The Function of Word-Formation
The Function of Word-Formation
In
Henk Aertsen, Mike Hannay & Rod Lyall (eds), Words in their Places. A Festschrift
for J. Lachlan Mackenzie. Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit. 2004, 283-292.
Lachlan has always been interested in the function of language, or the function of
constructions. In the context of a Festschrift for Lachlan, we might ask what the
function of word-formation is. The answer is easily available to us in the
literature (since this is far from the first time the question has been asked),
although the terminology may be rather variable: word-formation has two
functions, firstly a function of lexical enrichment, whereby new words are coined
to denote new, or newly salient, concepts, and secondly a transpositional
function, whereby lexemes (which we assume to have a fixed word-class) are
permitted to appear in a new word class so that the same meaning can be
transferred to a new function in a sentence.
Having answered that question, at least for the moment, we can go back
and ask a different question, though one which has worried linguists for some
time: what is the difference between inflectional morphology and derivational
morphology? Again this is not the first time the question has been asked, and
answers (plural) are easily available to us in the literature. For one thoroughly
exhaustive treatment, see Plank (1994). Plank allows us to deduce that the
categories of inflection and derivation are prototypical categories, from which
the categories of individual languages such as English and Dutch may differ
quite considerably. Such a view is also held by Dressler (1989) and by Bauer
1
I should like to thank Geert Booij for comments on an earlier version of this
paper. He is not to blame for the content, of course.
1
(1988). Other authorities give us rather more clear-cut answers. One such answer,
which has been extremely influential, is that given by Anderson (1982: 587):
‘inflectional morphology is what is relevant to the syntax’.
Fortunately, we are saved from heresy at this point by the fact that two
scholars have already gone before to show the path. Booij (1996) argues that
inflection is not monolithic, but that it divides into two distinct classes. The first
of these classes is contextual inflection, inflection which is determined by
concord and government within the sentence. Thus contextual inflection includes
adjectival agreement with nouns in Romance languages for number and gender,
verbs agreeing with their subjects or objects in number, person, gender/noun
class in a wide range of languages, and subjunctive marking where it is
demanded by a matrix clause (as in French Il faut que j’aille à Paris ‘I have to go to
Paris’ where the subjunctive form of go is demanded by the construction il faut
que ‘it is necessary that’), though not where it is a free choice in a main clause (as
in English God save the Queen!). The second of these classes, Booij calls inherent
inflection. Inherent inflection is syntactically relevant but not constrained by the
sentence structure. Plurality on nouns and tense on verbs are two of Booij’s
examples. Whether a subject noun is plural or singular may well have an effect
on the form of the verb, but is determined not by the sentence structure but by
the choice of the speaker (corresponding to the real-world situation to be
described). This division is a useful, but it has the disadvantage that the same
formal category may sometimes be inherent inflection and sometimes contextual
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inflection. For instance, the uses of the subjunctive mentioned above may be
different, and the comparative in (1) seems to be contextual inflection (unless its
presence is demanded by the semantics of the construction rather than by any
agreement), while the same form in (2) appears to be a case of inherent inflection.
The answer to the formal side of this problem was given in Bauer (1983: 79),
though the complete evidence was not available until Bauer (2001). That answer
is, in a word, lexicalisation. Nominalisations persist in a natural language like
English long after their coining (or long after they were borrowed, if that is the
relevant means of introduction of the new word into English). We are rarely in
the position of having to coin a nominalisation for a verb which we have not
inherited, ready-made, as part of our language’s norm. We use the established
nominalisation, whether or not that nominalisation could be produced in the
current state of the language system. When it comes to those few instances where
we are genuinely called upon to create a new nominalisation, we have two
possibilities: avoid the issue or create a new one. If the verb for which we wish to
create a new nominalisation uses the suffixes -ate, -ise or -ify, there is no choice of
nominalisation process. We must add -ion, -ation, -cation respectively. This is
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important because these are the only affixes with which new verbs can be created
in current English (Plag 1999). This leaves us (a) with instances of new verbs
created by conversion and (b) with established verbs which have no established
nominalisation. It seems that we are adept at avoiding this issue. My favourite
example of continued avoidance is the case of the verb ignore. We would expect
to have a nominalisation for this verb, yet ignorance has become so specialised in
meaning that it is no longer obviously related to ignore. The Oxford English
Dictionary provides ignoration with the required meaning, but speakers do not
use it, and tend to find it impossible when it is suggested. Rejection of this form
could be because it does not fit with the productive patterns available to speakers
of current English. In other words, pace Chomsky, the creation of new
nominalisations to allow new verbs to be used as nouns is perfectly regular.
