive account of present-day word formation in English. Starting with a discussion of some basic issues, including the definition of 'word', motivation, lexicalization, productivity, the relevance of historical information and the usefulness of dictionaries and other data-bases, the book then moves on to describe in detail a variety of prefixing, suffixing and compounding patterns - all illustrated with copious up-to-date examples. Other topics that are explored in-depth include diminutives, backformation and other effects of reanalysis, Latin and Greek based formations and sound symbolism.

Many examples are given in context: recent writing and the records of OED on CD ROM are drawn on to demonstrate the relationship between spontaneous coinages and familiar items. The comprehensive coverage allows an instructive overview and comparison of patterns and of the many and diverse factors relevant to the notion of productivity. Throughout, the discussions are placed in the context of other recent and less recent work in the area and the book also contains a useful extensive bibliography.

1

Preliminaries

1.1 Word formation

The term word formation can be understood in several ways. Word can mean ‘word-form’, a unit defined in writing by preceding and following spaces, and in speech – sometimes – by phonological clues. In this sense, wolf and wolves, ride, rides and rode are five different words. Word can mean ‘grammatical word’: just as singular wolf and plural wolves or past tense rode and past participle ridden are different grammatical words, so are singular and plural sheep, and past tense walked and past participle walked. And thirdly, word can mean ‘lexeme’, the unit of vocabulary which subsumes grammatical variants and is their representative in dictionaries – the nouns wolf and sheep, the verbs ride and walk. When its first element has all three of these senses, word formation is a synonym of morphology, the study of the structure of words.

In this book, word formation will be less inclusive: it will mean lexeme formation: we shall be interested, not in series of forms like those just mentioned, which exhibit inflectional distinctions, but rather, for example, in the possibility of a verb to wolf, related in some sense to the noun, or a noun rider, related to the verb. But here we encounter another uncertainty of meaning. Formation, like many nominalized words – nouns based on a lexeme of another class (in this case the verb to form) – can mean ‘the act of giving or assuming form’, as in the formation of new words was easy for James Joyce: we can understand word formation as ‘how people form new words’. In another context, a formation can be a fait accompli, the result of an act of forming. Both these senses are relevant here, since our expectations about new words are necessarily founded on those we have already encountered. Word (lexeme) formation in this book is necessarily as much concerned with the relationships of form and meaning which connect known lexemes to one another as with the ways in which speakers make new lexemes out of old ones. We begin with a closer look at the word as lexeme.

1.2 Lexemes

1.2.1 Complex words

Words like derail, preshrink, post-war, jumpy, censorable, sexist are all complex: more than one component is recognizable in them. Each word contains an affix, a ‘bound’ element which as a rule never occurs on its own. Initial bound elements like de-, pre-, post- are prefixes, attached to the bases rail, shrink, war. The bound elements -y, -able, -ist, following their bases jump, censor, sex are suffixes. Suffixes are generally not semantically autonomous, having no meanings of their own which are independent of the meanings of the bases they attach to and those of the words in which they appear. The few exceptions to this include suffixes like adjective-forming -ful, -like and -less, which retain some resemblance to the free elements from which they have developed. Prefixes on the other hand, many of which are related to adverbs or prepositions, typically do have distinct meanings.

Affixes attach to bases, which are identifiable with members of the major word classes, noun, adjective and verb. Bases may be free elements, able to occur on their own, or they may be bound forms with no independent existence, as in words like dental, holism, amorphous, whose bases have meanings like those of English words – ‘tooth’, ‘whole’, ‘form’. Bound bases will be referred to as stems. Bases, both words and stems, may combine to form compounds: credit card, oviraptor, pesticide. Particles, free elements with spatial meanings like over, out, up, also figure in compounds: overhang, outcrop, upshift. Unlike other words, and unlike affixes, particles never combine with stems.

Derivation comprises prefixation, suffixation and the processes by which verbs like to wolf and to tense and nouns like guide are formed. These words are based on – derived from – their noun, adjective and verb bases respectively, and we can extend the description ‘complex word’ to them too. Derivation and compounding account for the great majority of word-formational patterns. This brief naming of parts, however, does not exhaust the possibilities: in later chapters we encounter formative elements which cannot be identified as words, stems or affixes, and even words which it makes sense to see as derived from more complex ones.

