Word-formation in English

i

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction .......................................................................................................... 1
1. Basic concepts
1.1. What is a word?

4
4

1.2. Studying word-formation

12

1.3. Inflection and derivation

18

1.4. Summary

23

Further reading

23

Exercises

24

2. Studying complex words
2.1. Identifying morphemes
2.1.1. The morpheme as the minimal linguistic sign

25
25
25

2.1.2. Problems with the morpheme: the mapping of
form and meaning
2.2. Allomorphy

33

2.3. Establishing word-formation rules

38

2.4. Multiple affixation

50

2.5. Summary

53

Further reading

54

Exercises

55

3. Productivity and the mental lexicon

1

27

551

3.1. Introduction: What is productivity?

551

3.2. Possible and actual words

561

3.3. Complex words in the lexicon

59

3.4. Measuring productivity

64

Pages 55-57 appear twice due to software-induced layout-alterations that occur when the word for

windows files are converted into PDF.

ii
3.5. Constraining productivity

73

3.5.1. Pragmatic restrictions

74

3.5.2. Structural restrictions

75

3.5.3. Blocking

79

3.6. Summary

84

Further reading

85

Exercises

85

4. Affixation

90

4.1. What is an affix?

90

4.2. How to investigate affixes: More on methodology

93

4.3. General properties of English affixation

98

4.4. Suffixes

109

4.4.1. Nominal suffixes

109

4.4.2. Verbal suffixes

116

4.4.3. Adjectival suffixes

118

4.4.4. Adverbial suffixes

123

4.5. Prefixes

123

4.6. Infixation

127

4.7. Summary

130

Further reading

131

Exercises

131

5. Derivation without affixation

134

5.1. Conversion

134

5.1.1. The directionality of conversion

135

5.1.2. Conversion or zero-affixation?

140

5.1.3. Conversion: Syntactic or morphological?

143

5.2. Prosodic morphology

145

5.2.1. Truncations: Truncated names,
-y diminutives and clippings
5.2.2. Blends

146
150

iii
5.3. Abbreviations and acronyms

160

5.4. Summary

165

Further reading

165

Exercises

166

6. Compounding

169

6.1. Recognizing compounds
6.1.1. What are compounds made of?

169
169

6.1.2. More on the structure of compounds:
the notion of head

173

6.1.3. Stress in compounds

175

6.1.4. Summary

181

6.2. An inventory of compounding patterns

181

6.3. Nominal compounds

185

6.3.1 Headedness

185

6.3.2. Interpreting nominal compounds

189

6.4. Adjectival compounds

194

6.5. Verbal compounds

197

6.6. Neo-classical compounds

198

6.7. Compounding: syntax or morphology?

203

6.8. Summary

207

Further reading

208

Exercises

209

7. Theoretical issues: modeling word-formation

211

7.1. Introduction: Why theory?

211

7.2. The phonology-morphology interaction: lexical phonology

212

7.2.1. An outline of the theory of lexical phonology

212

7.2.2. Basic insights of lexical phonology

217

7.2.3. Problems with lexical phonology

219

7.2.4. Alternative theories

222

7.3. The nature of word-formation rules

229

iv
7.3.1. The problem: word-based versus morpheme-based
morphology

230

7.3.2. Morpheme-based morphology

231

7.3.3. Word-based morphology

236

7.3.4. Synthesis

243

Further reading

244

Exercises
References

246

v

ABBREVIATIONS AND NOTATIONAL CONVENTIONS

A

adjective

AP

adjectival phrase

Adv

adverb

C

consonant

I

pragmatic potentiality

LCS

lexical conceptual structure

n1

hapax legomenon

N

noun

N

number of observations

NP

noun phrase

OT

Optimality Theory

P

productivity in the narrow sense

P*

global productivity

PP

prepositional phrase

PrWd

prosodic word

SPE

Chomsky and Halle 1968, see references

UBH

unitary base hypothesis

UOH

unitary output hypothesis

V

verb

V

vowel

VP

verb phrase

V

extent of use

WFR

word formation rule

#

word boundary

.

syllable boundary

|

in the context of

vi
< >

orthographic representation

/

/

phonological (i.e. underlying) representation

[

]

phonetic representation

*

impossible word

!