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gloss as ‘noun from verb’. The grammatically important feature is thus the
transposition, not that part of the meaning which might appear variable.
This leaves us with that part of what has traditionally been called
‘derivation’ whose function is to expand the lexicon by modifying the meaning
of existing lexemes. Here we find such well-known instances as gender-marking
morphology (German Entericht ‘drake’ from Ente ‘duck’; English princess from
prince), morphology which marks agents, patients, instruments, locations (cf
2
The term ‘transposition’ is used more narrowly by Marchand (1969); this use
follows Haspelmath (1996).
5
English killer, interviewee, blender, diner, respectively), modal-marking on
adjectives (cf. eatable, payable), negation and reversative marking (cf. unequal,
inequality, undo, dethrone), as well as subtler meanings such as that shown by
-esque cited above.
Are there any other categories which we might want to distinguish on the
inflection-derivation cline? There may well be, and my provisional classification
here is not meant to exclude extra suggestions. There are two cases which may
have to be given particular consideration.
The first of these is the case of evaluative morphology, typified by the use
of augmentatives and diminutives. There are many ways in which diminutive
morphology, in particular, has been shown not to be typical of inflection nor of
derivation. For example, evaluative affixes are often transparent to the word-
class and/or gender of the base (see Scalise 1984: 131). Diminutives in many
languages are more productive than is typical of derivational morphology, yet
with a proliferation of possible markers which is otherwise more expected in
derivational morphology.
If the suggestions above are accepted, we might wish to say we are dealing
with not two classes of morphology (inflectional versus derivational) but six:
contextual, inherent, valency-changing, transpositional, evaluative, lexicon-
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expanding. Many of the criteria that have been traditionally taken to distinguish
inflection from derivation can be shown to be divided among these six
categories.
(a) Only contextual inflection is syntactic in the sense that it shows agreement
between various parts of syntactic structures or is introduced by
government.
(b) Both contextual and inherent inflection maintain the same lexeme (I make
the assumption here that no noun and verb can ever belong to the same
lexeme since they enter into different paradigms, and a fortiori that no
intransitive and transitive verb can belong to the same lexeme, since each
must be capable of entering into its own paradigm, and the two need not
match). The other types create new lexemes. Alternatively, in many
languages we can view this break as distinguishing those forms which
may appear within compounds or word-formation from those which must
be part of the syntax. The morphology which cannot occur word-internally
is precisely the inflectional morphology. Note that English is rather
insecure with regard to this particular point, since it does allow plurals
inside words, at least marginally on some analyses: admissions policy, teeth-
ridge, etc.
(d) The first four types share some grammatical function, while the last two
have a function which is more lexical in nature: categories such as
augmentative add new lexemes whose function is not determined by
grammatical needs, as do those categories which appear in the lexicon-
expanding set.
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(e) The last type is much less automatic than the other types. If there is no
instrument in English called a retriever, it is not a matter of morphology
that the slot is vacant, it is a matter of societal needs. For the other
categories considered, it tends to be grammatically driven whether or not
particular transpositional classes exist or not. Where they exist, we expect
to find some form available in most slots, or some way of creating words
to fit the slots in a regular manner (though, of course, it may not be
predictable over the established vocabulary precisely what form will fit in
any given slot). In the lexicon-expanding set, while there may be some
well-established slots with regular exponence, it is frequently not true that
the number of slots is predetermined. Thus English has experimented over
the last half-century or so (with greater or lesser success) with slots which
can be filled by words in -nik, -(n)omics, -(t)eria and so on. This difference
can be summarised by saying that the lexical-expansion type of
morphology is less paradigmatic than other types.
The creation of a new set of categories where there have previously been
only two or three inevitably brings problems with it. There are two obvious
problems with the suggestion made here: (1) it creates more borderlines, and
thus more borderline disputes; (2) it splits the outputs of more morphological
processes into different categories. The first of these problems is something that
has to be tested on real data: if the benefits of the categorisation outweigh the
borderline disputes, then the categorisation will have a value; otherwise it will be
discarded.