1.2.2 Lexemes and phrases

Complex words, it is generally agreed, are unlike phrases in that their constituents cannot be interrupted or rearranged, though in fact prefixes and compound elements can sometimes be coordinated, as in ‘pro- and anti-hunting factions’, ‘clusters of water-, rodent- and mosquito-borne infections’. Some types of phrasal collocation exhibit degrees of word-like fixedness. ‘Binomials’, for example – sequences of two words, usually nouns or adjectives, linked usually by a conjunction – may be more or less fixed. Fun and games, wild and woolly, are not reversible; gold and silver, knife and fork are, though this order is the preferred one; tables and chairs is as likely to occur as chairs and tables. Complex prepositions like by dint of, in process of, at the request of, exhibit different degrees of fixedness. Dint appears only in this idiom, process has lost its determiner, but the request can be augmented by a premodifier like any other noun phrase: at the urgent request of, and an alternative wording at someone’s request is possible. Sequences of verb + noun + preposition like give rise to, take advantage of, vary in their fixity: rise cannot be premodified but advantage can, as in *rise was given to …, advantage was taken of.… Though phrases like these may in time come to be seen as words – nouns, prepositions and verbs – the difference between them and complex words as defined in the previous section is clear.

Any phrase, retaining its phrasal character, can function as a modifier within a larger phrase, as in ‘a ground-to-air missile’, ‘easy-to-read stories’, ‘an I-knew-it-all-along expression’. Some suffixes, like -ism, -ish, -ness, -y, can readily attach to phrases, e.g. not-in-my-backyardism, morning-afterish, what-have-we-got-to-loseness, milk-and-watery. We might say that these hyphenated strings behave like words in these contexts, but not that they are complex words. According to the no-phrase constraint (see e.g. Carstairs-McCarthy 1992, 99f), complex words are not formed from phrases.

The distinction between phrase and complex word, however, is not always so clear. The head in syntax is the central constituent of a phrase which comes closest to characterizing the phrase as a whole. Criteria of different kinds may conflict in particular cases and the head status of items may be debatable (see especially Hudson 1987). In general, though, the head of a construction is normally obligatory, other elements assume forms which match it, it is the element on which any inflections appear, and it refers to the same kind of entity as the whole construction. If the notion of head is extended to words it has to be modified, since some kinds of element only occur in words. However, it is useful to invoke it when we inspect the borderland inhabited by word-like phrases and phrase-like words. According to the right-hand head rule (Williams 1981), we should expect the head of a word to be on the right. Any expression which we can see as not right-headed will be distinctive or untypical in some way, or will have the character of a phrase. In coordinative expressions for example, such as shed-cum-greenhouse, poacher-turned-gamekeeper, ‘doctor-patient relationship’, ‘public-private partnership’, ‘sweet-and-sour pork’, neither element is dominant: these are phrases, not complex words.

With the phrasal verb to change over, the criteria for syntactic head are decisive: ‘changing over’ is a kind of ‘changing’, and the left-hand element, the verb, is the head. In the related nominal expression change-over, the particle has one claim to headhood in that, being on the right, it necessarily carries any inflection: we can treat such nouns as complex words, though of an untypical kind. Similar expressions whose first elements are suffixed nouns, like runner up and telling off, are more obviously intermediate between phrase and word: phrase-like in that plural s can regularly intervene between the two elements, attaching to the verbal head, but word-like in that nothing else can. Occasional coinages like those illustrated in ‘Nancy was … an habitual tidier-upper’ (OED: 1976), ‘But Dunham was more than a washer-upper’ (OED: 1961) are evidence of attempts to make such hybrids more word-like. Participial adjectives like ‘boarded-up shops’, ‘wired-in connections’ are similarly both word- and phrase-like. Nominal examples like those in With a dart up and a scurry off, the rabbit disappeared in the brush’ (example from Bolinger 1961, 309) denote an instance of the verb’s action: the accentuation on the particle, usual in verb + particle collocations, underlines their partly phrase-like character.

