word formation hypothesis

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According to Chomsky (1970), raising to subject and raising to object may not take place inside nominalizations. This claim has largely been accepted as fact ever since. For instance, Newmeyer (2009) repeats the claim as crucial evidence for the Lexicalist Hypothesis, the view that word formation takes place in a component of the grammar separate from the phrasal syntax. This paper shows with attested examples and survey data that the claim is false: raising to subject and raising to object are both grammatical inside nominalizations. This argues for a purely syntactic model of word formation, and against Lexicalist accounts. Additionally, the paper shows that one argument against syntactic accounts of nominalization, that from coordination, does not go through, clearing the way for the most parsimonious type of theory: one with only one combinatorial component, not two distinct ones for phrases versus words.

syntactic word formation, raising, nominalization, the Lexicalist Hypothesis, experimental syntax

How to Cite

Bruening, B., (2018) “Word formation is syntactic: Raising in nominalizations”, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3(1): 102. doi: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.470

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1 Introduction

The literature includes two broad approaches to word formation. On the Lexicalist approach, the atoms of syntax are words, and word formation therefore requires a component of grammar separate from the phrasal syntax. In this type of theory, there are two distinct combinatorial systems in the grammar, the phrasal syntax and some word formation component. 1 According to the other view, there is only one component of grammar, a system of syntax. This system is responsible for putting all complex elements together, whether those things are words or phrases. The atoms of syntax in this approach are something smaller than words, something like morphemes. 2

This paper argues for the latter view and a model of grammar with only one combinatorial system. It does so by contesting the longstanding claim from Chomsky ( 1970 ) that raising to subject and raising to object do not take place in nominalizations. They actually do, as attested examples and an acceptability survey show. This, I argue, requires a syntactic account of nominalization, where the phonological word that pronounces a nominalization is put together by the syntax. Lexical analyses of nominalization cannot account for the attested patterns without additional stipulations. Additionally, some of the Lexicalist literature has argued against purely syntactic accounts of nominalization on the basis of coordination. I also address this argument, and show that it is without force. There is no issue from coordination for any syntactic account of nominalization, and the syntactic analysis is best at accounting for raising in nominalizations.

Section 2 begins by presenting new data regarding raising inside nominalizations. Section 3 proposes a syntactic account of nominalization and argues that Lexicalist accounts are inadequate. Finally, section 4 shows that the argument against syntactic accounts from coordination does not go through.

2 Raising is grammatical inside nominalizations

As stated above, Chomsky ( 1970 ) claimed that nominalizations may not include raising to subject or raising to object:

This claim was contested by Postal ( 1974: Chapter 10 ), but Chomsky ( 1977: note 47 ) and Kayne ( 1984: 142–143 ) dismissed Postal’s counterexamples. 3 The claim seems to have been accepted since. For instance, Jacobson ( 1990 ) uses the putative ungrammaticality of raising in nominalizations as an argument for her analysis of raising. Newmeyer ( 2009 ) cites such examples as crucial evidence for the Lexicalist Hypothesis, the hypothesis that (at least some) word formation is accomplished in a lexical component of grammar separate from the phrasal syntax.

According to Chomsky and Newmeyer, the Lexicalist Hypothesis rules out raising to subject and raising to object in the input to nominalization, because they are rules of the phrasal syntax. The output of lexical rules like nominalization feeds the phrasal syntax, and not vice versa. (See section 3 for discussion of Lexicalist models where raising is lexical rather than syntactic.)

In this section, I contest the claim that examples like (1b) and ones similar to (2b) are ungrammatical. I for one as a native speaker of English have always found (1b) perfectly acceptable. This is borne out by attested examples from corpora and an acceptability survey using Amazon Mechanical Turk. As for raising to object as in (2b), many speakers do not accept it with this particular word ( belief ), but examples of raising to object with nominalizations of other verbs are attested and accepted.

2.1 Attested examples

Numerous examples of raising to subject can be found with likelihood and certainty . I have found many examples on the web which I and others polled informally find perfectly acceptable:

Note that at least one of these comes from a published book.

Examples of clear raising to subject with likelihood can also be found in the Corpus of Contemporary American English ( http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ ). Here are a few examples:

I found no clear examples of raising to subject in COCA with certainty , however.

As for raising to object, it too is attested in nominalizations, though at a much lower rate (and speakers judge them to be less acceptable in the survey reported below). I was unable to find any examples in COCA, but the following are some examples from the web:

Native speakers polled informally find at least some such examples to be acceptable, although they typically report that they are less acceptable than raising to subject. Many people do not accept raising to object with proof or belief (but numerous examples of proof appear on the web), but raising to object does seem to be acceptable with nominalizations of some other verbs (see the acceptability survey below).

These attested examples contradict the judgments reported in the literature by Chomsky ( 1970 ), Kayne ( 1984 ), Newmeyer ( 2009 ), and others. 4

2.2 Acceptability survey

I also conducted a survey using Amazon Mechanical Turk. For this purpose I made use of the free tools described in Gibson et al. ( 2011 ) and available at http://tedlab.mit.edu/software/ , modified for the purposes of this experiment.

The experiment used a 2 × 2 design with factors raising to subject (“Subj”) versus raising to object (“Obj”) and nominalization (“Nom”) versus clause (“Clause”) . Experimental items were constructed in sets of four on the following pattern:

Raising to subject predicates were only be certain and be likely and their corresponding nominalizations certainty and likelihood . The raising to object verbs used were acknowledge, pronounce, recognize, estimate, calculate, observe, presume , and calculate ( calculate was accidentally used twice). All of these have nominalizations with either -tion or -ment . The complete list of items appears in the appendix.

Eight sets of four were constructed and divided into four lists, so that each subject saw only one item from each set. Each subject rated two exemplars of each condition. Subjects rated each sentence on a scale of 1 to 5, as follows: 1: Extremely unnatural, 2: Somewhat unnatural; 3: Possible, 4: Somewhat natural, 5: Extremely natural. 5 Each sentence was also accompanied by a comprehension question to make sure that the subjects were not just answering randomly without reading the sentence. For the set above, the question was, Was that radical group eager to start a civil war? Questions were always answered yes or no and always had a right answer (an obvious one). Subjects were discarded from the analysis if they answered more than 25% of the questions incorrectly.

In addition to the 8 experimental items that each subject judged, each also rated 22 fillers. Six of these were items for an unrelated experiment. Two of these were judged by the experimenters ahead of time to be acceptable, while the other four were unacceptable (but survey participants actually judged 5 of the 6 to be unacceptable). The other 16 were control sentences that were created by modifying examples taken from the web, typically on-line newspaper articles. Each of the sixteen was manipulated to create an ungrammatical match, where the manipulation was changing the word order of S, O, or V, or a P and its object. A couple of examples follow (the ungrammatical sentences were not presented with the star):

As stated, there were 16 pairs of controls, and once again each subject saw only one member of each pair. Subjects therefore rated a total of 30 sentences (8 experimental items + 6 fillers from another experiment + 16 control items). A different list was created for each subject with the presentation order randomized.

120 participants (“workers,” in Amazon Mechanical Turk parlance) were recruited from within the USA. Ten subjects were excluded for reporting a language other than English as their first language, for getting less than 75% correct on the comprehension questions, or for leaving more than 20% of the questions unanswered. This left 110 subjects whose data entered into the analysis.

Median ratings and mean ratings and standard deviations are shown below (again, the scale is 1–5, 1: Extremely unnatural, 2: Somewhat unnatural; 3: Possible, 4: Somewhat natural, 5: Extremely natural):

For comparison, median and mean ratings on the grammatical and ungrammatical controls are shown below:

Various statistical tests indicate that there are significant differences between the four conditions. For instance, a two-way ANOVA shows a main effect of subject versus object (F(1,876) = 15.4038, p < 0.0001) and a main effect of clause versus nominalization (F(1,876) = 7.8591, p = 0.0052), as well as an interaction (F(1,876) = 12.9237, p = 0.0003). 6 Post-hoc pairwise t-tests show that Subj_Clause and Subj_Nom do not differ from each other (p = 0.9439), but Obj_Clause and Obj_Nom do (p < 0.0001). Subj_Nom and Obj_Nom also differ (p < 0.0001), but Obj_Clause and Subj_Clause do not (p = 0.9955), nor do Obj_Clause and Subj_ Nom (p = 0.8577). In other words, Obj_Nom differs from the other three conditions, which do not differ from each other.