possible, but unattested word

1

Introduction:
What this book is about and how it can be used
The existence of words is usually taken for granted by the speakers of a language. To
speak and understand a language means - among many other things - knowing the
words of that language. The average speaker knows thousands of words, and new
words enter our minds and our language on a daily basis. This book is about words.
More specifically, it deals with the internal structure of complex words, i.e. words
that are composed of more than one meaningful element. Take, for example, the very
word meaningful, which could be argued to consist of two elements, meaning and -ful,

or even three,

mean, -ing, and -ful. We will address the question of how such words

are related to other words and how the language allows speakers to create new
words. For example,

meaningful

seems to be clearly related to colorful, but perhaps

less so to awful or plentiful. And, given that meaningful may be paraphrased as 'having
(a definite) meaning', and

colorful

as 'having (bright or many different) colors', we

could ask whether it is also possible to create the word

coffeeful, meaning 'having

coffee'. Under the assumption that language is a rule-governed system, it should be
possible to find meaningful answers to such questions.
This area of study is traditionally referred to as word-formation
present book is mainly concerned with word-formation in one particular language,
English. As a textbook for an undergraduate readership it presupposes very little or

no prior knowledge of linguistics and introduces and explains linguistic
terminology and theoretical apparatus as we go along.
The purpose of the book is to enable the students to engage in (and enjoy!)
their own analyses of English (or other languages') complex words. After having
worked with the book, the reader should be familiar with the necessary and most
recent methodological tools to obtain relevant data (introspection, electronic text
collections, various types of dictionaries, basic psycholinguistic experiments,
internet resources), should be able to systematically analyze their data and to relate
their findings to theoretical problems and debates. The book is not written in the

and the

2
perspective of a particular theoretical framework and draws on insights from various

research traditions.
Word-formation in English

can be used as a textbook for a course on word-

formation (or the word-formation parts of morphology courses), as a source-book for
teachers, for student research projects, as a book for self-study by more advanced
students (e.g. for their exam preparation), and as an up-to-date reference concerning

selected word-formation processes in English for a more general readership.
For each chapter there are a number of basic and more advanced exercises,
which are suitable for in-class work or as students' homework. The more advanced
exercises include proper research tasks, which also give the students the opportunity

to use the different methodological tools introduced in the text. Students can control
their learning success by comparing their results with the answer key provided at
the end of the book. The answer key features two kinds of answers. Basic exercises
always receive definite answers, while for the more advanced tasks sometimes no
'correct' answers are given. Instead, methodological problems and possible lines of
analysis are discussed. Each chapter is also followed by a list of recommended
further readings.
Those who consult the book as a general reference on English word-formation

may check author, subject and affix indices and the bibliography in order to quickly
find what they need. Chapter 3 introduces most recent developments in research
methodology, and short descriptions of individual affixes are located in chapter 4
As every reader knows, English is spoken by hundreds of millions speakers
and there exist numerous varieties of English around the world. The variety that has
been taken as a reference for this book is General American English. The reason for
this choice is purely practical, it is the variety the author knows best. With regard to
most of the phenomena discussed in this book, different varieties of English pattern
very much alike. However, especially concerning aspects of pronunciation there are
sometimes remarkable, though perhaps minor, differences observable between
different varieties. Mostly for reasons of space, but also due to the lack of pertinent
studies, these differences will not be discussed here. However, I hope that the book
will enable the readers to adapt and relate the findings presented with reference to
American English to the variety of English they are most familiar with.

3
The structure of the book is as follows. Chapters 1 through 3 introduce the
basic notions needed for the study and description of word-internal structure
(chapter 1), the problems that arise with the implementation of the said notions in the

actual analysis of complex words in English (chapter 2), and one of the central
problems in word-formation, productivity (chapter 3). The descriptively oriented
chapters 4 through 6 deal with the different kinds of word-formation processes that
can be found in English: chapter 4 discusses affixation, chapter 5 non-affixational

processes, chapter 6 compounding. Chapter 7 is devoted to two theoretical issues,
the role of phonology in word-formation, and the nature of word-formation rules.
The author welcomes comments and feedback on all aspects of this book,
especially from students. Without students telling their teachers what is good for
them (i.e. for the students), teaching cannot become as effective and enjoyable as it
should be for for both teachers and teachees (oops, was that a possible word of
English?).