Crystallize, squeaky, supportive have suffixes which indicate their word-class membership. The base of balloonist is an inanimate noun, but its suffix shows that the referent of the complex word is the name of an individual. The suffix of hermithood identifies the word as a non-count noun with a ‘state’ meaning. Suffixes, then, characterizing the words in which they occur, are plausible heads.¹ By contrast, in prefixed verbs like disconnect, recirculate or adjectives like non-catholic the nature of the word is indicated by the base, which thus qualifies as the head. But prefixes sometimes have an effect on their bases. Outswim, for example, illustrates the prefixing of an intransitive verb to make it transitive, though swim retains its characteristic way of forming the past tense (Mary outswam John on sports day), and we can still see the base as the head. Prefixing the noun night has a greater effect, making it into a verb: ‘I would outnight you did nobody come’ (Merchant of Venice, V. i). In this case we might say that prefixation and noun-to-verb derivation apply in tandem. Similarly, in decaffeinate and anti-bacterial, prefix and suffix operate together to derive a verb and an adjective from the nouns caffeine and bacteria. Cases like these are often referred to as parasynthetic formations.

We can take prepositional phrases to be left-headed: the preposition is the head. The attributive expressions in ‘on-line editing’ and ‘off-screen voice’ are phrases, but those in ‘inter-city train’ and ‘trans-world airline’, containing preposition-like prefixes meaning ‘between’ and ‘across’ respectively, are complex words. Like anti-bacterial, inter-city and trans-world are parasynthetic rather than left-headed, since the prefixing and attributive function of city and world go together. There is good reason to see determiners as heads of noun phrases (Hudson 1987, Abney 1987); the italicized parts of ‘no-phrase constraint’ ‘no-claim bonus’, ‘no-win situation’ are phrases, but the comparable prefixed expressions in ‘non-slip surface’, ‘anti-freeze liquid’, are complex words. Again, prefixation and attributive function combine in these examples to make parasynthetic formations.

In endocentric expressions, a central element is functionally equivalent to the whole. The phrase to change over is endocentric, as are most compound words, in which the element on the right, the head, is of the same kind as the word as a whole. A dustbin is a kind of bin, and energy-efficient specifies a way of being efficient. The term exocentric describes expressions in which no part seems to be of the same kind as the whole or to be central to it. The noun change-over is exocentric, and so are ‘verb–complement’ noun compounds like stop-gap, along with adjective + noun and noun + noun compounds like air-head, paperback, lowlife. These compounds, a rather small group in modern English, do not denote the same kind of entity as their final elements and are thus not clearly right-headed. The fact that the plural form of a compound like lowlife is lowlifes, not lowlives can be taken to indicate that life is not the head. Either lowlife is perceived as a simple word, or it is a ‘headless’ compound. Alternatively, life in this compound is simply a homonym of the independent noun life, and forms its plural differently.

Finally, adjective + noun collocations like wild animal, which are clearly endocentric and right-headed, pose problems of delimitation between phrase and compound word. The modifier in busy road is a phrase in its own right and can be expanded: extremely busy road. Wild animal can be interrupted in limited ways: wild and tame animals, unlike hardwood. The usual sense of cold is not discernible in cold war. We may want to call all but the first of these ‘compounds’, and reflect that some compounds at least result from the same process of idiomatization that we see in collocations like in (the) process of.

1.2.3 Lexemes and word-forms

The various forms which lexemes assume in different syntactic surroundings – boat and boats, big and bigger, look, looks, looking and looked – are marked by inflectional affixes. Inflections are dependable in their effects and specifiable by syntactic rule. Derivational affixes by contrast can be unpredictable in form and have unpredictable effects on bases. Unstable contrasts with instability, and inflatable with convertible. Pigs are kept in a piggery but a robbery is an event or the result of an event. We may choose to use an affix as in replay, or not, as in play again.

There are many expressions which make the distinction between derivation and inflection, lexeme and word-form, look hazy. Derivational suffixes som...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Preliminaries
• 2 Transposition
• 3 Prefixes
• 4 Suffixes
• 5 Particles
• 6 Noun compounds
• 7 Adjective compounds
• 8 Verb compounds
• 9 Stem formations
• 10 Phonaesthemes
• 11 Reanalysis
• 12 Overview
• References
• General index
• Index of word-elements