These results indicate that native speakers of English do not consider raising to subject in nominalizations degraded in any way compared to raising to subject in clauses. In fact, the mean rating was actually higher for nominalizations than it was for clauses, although this difference is not significant. I conclude that Chomsky ( 1970 ) was simply wrong to claim that raising to subject does not take place in nominalizations. It does.

As for raising to object, it is rated lower in nominalizations relative to the other three conditions, which do not differ from each other. This indicates that it is not as acceptable as raising in clauses or raising to subject in nominalizations. On the other hand, the mean (and median) rating for the Obj_Nom condition is still quite high, much higher than the ungrammatical control sentences. It should also be noted that there is little evidence of a dialect split: only seven out of 110 subjects rated both Obj_Nom sentences that they saw 2 or 1. All eight of the Obj_Nom items were also rated quite high (a similar range for each), so it is not the case that one or two items were responsible for the slightly lower mean rating. It appears that overall, raising to object is simply slightly less acceptable in nominalizations than raising in clauses or raising to subject in nominalizations.

The question is what we are to make of this result. It is not possible to decide that below a given mean rating (say, 2.5) sentences are ungrammatical, and above that they are grammatical. For one thing, the judgments reported by subjects are judgments of acceptability, not grammaticality, and judgments of acceptability are affected by numerous non-grammatical factors (such as length, complexity, and familiarity). Such factors can both lower subjects’ ratings for sentences that we must consider grammatical, and raise subjects’ ratings for sentences that we must view as ungrammatical within a well-motivated model of grammar.

This means that we have two options. The first option is that we can decide that raising to object is not grammatical in nominalizations, but other factors lead subjects to rate such examples surprisingly high in acceptability. The second option is that we can decide that raising to object is grammatical in nominalizations, but other factors lead subjects to assign examples of it somewhat lower ratings of acceptability.

I believe that several considerations favor the second view. First, the median and mean ratings of the Obj_Nom condition are quite high, close to 4 on a 5-point scale (the median rating is 4). This is much higher than we would expect for truly ungrammatical sentences, at least without some kind of “illusion” of the type discussed in Phillips et al. ( 2011 ). No such grammaticality illusion seems to be at work here, however. In cases of grammaticality illusions, native speakers will initially accept the examples, but then, given more time, agree that the examples are actually unacceptable. This does not seem to be the case with the examples of raising to object in nominalizations. Typically, native speakers that I have consulted either do not revise their initial judgments at all, or they revise them positively given more exposure to such examples.

Second, we have now concluded that raising to subject is grammatical in nominalizations. Given that, we should have every reason to expect that raising of all kinds would be possible, since in most models of grammar raising to subject and raising to object are very similar, parallel operations. That is, within a motivated model of grammar, there is no reason to expect that raising to object would be ungrammatical in nominalizations, if we accept that raising to subject is. Third, there may be an independent reason that raising to object is judged slightly less acceptable than raising to subject. Consider first that Chomsky ( 1970 ) contrasted raising to subject in nominalizations, which he judged to be ungrammatical, with raising to subject in gerunds, which is acceptable:

According to Chomsky ( 1970 ), (at least some types of) gerunds are formed syntactically and can include any relation or operation that is part of the phrasal syntax. However, gerunds are not very acceptable with raising to object when the object is marked with of :

One could claim that all nominals with of , including gerunds, are lexically derived and so do not permit syntactic operations. However, gerunds with of do permit particles and they do not permit the logical object to appear as a prenominal possessor, in contrast with other nominalizations ( Abney 1987 ). These sorts of facts led Abney ( 1987 ) and others to propose syntactic accounts of gerunds with of . An alternative explanation is that there are restrictions on what can appear with of in a nominalized form of a verb. The first object of a double object construction never can, for instance ( Kayne 1984 ; Pesetsky 1995 ), see (14), and various verbs that take direct objects also do not allow those with of (15):

It appears that there are some (poorly understood) restrictions on what can appear with of , 7 and this is what leads subjects to view raising to object with nominalizations as less than fully acceptable, since the raised object in a nominalization must appear with of . This is not about the grammaticality of combining raising to object and nominalization, however, it is something about the acceptability of different kinds of objects with of . It is probably not the case that this is a hard grammatical constraint, since subjects do rate NPs raised to object and marked with of as fairly acceptable in context (see the examples in the appendix). Postal ( 1974 ) also presented examples like the following, which also seem to involve raising to object:

It is therefore possible in principle for a non-thematic object of a verb to appear marked with of in a nominalization derived from that verb. However, there seem to be some restrictions which make this less acceptable than raising to subject, although I cannot at this point say exactly what those restrictions are. One suggestion I will tentatively offer is that internal arguments marked with of in a nominalization are somewhat less acceptable if they are not canonical patients of the nominalized verb stem. 8

To sum up, several considerations favor the view that raising to object is grammatical but somewhat degraded in acceptability in a nominalization. I know of no considerations that would favor the opposite view according to which raising to object is ungrammatical in nominalizations, but something leads subjects to rate examples surprisingly high in acceptability. I conclude that both raising to subject and raising to object are grammatical within nominalizations. Raising to subject is not any less acceptable in nominalizations than it is in clauses. Raising to object is slightly degraded in nominalizations as compared to clauses, but this seems to be due to poorly understood factors governing the acceptability of NPs marked with of in nominalized forms of verbs. In principle, raising to object is grammatical in nominalizations, and any model of grammar should be able to capture this.

3 Discussion and analysis

Attested examples and the acceptability survey described in the previous section indicate that both raising to subject and raising to object do take place in nominalizations. In this section, I discuss the consequences of this finding and propose a purely syntactic account of nominalizations, adopting existing proposals from the literature.

3.1 Discussion: Lexical versus syntactic models

The first important point is that the facts of raising cannot be taken as an argument in favor of the Lexicalist Hypothesis, as Chomsky ( 1970 ) and Newmeyer ( 2009 ) presented them. Contrary to their assertions, raising to subject and raising to object do feed nominalization. In the kind of feed-forward view advocated by Chomsky ( 1970 ), nominalization could not be a lexical process if raising is syntactic. In this view, lexical processes strictly precede the syntax, and it is not possible for a syntactic process to feed a lexical one.

Can we then use the existence of raising in nominalizations to argue against the Lexicalist model, and for a purely syntactic theory with no separate lexical component? Not yet, because there are theories where raising is also accomplished lexically, for instance LFG and HPSG (e.g., Bresnan 1982a ; Pollard & Sag 1994 ; Müller 2006 ; Müller & Wechsler 2014 ). In this type of account, there is no syntactic raising at all. Rather, lexical entries for raising verbs simply specify that a certain syntactic argument is not a semantic argument of the verb but is instead interpreted as the subject of a non-finite complement of the same verb. For, instance, declare as a raising to object verb says that it takes an NP complement and a non-finite clause as another complement. The NP receives no interpretation with respect to the predicate declare , it is instead interpreted as the subject of the non-finite complement. So, in declare those acts to be wrong, those acts is syntactically but not semantically the object of the verb declare ; it receives its semantic interpretation solely from the lower clause. In this analysis, there is no syntactic raising, although we get the semantic effect of the object NP functioning as the logical subject of the non-finite clause. It receives no interpretation qua object. The analysis of control is almost identical, except that the object (or subject, in the case of subject control) is assigned two semantic roles, one as the missing subject of the infinitive and one as the object of the higher verb (see especially Pollard & Sag 1994: 132–145 ).

The raising to object stem, declare in our example, as a verb stem can undergo lexical rules that can affect verb stems. For instance, it can undergo a lexical rule of nominalization. This will relate the stem to a nominal declaration , which will inherit the argument structure of the raising to object stem. That is, it too will take an NP object and a non-finite clause, and the NP object will be interpreted as the semantic subject of the non-finite clause. This will be the raising to object declaration . (Presumably the declaration that takes a finite CP complement instead is related to a verb stem declare that also takes a finite CP complement; if one wanted to relate this form to raising-to-object declare , then another lexical rule would accomplish that.)

