PowerPoint Presentation 323 Morphology

323 Morphology

The Structure of Words

• 3.1 Productivity and the Lexicon
• The lexicon is in theory infinite, but in practice it is limited. Human beings know only a certain amount of information at any one time and it is impossible for a human to know an infinite amount of information. This holds in the lexicon, as well. Comparing a lexicon to a dictionary (the printed lexemes), a dictionary can hold only so much information at one time. The list can grow and grow, but it is never infinite.
• The potentiality for making up new words by means of the rules of word building is potentially infinite, but this has never been proved. Nevertheless, it possible to create a large number of words, larger than what most humans could possibly memorize. Thus we must distinguish between actual words and potential words.
• A neologism is a new word that has been created. Neologisms that do not catch on except occasionally are called occasionalisms. Note that this word was probably created recently and I doubt if it has really caught on. If true, then the word occasionalism is itself an occasionalism.
• Affixes that are readily adjoined to words to create new words (bases and stems) are called productive.
• E.g. The English suffix ‘-er’ can be added to most verbs that denote an agent oriented action: doer, fixer, baker, worker, runner, swimmer, writer, and so forth. The same suffix can also denote an instrument ‘cooker, pickle slicer, popcorn maker, double-boiler, but it is doubtful that this verb productive, though it may be productive if the semantic class is known. Other affixes are clearly not productive:
• E.g. ‘-ic’, ‘ion’, ‘-ive’, ‘be-’, ‘de-’, ‘a-’, re-’ and so forth.
• Another problem with unproductivity (sic) is that unproductive affixes easily change the meaning of the word.

3.1 Productivity and the Lexicon

E.g. head, be-head; give, forgive; stand, understand; woman, womanize; and so forth.
There are affixes that are very productive, rather unproductive, somewhat unproductive, very unproductive. H lists a finer list of productiveness (p. 42). Another problem are complex words that are lexical, but underlying base is not lexical. To illustrate this, consider disgruntled. It is derived from the base *‘gruntle’, which is not a lexeme with the associated meaning of disgruntled. I take the view that forming bases is productive given the restrictions on the base, but the base is not always a lexeme. There no way to be absolutely sure whether a given base will or will not be a lexeme. As a consequence, all lexemes must be enterred in the lexicon. If a base is created, one must check to see if it is a lexeme, or one may occasionally determine a lexical meaning for the new base thus creating a new word, as I did with unproductivity above.
H argues that a word-form lexicon is more desirable. A word-form lexicon is one in which every declined or conjugated form of each word is listed in it. Inflected forms are generally predictable given the class forms of each lexeme, except the irregular ones such oxen, children, brethren; is, are, be, was, were (being and been) are regular (except for the pronunciation of been in the US and in Canada whether the American pronunciation has taken over the earlier one which is still standard in Britain.
Even so, there is evidence that all the word forms of everyday usage are memorized and listed in the lexicon. (I read a paper at SFU claiming that the lexicon is divided into two parts: the list of lexemes and the list of word-forms derived from them. Each set of word forms derived from a lexeme are linked to that lexeme at little cost to the grammar.) Linking is another research topic of mine, which I cannot get into here.