Chapter 1: Basic Concepts

1.

4

BASIC CONCEPTS

Outline

This chapter introduces basic concepts needed for the study and description of morphologically
complex words. Since this is a book about the particular branch of morphology called wordformation, we will first take a look at the notion of 'word'. We will then turn to a first analysis of

the kinds of phenomena that fall into the domain of word-formation, before we finally discuss
how word-formation can be distinguished from the other sub-branch of morphology, inflection.

1. What is a word?

It has been estimated that average speakers of a language know from 45,000 to 60,000

words. This means that we as speakers must have stored these words somewhere in
our heads, our so-called mental lexicon. But what exactly is it that we have stored?
What do we mean when we speak of 'words'?
In non-technical every-day talk, we speak about 'words' without ever thinking

that this could be a problematic notion. In this section we will see that, perhaps
contra our first intuitive feeling, the 'word' as a linguistic unit deserves some
attention, because it is not as straightforward as one might expect.
If you had to define what a word is, you might first think of the word as a unit
in the writing system, the so-called orthographic word. You could say, for example,
that a word is an uninterrupted string of letters which is preceded by a blank space
and followed either by a blank space or a punctuation mark. At first sight, this looks
like a good definition that can be easily applied, as we can see in the sentence in
example (1):
(1)

Linguistics is a fascinating subject.

5

Chapter 1: Basic Concepts

We count 5 orthographic words: there are five uninterrupted strings of letters, all of
which are preceded by a blank space, four of which are also followed by a blank
space, one of which is followed by a period. This count is also in accordance with
our intuitive feeling of what a word is. Even without this somewhat formal and
technical definition, you might want to argue, you could have told that the sentence
in (1) contains five words. However, things are not always as straightforward.
Consider the following example, and try to determine how many words there are:
(2)

Benjamin's girlfriend lives in a high-rise apartment building

Your result depends on a number of assumptions. If you consider apostrophies to be
punctuation marks,

Benjamin's

constitutes two (orthographic) words. If not,

Benjamin's is one word. If you consider a hyphen a punctuation mark, high-rise is two
(orthographic) words, otherwise it's one (orthographic) word. The last two strings,
apartment building, are easy to classify, they are two (orthographic) words, whereas
girlfriend must be considered one (orthographic) word. However, there are two basic
problems with our orthographic analysis. The first one is that orthography is often
variable. Thus,

girlfriend

is also attested with the spellings , and even

(fish brackets are used to indicate spellings, i.e. letters). Such variable
spellings are rather common (cf. word-formation, word formation, and wordformation, all
of them attested), and even where the spelling is conventionalized, similar words are

often spelled differently, as evidenced with grapefruit

vs. passion fruit. For our

problem of defining what a word is, such cases are rather annoying. The notion of
what a word is, should, after all, not depend on the fancies of individual writers or
the arbitrariness of the English spelling system. The second problem with the

orthographically defined word is that it may not always coincide with our intuitions.
Thus, most of us would probably agree that girlfriend is a word (i.e. one word) which
consists of two words (girl and friend), a so-called compound. If compounds are one
word, they should be spelled without a blank space separating the elements that
together make up the compound. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The compound
apartment building, for example, has a blank space between apartment and building.

6

Chapter 1: Basic Concepts

To summarize our discussion of purely orthographic criteria of wordhood, we
must say that these criteria are not entirely reliable. Furthermore, a purely
orthographic notion of word would have the disadvantage of implying that illiterate
speakers would have no idea about what a word might be. This is plainly false.
What, might you ask, is responsible for our intuitions about what a word is, if
not the orthography? It has been argued that the word could be defined in four other
ways: in terms of sound structure (i.e. phonologically), in terms of its internal
integrity, in terms of meaning (i.e. semantically), or in terms of sentence structure
(i.e. syntactically). We will discuss each in turn.
You might have thought that the blank spaces in writing reflect pauses in the
spoken language, and that perhaps one could define the word as a unit in speech
surrounded by pauses. However, if you carefully listen to naturally occurring