This type of lexical account is compatible with the facts as we have seen them here. However, there is an argument against this type of analysis, and for a purely syntactic account. This argument comes from Williams ( 2015: 312 ). In the opposing syntactic account, a verb stem takes a non-finite complement clause, out of which the subject raises to become the object of the verb stem. This entire syntactic construct forms the input to nominalization in an example like the following:

That is, the nominalization God’s declaration of them to be wrong can only be formed from the full phrase [ declare them to be wrong ], where the NP has undergone raising (see below for an analysis).

The difference between the two accounts is that in the lexical analysis, the nominalization is only a nominalization of a verb stem, not a phrase. The nominalization takes the arguments of the stem it is formed from, but they will not necessarily be present in the syntax. In contrast, in the syntactic account, raising to object is purely syntactic, and there can be no such thing as raising to object in the absence of a full phrase structure to support it (that is, raising will not be possible unless there is a clause for the NP to raise out of).

The argument against the lexical account comes from the fact that arguments of nominalizations are never obligatory. Now, they have sometimes been claimed to be, so it is important to establish that they are not. For instance, Grimshaw ( 1990 ) claimed that certain types of nominalizations (her “complex event nominals”) require that their internal arguments be realized. However, this was shown by Reuland ( 2011 ) to be false. Here are a couple of his examples, which show that as long as there is a supporting context, complex event nominals do not require their internal argument ( Reuland 2011: 1294 ):

In these examples, the internal argument of the verb is obligatory, but it can be left out in the corresponding nominalization (even with the definite determiner, which Grimshaw claims is not possible). A few more examples of my own follow:

See also Lieber ( 2016 ), who cites several attested examples of complex event nominals without their internal arguments.

The question arises, of course, of why arguments of nominalizations, complex event nominals in particular, have been thought to be obligatory in the past. Adger ( 2013 ) suggests that there is a pragmatic requirement of identifiability on the arguments of such nominals. If there is no context that can identify the argument, then it will appear to be obligatory, but if there is a context, then it is not. I note that in this respect, nominalizations are behaving just like verbs that idiosyncratically permit their arguments to drop, but where those dropped arguments are interpreted as definites. For instance, win and notice permit their internal arguments to be missing, but only if what is won or what is noticed is pragmatically identifiable ( Fodor & Fodor 1981 ; Dowty 1981 ; Fillmore 1986 ):

It therefore appears that verbs idiosyncratically choose whether their arguments are obligatory or optional, and they furthermore choose whether any missing argument is interpreted as a definite or an indefinite (the optional arguments of eat and steal are indefinite, for instance, and do not need to be identifiable at all; see Williams 2015: Chapter 5 for discussion and references). Nominalizations as a class, in contrast, have optional internal arguments that are interpreted as definites. They can therefore only be dropped when the context provides a unique, identifiable referent for the missing argument. This is something that the analysis of nominalization will have to specify (see below), but all that is important here is the conclusion that arguments of nominalizations are never obligatory in the syntax. Provided a suitable context, the arguments of nominalizations can always be dropped, just like the internal arguments of win and notice .

A more recent claim that there are nominalizations with obligatory arguments comes from Müller ( 2018 ). Müller cites German examples like Bartträger , ‘bearded man’ (lit. ‘beard-bearer’) and Spassmacher , ‘jester’ (lit. ‘fun-maker’). English examples of this sort might include babysitter and treehugger . According to Müller, such nominalizations may not have the meaning they do without the internal argument. These examples are of a very different type, however. All of Müller’s examples involve a particular verb stem with a particular object which, just when combined, have a conventionalized meaning. It is not that träger , ‘bearer’, requires an object, rather, the meaning of ‘bearded man’ only resides in the particular combination Bart-träger . 9 Similarly, treehugger is only a pejorative term for an environmental activist with that particular object. A planthugger or pandahugger does not have that meaning. Moreover, whether the logical object can be dropped or not is idiosyncratic. As an example, sitter can be used by itself, for instance, We won’t be able to go out tonight if we can’t get a sitter could be uttered by either a parent or a dog owner, but a bulldozer operator could not complain about the huggers lying down in front of his machine. In contrast, as I will show below, the facts involving raising are systematic . They should not be handled on a case-by-case basis, simply listing requirements of individual lexical items (as Müller 2018 appears to advocate), but demand a systematic, grammatical account.

Having established that arguments of nominals are never obligatory, we can turn back to the argument against the lexical account. To illustrate optionality of arguments with the kinds of nominalizations under discussion, it is possible to talk about a declaration , with no syntactic realization of a complement clause or NP. We should then expect that the arguments of the nominalization formed from raising-to-object declare are also optional. Moreover, since this declaration takes two objects, an NP and a non-finite clause, they should be independent of one another (compare placement of the stones on the path, placement of the stones, placement on the path ). We should be able to drop the complement clause while keeping the NP, and preserve the raising to object interpretation. This is not possible, however. A raising to object interpretation is only ever possible in the presence of the complete phrase structure for it. God’s declaration (to him) is grammatical by itself but implies a proposition, but God’s declaration of those acts is nonsensical, and certainly does not imply a predicate that takes those acts as its subject. The same is true of all such examples: any NP after of can only be taken as the thematic direct object of the verb used as a simple transitive, and never as the subject of an implied predicate:

This is true even when a supportive context of the type illustrated in (18–19) is provided:

Since, in the lexical account, the NP object and the non-finite clausal object are independent, that account also expects that it should be possible to drop the NP object while keeping the non-finite clause. However, that is not possible, either:

The generalization is that nominalizations may only have a raising interpretation when they actually occur with overt raising of a phrase out of a phrase. 10 This in turn means that the nominalization must be a nominalization of phrasal syntax. Treating raising and nominalization lexically makes the wrong predictions. Compare control verbs, which can nominalize and drop the non-finite clause argument:

In the lexical account, control verbs and raising verbs are treated in an almost identical fashion, as mentioned above (and see more below). There is no way to distinguish the two for this purpose.

Of course, the lexical account could stipulate that when a nominalization is related to a raising to object stem, the arguments of the stem are obligatory in the nominalization. This would be nothing but a stipulation, however, and would contradict the general pattern where arguments of nominalizations are not obligatory (as we just saw with control verbs, for instance). In contrast, the syntactic view predicts that raising could never be possible in the absence of the phrase structure that is necessary for its existence.

This argument can be extended from the nominal to the clausal domain. In the lexical account, there is no literal raising to object or raising to subject, even in clauses. As described above, the lexical entry for a raising verb says that the verb takes an NP and a non-finite clause as arguments, and specifies that the NP is interpreted as the subject of the non-finite clause. The NP is not the syntactic subject of the non-finite clause it is the semantic subject of. Raising in this account is treated exactly like control, with the only difference being that a control verb also assigns a thematic interpretation to the NP (so the NP plays two thematic roles; see Pollard & Sag 1994 for extensive discussion). However, observe that control verbs often permit their clausal argument to drop, while the NP argument remains:

This is never possible with raising ( Jacobson 1990 ). A raising to subject or raising to object interpretation is simply not available in the absence of the clause the NP raised out of. The only possibility is VP ellipsis within the clause, not dropping the entire clause:

If raising were really a verb taking two syntactically independent arguments, an NP and a clause of some type, we would not expect this dependency between them. We do not observe it in control. A purely syntactic theory of raising, in contrast, does expect this dependency: raising requires the presence of a clause for the NP to raise out of. If there is no clause, there can be no raising.

Pollard & Sag ( 1994 ) claim that the above facts follow in the lexical theory from a principle that they call the Raising Principle:

According to Pollard & Sag ( 1994 ), this principle ensures that subjects not assigned a semantic role by the predicate they are a syntactic argument of can only appear when an unsaturated phrase is also present (as a co-argument of the predicate). But note that this principle is a pure stipulation, stating by brute force what follows as a consequence from the syntactic theory. The Raising Principle could not follow from some kind of general semantic recoverability condition, for instance. The semantic content of missing arguments is clearly recoverable and applicable to pronounced arguments. Consider the following question-answer pair:

The semantic content of the missing non-finite clause in the answer is obviously recoverable and applicable, for if it were not, the answer would be nonsensical and there would be no basis for the judgment that a plural NP is a felicitous answer to the question and a singular is not. The answer has no overt representation of the item that requires a plural (the reciprocal). This means that a missing argument can be recovered and interpreted semantically, and, in particular, an overt NP can be interpreted with respect to the missing argument. Since this is possible with control, it should be possible with raising, too, and there is no justification for the Raising Principle. Similarly, we already noted that raising is possible in the presence of VP ellipsis, where the lexical item that assigns the raised NP its thematic role is not actually present (34a). Other kinds of elliptical processes are also fine with raising, for instance sluicing (34b), fragment answers (34c), and bare argument ellipsis (34d):

There is no general requirement that the predicate that assigns the raised NP its semantic role be present overtly. The Raising Principle, then, cannot follow from anything, and is nothing but a stipulation. 11

I conclude from these facts that we need a syntactic account of raising, not a lexical one. Raising is only ever possible with the full syntactic structure that the syntactic account requires. This is true in both clauses and nominalizations, and so we need a syntactic account of both.