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that we should consider adopting a separationist view of morphology, following
Beard and others (see e.g. Beard 1994), or it suggests that we need to be much
stricter in distinguishing between productive and non-productive uses of
morphology. For example, we may take it, following Aronoff’s work, that -ity is
still used productively on certain bases to derive abstract nouns which we might
gloss, in Marchandian fashion as ‘state, quality, condition of —’, but once we
start talking about an atrocity, the muzzle velocity of a bullet, uttering profanities
and minor divinities we are no longer seeing productive uses of -ity affixation as
a morphological process, but the historical process of semantic change. It is not
entirely clear to me to what extent we can solve problems of this kind by
restricting our analysis to what happens in productive morphology, but I am
convinced that it will at least reduce the apparent size of the problem, if not
remove it entirely.
It is of some interest to consider other criteria that are standardly given for
distinguishing inflection from derivation, to see how they fare against this six-
way division. Such criteria include regularity of meaning, productivity,
obligatoriness, the relative size of the sets of affixes concerned and affix ordering
(see e.g. Bauer 1988, Dressler 1989).
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specific meanings than could be deduced from their form, and we could
argue that the specialisation of duckling, gosling, spiderling to mean ‘young
of the species’, while princeling focuses on negative connotations and
darling on positive ones are all indications of lexicalisation. (See also Bauer
1997: 551.) As was mentioned earlier, English tends not to have valency-
changing morphology, but in Diyari we find examples such as the
transitive form of a verb meaning ‘die’, palima-, can only take the noun
meaning ‘fire’ as its object and is specialised in the sense of ‘extinguish (a
fire)’ (Austin 1981: 160). Semantic lexicalisation (or idiomatisation) can also
affect inherent inflection. Beard (1982) cites examples of semantically
irregular plural forms such as feelings, greens, heavens, looks, waters.
Contextual inflection does not appear to lexicalise. If we look at semantic
regularity in terms of its inverse, lexicalisation, then it appears that, to a
large extent, the further left we are on the scale in Table 1, the less
lexicalisation there is likely to be. Evaluative morphology may be less
subject to lexicalisation that transpositional morphology, but we do not
have statistical information to support such a claim at the moment.
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different kinds of morphology in different ways. Turner (1973: 181)
comments on the nominal style of English scientific writing, and students
in translating to and from French are often taught to use a more verbal
style in French (see Ritchie 1963: 73 for a hint of such matters). If it is the
case that different styles or different language use more nominals than
others, there may be greater use of and greater regularity in
nominalisation markers in the one than in the other. This remains to be
proved, but seems a reasonable hypothesis.
(d) Relative sizes of affix sets. Doubt is cast on this potential criterion in Bauer
(1988), and without a serious attempt to count the comparable sets in a
number of languages nothing can be concluded here.
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(5) French: mang·er·ons ‘we shall eat’ (eat·FUT·1PL)
Having said that, it must also be admitted that, even ignoring the cases
where evaluative morphology is apparently ordered in strange positions, it is
relatively easy to find apparent counterexamples, like that in (8) where valency-
changing and transpositional morphology come in the wrong order. Clearly
some kind of statistical survey would be needed to see what the preferred order
for these suggested categories is cross-linguistically.
Even with the extended schema suggested here, the position of evaluative
morphology may not be completely secure. Nevertheless, it is of interest that the
other types do seem to provide some support for the ordering that is laid out in
Table 1.
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Whether the solution has lasting value or not, the general principle ought to be
one of which Lachlan would approve.
References
Beard, Robert 1982. The plural as lexical derivation. Glossa 16: 133-148.
Booij, Geert 1996. Inherent versus contextual inflection and the split morphology
hypothesis. In Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds), Yearbook of Morphology
1995, Dordrecht, etc.: Kluwer, 1-16.
13
Bybee, Joan L. 1985. Morphology. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Krishnamurti, Bh. & J.P.L. Gwynn 1985. A Grammar of Modern Telugu. Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Marchand, Hans 1969. The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-
Formation. Second edition. Munich: Beck.
Plag, Ingo 1999. Morphological Productivity. Berlin and New York: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Plank, F. 1994. Inflection and derivation. In R.E. Asher (ed.), The Encyclopedia of
Language and Linguistics, Oxford, etc.: Pergamon, vol. 3, 1671-1678.
14
Table 1: A representation of the differences between the 6 suggested categories
Agreement No agreement
Class-maintaining Class-changing
Grammatical Lexical
Paradigmatic Non-paradigmatic
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