speech you will realize that speakers do not make pauses before or after each word.
Perhaps we could say that words can be surrounded by potential pauses in speech.
This criterion works much better, but it runs into problems because speakers can and
do make pauses not only between words but also between syllables, for example for
emphasis.
But there is another way of how the sound structure can tell us something
about the nature of the word as a linguistic unit. Think of stress. In many languages
(including English) the word is the unit that is crucial for the occurrence and

distribution of stress. Spoken in isolation, every word can have only one main stress,
as indicated by the acute accents (´) in the data presented in (3) below (note that we
speak of linguistic 'data' when we refer to language examples to be analyzed).
(3)

cárpenter

téxtbook

wáter

análysis

féderal

sýllable

móther

understánd

The main stressed syllable is the syllable which is the most prominent one in a word.
Prominence of a syllable is a function of loudness, pitch and duration, with stressed

syllables being pronounced louder, with higher pitch, or with longer duration than

7

Chapter 1: Basic Concepts

the neighboring syllable(s). Longer words often have additional, weaker stresses, socalled secondary stresses, which we ignore here for simplicity's sake. The words in
(4) now show that the phonologically defined word is not always identical with the
orthographically defined word.
(4)

Bénjamin's
gírlfriend
apártment building

While apártment building

is two orthographic words, it is only one word in terms of

stress behavior. The same would hold for other compounds like trável agency, wéather
forecast, spáce shuttle, etc. We see that in these examples the phonological definition of

'word' comes closer to our intuition of what a word should be.
We have to take into consideration, however, that not all words carry stress.
For example, function words like articles or auxiliaries are usually unstressed (a cár,
the dóg, Máry has a dóg) or even severely reduced (Jane's in the garden, I'll be there).
Hence, the stress criterion is not readily applicable to function words and to words
that hang on to other words, so-called clitics (e.g. 've, 's, 'll).
Let us now consider the integrity criterion, which says that the word is an
indivisible unit into which no intervening material may be inserted. If some
modificational element is added to a word, it must be done at the edges, but never
inside the word. For example, plural endings such as -s in

girls, negative elements

such as un- in uncommon or endings that create verbs out of adjectives (such as -ize in
colonialize) never occur inside the word they modify, but are added either before or
after the word. Hence, the impossibility of formations such as *gi-s-rl, *com-un-mon,
*col-ize-onial (note that the asterisk indicates impossible words, i.e. words that are not

formed in accordance with the morphological rules of the language in question).
However, there are some cases in which word integrity is violated. For
example, the plural of

assumption that

son-in-law

son-in-law

is not *son-in-laws

but sons-in-law. Under the

is one word (i.e. some kind of compound), the plural

ending is inserted inside the word and not at the end. Apart from certain

8

Chapter 1: Basic Concepts

compounds, we can find other words that violate the integrity criterion for words.
For example, in creations like

abso-bloody-lutely, the element bloody is inserted inside

the word, and not, as we would expect, at one of the edges. In fact, it is impossible to
add bloody
bloody

before or after absolutely

in order to achieve the same effect. Absolutely

would mean something completely different, and *bloody absolutely

utterly strange and, above all, uninterpretable.
We can conclude that there are certain, though marginal counterexamples to
the integrity criterion, but surely these cases should be regarded as the proverbial

exceptions that prove the rule.
The semantic definition of word states that a word expresses a unified
semantic concept. Although this may be true for most words (even for

son-in-law,

which is ill-behaved with regard to the integrity criterion), it is not sufficient in order
to differentiate between words and non-words. The simple reason is that not every
unified semantic concept corresponds to one word in a given language. Consider, for
example, the smell of fresh rain in a forest in the fall. Certainly a unified concept, but
we would not consider the smell of fresh rain in a forest in the fall a word. In fact, English
simply has no single word for this concept. A similar problem arises with phrases
like the woman who lives next door. This phrase refers to a particular person and should
therefore be considered as something expressing a unified concept. This concept is
however expressed by more than one word. We learn from this example that