3.2 A syntactic analysis

For the purposes of this paper I will try to make the minimal assumptions necessary for a syntactic account of raising in clauses and in nominalizations. In clauses, I will assume that a verb or adjective takes a non-finite TP as its complement. In raising to object, the subject of this non-finite TP raises to an object position in the main clause, which I will take to be Spec-VP. There is a head Voice above VP which projects the external argument ( Kratzer 1996 ). This external argument typically moves to Spec-TP (not shown in the tree below). The verb V moves to Voice to produce the correct word order (strikethrough indicates lower copies of moved elements):

An adverb can adjoin to the intermediate projection of V, giving the word order God declared them so forcefully to be wrong .

I suggest that the motivation for the movement of the subject of the non-finite embedded clause is related to but is not case. A long tradition holds that subjects of non-finite clauses do not receive case within the non-finite clause, and have to receive case from elsewhere. Following Kratzer ( 1996 ), active Voice (one that projects a thematic specifier) is what assigns accusative case to a syntactic object. I propose that case assignment is strictly local, so that Voice can only assign case to an NP that is the specifier or complement of its sister. In the tree above, the sister of Voice is VP, so case assignment is only possible to Spec-VP or to the complement of V. Voice cannot assign case to the subject of the non-finite clause. However, V can optionally be endowed with an EPP feature ( Chomsky 2000 ) that attracts an NP from within its complement to its specifier. This causes the embedded subject to move to Spec-VP. When Voice is active, this NP will be assigned accusative case there. (If no EPP feature is given to V, the NP will not move and the derivation will crash, because the NP will not be assigned case.)

Raising to subject will be similar, except that Voice will not project any external argument (it is non-active). It therefore also does not assign accusative case. The only case assigner is the matrix T, which assigns nominative case. Given the locality condition on case assignment, T can only assign case to either Spec-VoiceP or the complement of Voice, so this time the lower subject will have to move to Spec-VoiceP. I assume that heads can freely be given EPP features, so Voice can be endowed with an EPP feature which attracts the embedded subject. In Spec-VoiceP, the embedded subject can be assigned nominative case by the matrix T. Of course, English also requires an NP in Spec-TP, which I formalize as T also having an EPP feature, only on T it is obligatory. This will cause the NP to move further, to Spec-TP:

Turning to nominalizations, numerous syntactic accounts have been proposed for deriving nominalizations from phrases (e.g., VPs). These include, among others, Marantz ( 1997 ); Alexiadou ( 2001 ); Borer ( 2003 ); Roeper ( 2005 ); Bruening ( 2013 ). I will adopt the account in Bruening ( 2013 ), where a nominalizing head N takes an unsaturated projection of Voice as its complement (a VoiceP that has not projected its thematic specifier). N may project an NP in its own specifier:

The NP in Spec-NP may be, but does not have to be, interpreted as the unsaturated argument role of Voice. Alternatively, a by-phrase can adjoin to Voice and fulfill the same function (see Bruening 2013 for details). Importantly, Voice is not active, since it does not project a thematic specifier. This means that it does not assign accusative case. However, the head N can assign case, I propose. Ns assign genitive case rather than accusative case.

I will adopt the view that of is the spellout of genitive case, assigned to the syntactic object by the nominalizing head N. As mentioned above, Voice in a nominalization is non-active and so does not assign accusative case. The N head is able to assign case, but the case that Ns assign is genitive. Once again, case assignment is local, so in (37) above the complement of the V stem will have to move to Spec-VoiceP. Once again this is accomplished by giving Voice an [EPP] feature. At the same time, the V stem moves through Voice to N, where the complex V-Voice-N is pronounced relocation :

The tree in (38) spells out the internal structure of the NP complement of V in the higher position. I assume that NPs can have a K(ase) head merged with them. In English, this head is only spelled out on non-pronominal NPs when the case that is assigned to the NP is genitive. In that case, K is spelled out as of . In Spec-VoiceP, the NP is sufficiently local to N for N to assign genitive case, and K is accordingly spelled out as of . 12

Turning to a raising to object example, in (39), everything is exactly the same, except that the NP that moves and gets assigned genitive case starts as the specifier of the lower TP, rather than the complement of the V:

Once again, the subject of the non-finite clause is not close enough to the case assigner, so it has to move. The case assigner, N, takes Voice as its complement, so the embedded subject has to move to Spec-VoiceP, as indicated. Voice again needs to be given an [EPP] feature. As for the heads involved, the V moves through Voice to N, where V-Voice-N are pronounced as declaration . As with relocation , the NP that is assigned genitive case has a K merged with it, which is pronounced of when assigned genitive case. 13

As mentioned above, outside of raising the internal arguments of nominalizations are not obligatory. If they are dropped, they are interpreted as definite and need to be pragmatically identifiable, just like the objects of verbs like win and notice . Since this is something common to all nominalizations and is not related to the verb involved, it must be specified by the nominalizing head, N in the structure above. Let us consider how this might work. There does not appear to be a null argument in the syntax in such cases, because it cannot be modified by a secondary predicate, unlike null internal arguments in recipe contexts:

In the analysis of passives and nominalizations in Bruening ( 2013 ), the argument of Voice is allowed to remain unprojected just when Voice combines with a head with the right properties, for instance a Pass(ive) head or the nominalizing head. Pass and the nominalizing head are able to satisfy the selectional requirements of Voice without it actually projecting an argument (see Bruening 2013 for a formalization). In the case of the internal argument of the verb, the verb appears to be too far away from the nominalizing head for it to perform this function. Take an example like the relocation , with no overt internal argument (but one which is pragmatically identifiable). I assume that the internal argument is simply not projected:

I will assume that the argument of the stem relocate is allowed to remain unprojected just because the V moves through Voice to N. At that point it combines locally with N. The N head checks off the so-far unsatisfied selectional requirement of the V (again, see Bruening 2013 for a formalization of this checking), and specifies that the unprojected argument of V is definite. As this is a property of the abstract nominalizing head N, N can do this with any V stem it combines with (even when it is pronounced as something other than -tion ).

This will not work with a raising clause, however. In (39), if the argument of the V stem declare is not projected, then there will be no clause and no subject of that clause. There will simply be a pragmatically identifiable proposition. It will be impossible to have an NP without projecting the TP that the NP started in. This is why the non-finite clause can never be dropped, leaving the NP behind. It will also be impossible to have TP without a subject for that TP: the nominalizing head N does not combine with the head that projects the embedded subject, so it cannot check off the selectional requirements of that head. This is why it is also not possible to drop the NP argument, leaving just the non-finite clause. Thus, we explain why argument drop is never possible with raising.

Finally, note that VP in the structures here provides an adjunction site for adverbs, yielding examples like the relocation of the refugees forcibly and God’s declaration of them so forcefully to be wrong . In my judgment, such adverbs are acceptable with nominalizations derived from VPs, but are not acceptable with underived nouns. So *his claim so forcefully that cheetahs are not cats is not acceptable. In this my judgments accord with those reported in Fu et al. ( 2001 ). These judgments have been disputed by Newmeyer ( 2009 ) and Ackema & Neeleman ( 2002: 119, (41) ), both of whom present examples of putatively underived nouns that also permit adverbs. Newmeyer’s examples all seem to be derived nouns, while Ackema and Neeleman’s examples are all unacceptable in my judgment (and the judgments of other speakers I have asked). I will have to leave full exploration of this matter to future research, but I will provide some data that I think indicate that derived nominals can be modified by adverbs while underived nominals cannot. Consider the following contrasting sets, using underived nouns that can be eventive from Newmeyer ( 2009 ) and Lieber ( 2016 ): 14

Bruening ( 2013 ) also claims that certain PP adjuncts like instrumentals and subject-oriented comitatives are acceptable with derived nominals, but not with underived nominals. If this is correct, it would again corroborate the presence of VP structure within nominalizations.

Fu et al. ( 2001 ) also claim that nominals derived from VPs can serve as the antecedent for the VP anaphor do so , but underived nominals cannot. They take this to also indicate that nominals derived from verbs include VP structure within them. It does indeed appear that there is a contrast along these lines. All of the attested examples that I have found of nominals anteceding do so involve derived nominals:

While the matter may not be settled yet, it appears to me that the weight of the existing evidence points to the presence of VP structure within derived nominals, exactly as in the analysis proposed here.

3.3 Summary

I have argued here that raising requires a syntactic account, not a lexical one, and I have also spelled out a minimal syntactic analysis of nominalization that is compatible with a syntactic account of raising. We can do without lexical processes altogether, and move in the direction of a more parsimonious theory, with only one component of grammar and not two.

4 Defending a syntactic account of nominalizations: coordination

One argument that has been presented against syntactic accounts of nominalizations like the one outlined above is that nominalizations of verbs can be coordinated with underived nouns and share arguments with them ( Wechsler 2008 ; Müller & Wechsler 2014 ). However, all the examples that I have been able to find (both in the literature and in corpora) involve coordination of derived nouns, like the following: 15

In fact, coordination of derived nouns and truly underived nouns seems to be ungrammatical:

It is possible that this incompatibility is semantic in nature, and so I will not make anything of it here.

However, Wechsler ( 2008 ) presents examples like those in (47) as problematic for specific accounts of nominalizations which ascribe very different structures to nominalizations like destruction and gerunds derived with -ing , like looting (e.g., Marantz 1997 ). The first response to this argument is that it is only an argument against accounts that treat -tion and -ing nominalizations very differently. Other syntactic accounts may not be subject to this criticism. For instance, we could give -ing nominalizations the exact same account as -tion nominalizations in (39), only with -ing in place of -tion . (An issue for such an account is that -ing nominalizations, unlike -tion nominalizations, permit particles but do not permit the logical object to appear as a prenominal possessor. An analysis that treated them the same would have to explain these differences.)

The second, and more important, response to this argument is that there is evidence for an ellipsis account of coordination with argument sharing as in (47). For example, such coordinations can antecede elements that require plurals, as shown in (49):

The NPs here have the same interpretation as the hiring of faculty members into tenured positions and the promotion of faculty members into tenured positions , and the soldiers’ destruction of their home and the soldiers’ looting of their home . This points to an ellipsis account, with deletion of shared material in the first conjunct. See Chaves ( 2008 ) on this point with apparent coordination of word parts, and a deletion analysis. If a coordinate ellipsis account is correct, then coordination is not problematic for any syntactic theory of nominalizations. It is possible to give destruction a very different analysis from that given to a gerund like looting , and still have them coordinate, because the analysis will have full phrases in each conjunct ( the [destruction of their home] and [looting of their home] ).

I conclude that coordination is not problematic for any syntactic account of nominalization, contra claims in the Lexicalist literature. This clears the way for a purely syntactic account of word formation.

5 Conclusion

Since Chomsky ( 1970 ), it has been accepted that raising is ungrammatical in nominalizations, and some have argued that this points to a Lexicalist conception of grammar, with distinct components for word formation and phrasal syntax. I have shown here that this is not correct: raising to subject and raising to object are both grammatical in nominalizations. I have also argued that raising is better treated syntactically, as a lexical analysis cannot explain the need for a lower clause for a raised NP to have raised out of. This is true in both clauses and nominalizations: a raising to object interpretation is not possible without the full phrasal syntax to support it. This points to a purely syntactic account. We then also need a syntactic account of nominalizations. Recent arguments against such accounts from coordination were shown not to go through, since coordination requires an ellipsis analysis and so is compatible with fully phrasal analyses.

More generally, the results of this study point to a model of grammar where there is only one combinatorial component, not two. We can do without a lexical component altogether, and analyze everything, including word formation, with the phrasal syntax.

Additional File

The additional file for this article can be found as follows:

Experimental items for the acceptability survey. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.470.s1

• References for the Lexicalist approach include, among many others, Chomsky ( 1970 ), Jackendoff ( 1972 ), Aronoff ( 1976 ), Lapointe ( 1980 ), Bresnan ( 1982b ), Kiparsky ( 1982 ), Simpson ( 1983 ), Mohanan ( 1986 ), Di Sciullo & Williams ( 1987 ), Bresnan & Mchombo ( 1995 ). Some more recent defenses of Lexicalism include Ackema & Neeleman ( 2004 ), Williams ( 2007 ), Newmeyer ( 2009 ), Müller ( 2013 ), Müller & Wechsler ( 2014 ). [ ^ ]
• References for the purely syntactic approach include, among others, Sadock ( 1980 ), Baker ( 1985 ), Sproat ( 1985 ), Lieber ( 1988 ; 1992 ), Hale & Keyser ( 1993 ), Halle & Marantz ( 1993 ), Marantz ( 1997 ), Borer ( 2005 ; 2013 ), Bruening ( 2014 ; 2018 ). [ ^ ]
• Actually, Chomsky and Kayne only addressed one of Postal’s counterexamples, examples like John’s tendency to leave . Postal produced several other counterexamples. These include Nixon’s likelihood of being reelected is minimal (328, (23b)), which Postal judged marginal, Nationalist China’s continuation as a Security Council member (330, (31)), cancer’s persistence as a frightening killer (328, (32–33)), the bomb’s failure to go off (354, (84)) on the raising to subject side, and your estimate of Bob’s weight to be/as being 200 pounds (348, (71)), your recognition of him as (being) the outstanding living malingerer (352, (77b)) on the raising to object side. I believe Postal to be correct that these are genuine examples of raising within nominalizations. Additionally, a recent publication ( Lieber 2016: 50 ) cites two attested examples of raising to subject: the adolescent’s tendency to feel invulnerable and his only child’s failure to marry . Lieber ( 2016 ) also calls into question many other claims that have been made about nominalizations in the syntactic literature (especially those from Grimshaw 1990 ). [ ^ ]
• When I have presented this material, multiple linguists have told me that they never really agreed with Chomsky’s judgments on raising to subject in (1b). With raising to object, Chomsky and others simply did not try enough verbs. [ ^ ]
• This was the scale that was provided with the free tools described in Gibson et al. ( 2011 ). Participants were not told what was meant by “(un)natural.” This is an area where the experimental setup could certainly be improved, but on the other hand, the results gleaned from using these tools indicate that participants are doing what the experimenters want them to (rate intuitive acceptability). [ ^ ]
• Mixed models that include subjects and items as random effects lead to different results depending on how they are set up. The one thing they all agree on is that the interaction between the two factors is significant. They differ on whether there are any main effects. [ ^ ]
• One might think from some of these examples that acceptability with of correlates with acceptability of the passive. For instance, most of the corresponding verbs in (15) cannot passivize. However, the house was surrounded by trees is acceptable (as an adjectival passive, at least). Conversely, NPs raised to object are fine as passivized subjects in clauses, although they are degraded with of to different degrees. [ ^ ]
• An anonymous reviewer offers the alternative suggestion that of , unlike for , strongly prefers to case-mark its sister and does not like to case-mark the specifier of its sister. In the analysis I propose below, of is just a marker of genitive case and is not a case assigner, so I cannot adopt this suggestion. [ ^ ]
• This is exactly like phrasal idioms like eat crow (‘be humiliated by having to admit being wrong’). No one would say that the fact that eat by itself cannot mean what eat crow does shows that the object of eat is obligatory. [ ^ ]
• I assume that missing complements are not present in the syntax at all. This is why neither the NP nor the complement clause can be dropped while the other is present. If the non-finite clause is missing, there was nothing for the NP to have raised out of. If the NP is missing, the non-finite clause is missing a subject, which violates both selectional requirements and the EPP in the lower clause. See below. [ ^ ]
• Pollard & Sag ( 1994: note 43 ) do state that VP ellipsis has to be treated differently from argument drop (or “null complement anaphora”). However, it is not clear that it is even possible to formulate a process of VP ellipsis in HPSG—which generally eschews null structure—in such a way that it can avoid violating the Raising Principle. The analysis of VP ellipsis in Sag et al. ( 2003: 416–419 ), for instance, seems to directly violate the Raising Principle. Moreover, Pollard & Sag 1994 go on to treat infinitival to as a raising verb exactly like seems , on their page 143, example (124). If to and other auxiliaries are raising verbs, there is no way their complements can be elided without violating the Raising Principle. Yet, as we see in (34a), the complement of to can be null. [ ^ ]
• I indicate the lower copy as also having of . I view the NP as starting with unvalued case features, which will only be pronounced as of once they are valued as genitive in the higher position. However, given that all copies in a movement chain are formally the same item, once the features are valued on the highest copy, they are valued on all lower copies as well. This is why I indicate the presence of of even in the lower copy. [ ^ ]
• It should be noted that expletives like there , one of the primary diagnostics of raising, are not possible in nominalizations when they are marked with of or with genitive’s (* acknowledgment of there to be dissent , * there’s likelihood to be protests ). Postal ( 1974: 325 ) suggests that this is due to a surface restriction against such NPs being marked with genitive case. Expletives are grammatical in nominalizations (gerunds) when they receive a different case ( there being likely to be vs. *there’s being likely to be ), so it does not appear that there is anything that blocks expletives in nominalizations in general. [ ^ ]
• Payne et al. ( 2010 ) show that certain types of adverbs can freely modify both derived and underived nouns. However, the semantic classes of adverbs that can do this are different from the manner and act-related adverbs at issue here, which seem to indicate a contrast. These types of adverbs are missing from corpora, as Payne et al. ( 2010 ) show, but it appears that a significant number of speakers judge them to be acceptable just with nouns derived from verbs. [ ^ ]