although a word may always express a unified concept, not every unified concept is
expressed by one word. Hence the criterion is not very helpful in distinguishing
between words and larger units that are not words. An additional problem arises
from the notion of 'unified semantic concept' itself, which seems to be rather vague.
For example, does the complicated word conventionalization really express a unified
concept? If we paraphrase it as 'the act or result of making something conventional',
it is not entirely clear whether this should still be regarded as a 'unified concept'.
Before taking the semantic definition of word seriously, it would be necessary to
define exactly what 'unified concept' means.
This leaves us with the syntactically-oriented criterion of wordhood. Words
are usually considered to be syntactic atoms, i.e. the smallest elements in a sentence.
Words belong to certain syntactic classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions etc.),

seems

9

Chapter 1: Basic Concepts

which are called

parts of speech, word classes or syntactic categories. The position

in which a given word may occur in a sentence is determined by the syntactic rules
of a language. These rules make reference to words and the class they belong to. For

example, the is said to belong to the class called articles, and there are rules which
determine where in a sentence such words, i.e. articles, may occur (usually before
nouns and their modifiers, as in the big house). We can therefore test whether
something is a word by checking whether it belongs to such a word class. If the item
in question, for example, follows the rules for nouns, it should be a noun, hence a
word. Or consider the fact that only words (and groups of words), but no smaller
units can be moved to a different position in the sentence. For example, in 'yes/no'
questions, the auxiliary verb does not occur in its usual position but is moved to the
beginning of the sentence (You

can read my textbook vs. Can you read my textbook?).

Thus syntactic criteria can help to determine the wordhood of a given entity.
To summarize our discussion of the possible definition of word we can say
that, in spite of the intuitive appeal of the notion of 'word', it is sometimes not easy
to decide whether a given string of sounds (or letters) should be regarded as a word
or not. In the treatment above, we have concentrated on the discussion of such
problematic cases. In most cases, however, the stress criterion, the integrity criterion
and the syntactic criteria lead to sufficiently clear results. The properties of words
are summarized in (5):
(5)

Properties of words
- words are entities having a part of speech specification
- words are syntactic atoms
- words (usually) have one main stress
- words (usually) are indivisible units (no intervening material possible)

Unfortunately, there is yet another problem with the word

word

itself, namely its

ambiguity. Thus, even if we have unequivocally decided that a given string is a
word, some insecurity remains about what exactly we refer to when we say things
like

Chapter 1: Basic Concepts

10

11

Chapter 1: Basic Concepts

(6)

a.

“The word be occurs twice in the sentence.”

b.

[D´w„dbi´k„ztwaIsInD´sent´ns]

The utterance in (6), given in both its orthographic and its phonetic representation,
can be understood in different ways, it is ambiguous in a number of ways. First,
or the sounds [bi] may refer to the letters or the sounds which they stand for.
Then sentence (6) would, for example, be true for every written sentence in which the

string
be BLANK SPACE> occurs twice. Referring to the spoken

equivalent of (6a), represented by the phonetic transcription in (6b), (6) would be
true for any sentence in which the string of sounds [bi] occurs twice. In this case, [bi]
could refer to two different 'words', e.g. bee and be. The next possible interpretation is
that in (6) we refer to the grammatically specified form be, i.e. the infinitive,
imperative or subjunctive form of the linking verb

specified form is called the

BE.

grammatical word (or

Such a grammatically

morphosyntactic word). Under

this reading, (6) would be true of any sentence containing two infinitive, two

imperative or two subjunctive forms of be, but would not be true of a sentence which
contains any of the forms am, is, are, was, were.
To complicate matters further, even the same form can stand for more than
one different grammatical word. Thus, the

word-form be is used for three different

grammatical words, expressing subjunctive infinitive or imperative, respectively.
This brings us to the last possible interpretation, namely that (6) may refer to the
linking verb BE in general, as we would find it in a dictionary entry, abstracting away
from the different word-forms in which the word BE occurs (am, is, are, was, were, be,
been). Under this reading, (6) would be true for any sentence containing any two
word-forms of the linking verb,

i.e. am, is, are, was, were,

interpretation, am, is, are, was, were,be

and been

and be. Under this

are regarded as realizations of an

abstract morphological entity. Such abstract entities are called lexemes. Coming back
to our previous example of

be and bee, we could now say that

BE and BEE

different lexemes that simply sound the same (usually small capitals are used when

writing about lexemes). In technical terms, they are homophonous words, or simply
homophones.

are two

12

Chapter 1: Basic Concepts

In everyday speech, these rather subtle ambiguities in our use of the term
'word' are easily tolerated and are often not even noticed, but when discussing
linguistics, it is sometimes necessary to be more explicit about what exactly one talks
about. Having discussed what we can mean when we speak of 'words', we may now
turn to the question what exactly we are dealing with in the study of word-

formation.