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of Glossa .

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.

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Home Supplements Book reviews 2020 Ingo Plag, Word-Formation in Engl...

Ingo Plag , Word-Formation in English (2 nd Edition)

Word-Formation in English , Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics, 2018. ISBN: 978-1-316-62329-9 , Price: £30.99, 245 pages.

1. General observations

1 Ingo Plag is Professor of English Linguistics at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. He has published articles in specialized journals like Linguistics , Language or English Language and Linguistics and in works like the Yearbook of Morphology [2001], Word-Formation: An International Handbook of the Languages of Europe [2016] or Word Knowledge and Word Usage: A Cross-Disciplinary Guide to the Mental Lexicon [2017]. He is the author of Morphological Productivity: Structural Constraints in English Derivation [1999]. Word-Formation in English was first published in 2003. The phrase “Word-Formation” emphasizes the author’s aim, which is to specify from a morphological point of view the main processes at work in the creation of words.

2 In the Preface to the Second Edition (p. xi), the author, who dedicates his book to his team, states the reasons why an update was required:

In particular, the work with Laurie Bauer and Shelly Lieber on The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology , published in 2013, showed me that certain concepts and theoretical notions needed to be reconceived and modernized in the light of the new evidence that had become available by that time.

3 In the Preface to the First Edition (p. xiii-xiv), which has also been included, he already mentioned the help he had received from his colleagues and the hints that had been provided by his students. The book was dedicated to his “academic teacher, mentor, and friend, Professor Rüdiger Zimmerman”. You also learn that his main source of inspiration was “a review article on Katamba’s morphology textbook” written in 1999 by Joel N. Nevis and John T. Stonham. His belief is that “everyone is a linguist, even if it is sometimes hard work (for both teachers and students) to unearth this talent”.

4 The new version of Word-Formation in English will be of interest to you if you wish to study one of the main linguistic processes which come into play in any language, whether you be a learner who wants to acquire the basic notions of morphology or a specialist whose desire it is read about the latest research. If you are willing to further your knowledge, other works belonging to the same series, “Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics”, deal with topics pertaining to domains such as semantics, syntax, phonetics and phonology, dialectology and varieties of English, pragmatics and grammar, language acquisition, the construction of meaning, as well as the main theories.

2. Linguistic framework

5 The author makes it clear that the approach chosen, whose goals are explicitly practical, does not rely on a specific linguistic theory, but favours the references which seem the most appropriate according to the topic at issue. Readers are thus invited to discover the latest findings and select the points of view they like best, which means that they cannot feel constrained by any analytical bias.

3. Synopsis of the book

6 From pages 1 to 3, the “Introduction: What This Book Is about and How It Can Be Used” states the topic straight away and gives all necessary instructions to readers. While taking stock of the universal situation in which words are taken for granted, the author wonders about the creativity at work in “word-formation”. He also ponders on the nature of the relationship between simple words and complex words. The intended readership is mainly of undergraduate level since all the explanations are provided for the student to become autonomous in their “own analyses of English (or other languages’) complex words” (p. 1). As no particular theoretical framework has been selected, the use of the textbook depends on what the teacher, student or general reader is looking for.

7 There are three parts: chapters 1 to 3 correspond to the definitions of “basic notions”, chapters 4 to 6 are descriptive and deal with “different kinds of word-formation processes in English” while chapter 7 is focused on “the role of phonology in word-formation and the nature of word-formation rules”. The introduction ends on a humorous note with the mention of the term t eachees , which arouses the reader’s curiosity: you will undoubtedly want to find out more about this noun and ask yourself whether it is “a possible word of English” or not. Starting with an example, a concrete one, is a good way of concluding this brief introduction, which is remarkable for its clarity: no jargon is used, essential definitions are already given so you understand that more complex paragraphs are to be found afterwards. The author’s point is to make a good impression on the reader, who hopefully will not be deterred from going on studying each chapter.

8 The only question you might ask yourself is why the refusal to choose a particular theoretical framework has not been justified from the outset: is it because according to Ingo Plag none really achieves its aims or relies on precise enough concepts? Or is it on account of his wish to let practice prevail over theory so that readers might be trained in carrying out linguistic analyses? Does he think that it is better to propose several approaches which, to some extent, complement one another or does he prefer to give you the opportunity to select the one you like best? In which case, you may deduce that open-mindedness might be the reason for such an absence.

9 The seven chapters, which go from the general to the particular, from the most accessible to the most complex data, feature in the table of contents on pages vii, viii and ix. They all follow the same pattern: an “outline” at the top of the page announces key definitions, which are explained in detail in the multiple analyses that are carried out before a “summary” is included at the end. A few lines on “further reading” are then added as well as some exercises adapted to the basic and advanced levels. Thanks to that overall layout, it is easy to understand how the transitions operate from one chapter to the next and all the more so since the logical links between the various linguistic issues are obvious: the presentation of “Basic Concepts” (chap. 1) leads to “Studying Complex Words” (chap. 2), “Productivity and the Mental Lexicon” (chap. 3), “Affixation” (chap. 4) , “Derivation without Affixation” (chap. 5) and “Compounding” (chap. 6), to end with “Theoretical Issues: Modeling Word-Formation” (chap. 7). The telegraphic style used in the heads and subheads, which are made up of one word or more, enables readers to immediately get a clear idea of what the textbook is all about. It soon becomes manifest too that theory is not the main focus, the last chapter serving as a conclusion since “Answer Key to Exercises” is to be found right after the summary of Chapter 7.

10 The ‘References’ section covers nine pages, but it is not so long as to disorientate readers. The selection that is presented is a medley of books, articles in paper format and online articles in alphabetical order with an obvious emphasis on the English language, especially “General American English” (p. 2), and mostly on written English. It may be regrettable that the great variety of resources you have at your disposal has not been divided into categories, either according to the nature of the reference, to the thematic content or to the degree of specialization involved so that a beginner and a specialist might have known which items are most suitable for them. A distinction could have been established between firstly general introductions to morphology reflecting various schools of thought as well as their theoretical frameworks and secondly more specialized material, to end with the most highly complex works.

Another possibility might have been to introduce them chapter by chapter since themes have been predetermined in their succession and all the more so because bibliographical advice is given at the end of each chapter of the book.

11 Nevertheless, the comparative studies between British and American English or between Italian, German and other languages are of interest, as well as the fact that phonology has been taken into account so that oral English has not been forgotten (cf. Mari Ostendorf, Patti Price and Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, for instance). Behavioural studies (cf. Robert A. Rescorla and Allen R. Wagner) as well as those focused on “theories of associative learning in animals” (cf. John M. Pearce and Mark E. Bouton) have also been added so that, all in all, you are provided with a wealth of seminal works.

12 The three-page Subject Index is very useful if you are looking for a definition, as are the two-page Affix Index and the two-page Author Index. We can guess that it is for clarity’s sake that the Affix Index has not been included in the Subject Index. That way, it is easier to flip through the book and find a precise reference.

4. Detailed presentation of each chapter

4.1. chapter 1.

13 If you are what the author calls “a novice”, you would be well-advised to read the first chapter, which is the shortest one. Otherwise it will be difficult for you to understand the others. The author establishes very useful distinctions between crucial linguistic terms and resorts to visual props like tree diagrams or words above and below curly brackets to help you navigate through the transitions, temporary conclusions and numbered examples. The latter illustrate key rules and exceptions, the special cases being naturally of particular interest.

14 Yet, what is a little confusing is the use of the term “grammatical word” for walk in (a) “Franky walked to Hollywood every morning.”, (b) “You’ll never walk alone.”, (c) “Patricia had a new walking stick.” in Exercise 1.1 page 18 and in the Answer Key page 198. What Ingo Plag means by such a phrase is nevertheless explained there: “walked in (a) is a grammatical word because it is a verb that is specified for tense, in this case past second person”. This categorization does not correspond to the one normally used in phonology for instance where “grammatical words” are defined as tools in contrast to lexical words which,like the verb walk , bear informative content.

15 The phonological transcription [oʊ] instead of /əʊ/ for <o> in NATO is derived from the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English like all the other transcriptions as the author writes page 8, but it is not the typical IPA one. This is a recurrent phenomenon throughout the book. What is more surprising is the following statement: “[bi] could refer to two different ‘words,’ e.g. bee and be” (p. 8). In fact, <bee> is usually transcribed as /'bi:/ and only the strong form of be would correspond to it.

16 The sentence “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” (p. 8) is not always true because it is only the case for some words. For instance, we cannot say “*the house big” although some attributive adjectives like “present” can be placed after the noun. The assertion “in ‘yes/no’ questions, the auxiliary verb does not occur in its usual position but is moved to the beginning of the sentence” (p. 8) is a little confusing too because it is based on the premise that the assertion is the starting-point. The deduction “Hence the auxiliary verb must be a word. Thus syntactic criteria can help to determine the wordhood of a given entity.” (p. 8) also seems to be misleading: does it mean that as a consequence a lexical verb, which can never be put before the subject, would not be a word?

17 The comparative analyses between English and German offer you the possibility to understand better the specificity of the former while the variety of language-users ranging from the illiterate to the experts is also taken into account. Hence, tangible facts inevitably prevail over assumptions and valid criteria are set. That is why the phonological, semantic, and syntactic approaches are preferred to “orthography only” as is the one based on the “internal integrity rule” (p. 5). The opposition between written and oral English, which both allow the speaker to reach for particular stylistic effects, also plays a role in the description of compounds or creations, which are obviously the main issue.

18 The definitions of lexemes, homophones, morphologically complex words, and morphemes whether bound or free, are followed by the distinction which is established between roots, stems or bases, between roots in general and bound roots in particular. The terms “affix”, “prefix”, “suffix” and “infix” are made clear while the study of derivatives implies having a look at the “mechanisms that regulate the distribution of affixes and bases” and determine the “combinatorial properties of morphemes” (p. 11). “Concatenation” vs. “non-concatenative ways to form morphologically complex words” then come under scrutiny as does the process of “conversion, zero-suffixation or transposition” (p. 12), which takes place for instance between noun and verb (eg. walk ). You will learn more about truncation, clipping (p. 12), blends (p. 13), acronyms and abbreviations (p. 13) as well as about the contrast between inflection and derivation (p. 13-17), which respectively involve word-forms as opposed to lexemes. “Non-transparent formations” are also at stake within derivational morphology as are the restrictions applying to the possible combinations.

4.2. Chapter 2

19 The morpheme, which is “a unit of form and meaning” (p. 20), was studied in the previous chapter, but now the author wishes to focus on the theoretical “problems of the mapping of form and meaning” (p. 20). The aim is to differentiate a derived word from a complex word as opposed to a simplex word (p. 26), and from “a compositional linguistic expression” (p. 26). Ingo Plag also goes back to the notion of “conversion” and the question of the “presence of a zero-morph” while broaching truncation again and introducing “extended exponence” (p. 23) to show that morphemes are discontinuous (p. 24). As far as monomorphemic words like “prefer” are concerned, according to him, morphology should be viewed independently of etymology. Several pages, which are devoted to verbs and “their nominalizing suffix[es]” (p. 26), feature references to the literature on the subject, which leads the author to favour “a gradient view of morphological complexity” (p. 27) as suggested by Laurie Bauer, Rochelle Lieber and Ingo Plag in The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology [2013]. The statement “It can thus be argued that government is morphologically less complex than for example, assessment or improvement whose phonological and semantic behavior is fully predictable from the morphemes that make up these words” (p. 27) is intriguing since you may feel that it is precisely the opposite: is not government more complex in fact since one of its pronunciations, /'gʌvm F nt/, is less predictable just like its pointing to “the people who govern” and not to the “action or result of governing”, as in the other two nouns quoted?

20 The study of the complementary distribution of adjectival suffixes -al and -ar and of the “morpho-phonological alternations” (p. 30) is instructive. When zooming in on the prefix un- , you will learn about the existence of three prefixes: the de-adjectival, denominal and deverbal one, and about the restrictions that apply (p. 31-35). The notion of complementarity then proves useful and the word-formation rule that is suggested can only be a tentative one at that stage: as the author remarks, “the task of the morphologist would be to find out more about the exact nature of the restrictions mentioned in the rules” (p. 36). For instance, the -th suffix does not make it possible to create new words through the process known in linguistics as “analogy” (p. 37). In back-formation, words are analogically derived by deleting a suffix (or supposed suffix)” as with the verb edit which was derived from the noun editor (p. 38). And in the case of multiple affixation (p. 39), parasynthetic forms may be encountered such as decaffeinate (p. 41).

21 Regarding the statement “the verb interview does not mean ‘view between’ but something like ‘have a (formal) conversation’” (p. 21), one could remark that originally people were supposed to see each other to be able to talk together before the introduction of technical devices that enable users to communicate with each other or with one another from a distance. Page 21, the distinction between “phonetic” and “phonological” forms should have been explained to those of the readers who are students. Page 31, the phrase “the hypothesis is falsified” (p. 31) might have been worded with the help of the adjective “false” instead, as in “results that could potentially falsify the initial hypotheses” (p. 43) where the meaning rather seems to be that of the verbs to contradict or to undermine. In the key to exercise 2.5 on pages 205-206, it could have been added that semantically speaking both ingenious and indifferent differ from all the other adjectives on the list because they are not the antonyms of different or * genious .

22 When it comes to phonology, the transcription [ʌnh ӕ p q ] with j as exponent at the end (p. 21) is not the usual IPA one, neither is that of fall vs. fell ([ɔ]  [ ε ]) (p. 23) where the IPA symbols should have been /ɔ:/ and /e/. And ought not the definite article <the> in isolation have been transcribed as /'ði:/ instead of [ði] (p. 28)? Ingo Plag also declares that in the verb explain “the first syllable of the base is pronounced [ ε k] instead of [ q k]” (p. 29), but in Jones’s pronouncing dictionary for instance, we can find both transcriptions: / q k'sple q n/ and /ek'sple q n/. The sentence “the insertion of [ F ] with words ending in [t] and [d] (mended, attempted) can be analyzed as a case of dissimilation” (p. 29) is odd considering that the usual pronunciation of <-ed> in those words is / q d/. The definition “One of the two allomorphs occurs when a consonant follows, the other when a vowel follows” (p. 28) is problematic because it should have read: “when a consonant sound / when a vowel sound follows”. Otherwise how would it be possible to account for such examples as “the university”, where the definite article is pronounced /ð F / and “a union” where it is not <an> which is used, /j/ being the first sound that is heard and a consonant one at that, although in spelling both words start with a vowel? I can also mention the uncommon wording of the phrase “for + verb in -ING” in the sentence “Use tree diagrams for representing the structure…” (p. 43) instead of the usual infinitive “to represent”, which expresses a goal.