2. Studying word-formation

As the term 'word-formation' suggests, we are dealing with the formation of words,
but what does that mean? Let us look at a number of words that fall into the domain
of word-formation and a number of words that do not:
(7)

a.

employee

b.

apartment building

c.

chair

inventor

greenhouse

neighbor

inability

team manager

matter

meaningless

truck driver

brow

suddenness

blackboard

great

unhappy

son-in-law

promise

decolonialization

pickpocket

discuss

In columns (7a) and (7b) we find words that are obviously composed by putting
together smaller elements to form larger words with more complex meanings. We
can say that we are dealing with morphologically
employee can be analyzed as being composed of the verb
the adjective

complex words. For example,
employ and the ending -ee,

unhappy can be analyzed as being derived from the adjective happy by

the attachment of the element

un-, and decolonialization can be segmented into the

smallest parts de-, colony, -al, -ize, and -ation. We can thus decompose complex words
into their smallest meaningful units. These units are called morphemes.

13

Chapter 1: Basic Concepts

In contrast to those in (7a) and (7b), the words in (7c) cannot be decomposed
into smaller meaningful units, they consist of only one morpheme, they are monomorphemic. Neighbor,

for example, is not composed of neighb- and -or, although the

word looks rather similar to a word such as inventor. Inventor ('someone who invents
(something)') is decomposable into two morphemes, because both invent- and -or are

meaningful elements, wheras neither neighb- nor -or carry any meaning in neighbor (a
neighbor is not someone who neighbs, whatever that may be...).
As we can see from the complex words in (7a) and (7b), some morphemes can
occur only if attached to some other morpheme(s). Such morphemes are called
bound morphemes, in contrast to

free morphemes, which do occur on their own.

Some bound morphemes, for example un-,

must always be attached before the

central meaningful element of the word, the so-called root, stem or base, whereas
other bound morphemes, such as

-ity, -ness, or -less, must follow the root. Using

Latin-influenced terminology, un- is called a

prefix, -ity a suffix, with affix being the

cover term for all bound morphemes that attach to roots. Note that there are also
bound roots, i.e. roots that only occur in combination with some other bound
morpheme. Examples of bound roots are often of Latin origin, e.g. later-

(as in

combination with the adjectival suffix -al), circul- (as in circulate, circulation, circulatory,
circular), approb- (as in approbate,

approbation, approbatory, approbator), simul- (as in

simulant, simulate, simulation), but occasional native bound roots can also be found
(e.g. hap-, as in hapless).
Before we turn to the application of the terms introduced in this section, we
should perhaps clarify the distinction between 'root', 'stem' and 'base', because these
terms are not always clearly defined in the morphological literature and are

therefore a potential source of confusion. One reason for this lamentable lack of
clarity is that languages differ remarkably in their morphological make-up, so that
different terminologies reflect different organizational principles in the different

languages. The part of a word which an affix is attached to is called base. We will
use the term

root to refer to bases that cannot be analyzed further into morphemes.

The term 'stem' is usually used for bases of inflections, and occasionally also for

14

Chapter 1: Basic Concepts

bases of derivational affixes. To avoid terminological confusion, we will avoid the
use of the term 'stem' altogether and speak of 'roots' and 'bases' only.
The term root is used when we want to explicitly refer to the indivisible
central part of a complex word. In all other cases, where the status of a form as
indivisible or not is not at issue, we can just speak of
derived word is often referred to as a
derivative

bases or base-words. The

derivative. The base of the suffix

colonial is colony, the base of the suffix -ize

colonial, the base of

-ation in the derivative

-al in the

in the derivative colonialize is

coloni...