4.3. Chapter 3

23 The phrase “the mental Lexicon”, which is introduced and defined page  in Chapter 1, is an interesting one: it is eye-catching and raises several questions. For instance, to what extent is it different from what we usually conceive of as the lexicon? The notion of “productivity”, of a word-formation rule especially, leads Ingo Plag to focus on the affix: what are the mechanisms that determine whether an affix is productive or not? The distinction between “possible and actual words” (p. 45) based on the study of “semantically transparent forms” (p. 46), whose meaning is predictable, implies examining some counter-examples like knowledgeable and probable (p. 47) which do not respectively mean “can be knowledged” and “can be probed”. Concerning “complex words in the lexicon” (p. 47), it is stimulating to see how the brain processes them, which allows for “psycholinguistic arguments” (p. 51), and to factor in the role played by “frequency of occurrence”.

24 Scrutinizing the measure of productivity and the factors that come into play in the process involves analyzing neologisms, hapaxes and “extent of use” as defined in 1993 by Harald R. Baayen in On Frequency, Transparency and Productivity (p. 54). In so doing, the author should have established a clearer distinction between “neologisms”, “new words” and “hapaxes” although he states page 54 that “a hapax legomenon […] could […] simply be a rare word of the language (instead of a newly coined derivative) or some weird ad-hoc invention by an imaginative speaker” (p. 55) and a few pages later that “a new word is created to give a name to a new concept or thing” (p. 59). A few concrete examples given from the outset pages 54-55 would have made the demonstration more effective. The restrictions to productivity that pertain to phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics may be influenced by usage-based factors too. Homonymy or synonymy blocking (p. 63) is related to “the principle of ambiguity avoidance” (p. 63), which is why Ingo Plag presents “type-blocking and token-blocking” as defined in 1988 by Franz Rainer in Towards a Theory of Blocking , although he does not agree on the former notion (p. 67).

25 As far as the style of writing is concerned, it is strange to see the recurring use of the for + -ING phrase in “For illustrating the frequencies of derived words in a language corpus, let us…” (p. 50). The expression “in short” could have been used in “Hapax legomena (or hapaxes for short)” (p. 54). Page 66, a question mark has been added before the word decentness whereas pages 64-65 it is not the case, which is a little confusing because the status of this noun might seem uncertain to some readers. The nouns discoursiveness and discoursivity (p. 67) should have been spelt discursiveness and discursivity .

4.4. Chapter 4

26 The question of knowing whether an affix is “a bound or free morpheme” is answered thanks to the example of compounds, which implies the distinction between an affix and a bound root. The latter term is here more precisely defined than in Chapter 1, as “neoclassical elements”, also called “combining forms”, are introduced in detail (p. 72). According to Ingo Plag, they should be considered to be compounds and not “cases of affixation”. You will learn more about the large databases available to researchers and the ‘Advanced search’ options on the OED website with the example of <-ment> (p. 73-77). The general properties of English affixation, be they phonological, morphological or semantic, are investigated with the example of the Latinate affixes as compared to those of Germanic origin. The chapters on prosodic structure are a little more complex to grasp although it might interest you to know more about the differences between the non-native suffixes, which tend to be vowel-initial, and the native ones, which tend to be consonant-initial (p. 79). An in-depth presentation of nominal (p. 87), verbal (p. 92), adjectival (p. 94) and adverbial suffixes (p. 97) follows, which has required extensive research, like the following review of prefixes. Yet, instead of devoting one paragraph or more to each of these affixes, it might have been a good idea to present them in a series of tables. Readers could have compared them at a glance and would have been able to memorize them more easily. The layout is thus intended for specialists rather than for students who just want to check an affix or two.

27 The acceptations provided for the adjectives economic vs. economical are profitable vs. money-saving (p. 96), but the former also has the meaning of “related to economics”. As far as the -ive suffix is concerned (p. 97), about which Ingo Plag writes that “some forms feature the variant -ative without an existing verb in -ate: argumentative quantitative, representative”, the exception preventative might have been added. Page 99, -im , -il and -ir should have been included in the paragraph about -in because among the examples mentioned are the adjectives implausible , illegal and irregular . Page 100, -ir should have featured in the paragraph on non- because of the example of irrational . The transcription [lɛss] (p. 72) for less does not follow the IPA rules, neither do those of obscene and obscenity , obsc[i]ne, obsc[ɛ]nity, (p. 92) or of produce , [djus] (p. 97), but these are a consequence of the author’s choice, as quoted above.

4.5. Chapter 5

28 This chapter deals with “non-affixational word-formation processes” like conversion, truncated names, -y diminutives, clippings, blends, abbreviations and acronyms (p. 106). The first question is that of the “directionality” of conversion between verb and noun, which is taken up from a previous chapter. Ingo Plag refers to the history of language to show that derived words are generally semantically more complex than their bases “since affixes normally add a certain meaning to the meaning of the base” (p. 107). It is appropriate to mention that the frequency of occurrence is lower for derived words but as far as “ring” is concerned page 107, the semantics of “rang” could have been detailed line 2 in the column entitled “meaning”. The role of inflection and, notably in the case of phrasal verbs, of stress is studied at length (p. 108), but for clarity’s sake it might have been better to mention a “particle” instead of a “preposition” in column 3b on the very same page. The topic of “conversion or zero-affixation or the overt analogue criterion” (Gerald Sanders [1988:160-161]) is then broached by Ingo Plag, who says that there is no basis for “the assumption of a zero-affix” (p. 111), insisting that conversion should be viewed as “non-affixational” (p. 112). According to him, this process is morphological and not syntactic except in adjectives notably used when referring to “persons collectively” (p. 114). An exception such as * the pretty might have been on the list drawn up page 113, to compare it to the beautiful for instance, which does not imply a class of people.

29 The author then expands on prosodic morphology, which was already introduced in Chapter 4, to examine truncated names as well as -y diminutives and clippings from a phonological point of view (p. 115-120). Clipped compounds also known as blends, whose shapes are “crucially constrained by prosodic categories” (p. 122), are subject to three types of restrictions: syllable structure, size and stress. The chapter, which makes good reading, ends with abbreviations and acronyms, both categories being better-known to the general reader (p. 124), although “the question of whether abbreviations are new lexemes or simply new surface forms, i.e. allomorphs, of the same lexeme” is more complex. According to Ingo Plag, the abbreviation differs from the base word semantically speaking because it has a connotation that is related to a social meaning as we can see in START and SALT. That is why he asserts that abbreviations can be markers of social identity.

4.6. Chapter 6

30 This chapter is devoted to the ways of recognizing compounds, compounding being defined by the author as “the most productive type of word-formation process in English”, but also as “the most controversial one in terms of its linguistic analysis” (p. 131). Compounds are not always made up of two words only, yet it is demonstrated that it is generally possible to analyze polymorphemic words as “hierarchical structures involving binary (i.e. two-member) subelements”. The property of recursivity (p. 133) is useful when dealing with compounds, each being “a word that consists of two elements, the first of which is either a root, a word or a phrase, the second of which is either a root or a word” (p. 134). A possible classification is based on the syntactic nature of the head, which determines the major properties of a compound: it can be a noun, a verb or an adjective. What is stimulating too is the notion of semantic head to be found either inside the compound in the case of an “endocentric compound” or outside it in the case of an “exocentric compound” as well as the mention of “canonical and non-canonical compounds” suggested by Laurie Bauer (p. 135). The “coordinative compounds” as Laurie Bauer calls them, which may be “exceptions to the binarity constraint” are divided into three classes: “appositional, additive or compromise compounds” (p. 140). You are provided with keys to interpreting and analyzing nominal compounds thanks to the linguistic notion of argument: Ingo Plag believes that in argumentative compounds, the left element is an argument of the head (p. 143). He is convinced that:

the interpretation of compounds depends on the possible conceptual and semantic properties of the nouns involved and how these properties can be related to create compositional meaning in compounds. (p. 144)

31 With noun-noun compounds, the interpretation depends on “the argument structure of the head, the semantics of the two nouns, the possible conceptual relationship between the two nouns, and on the surrounding discourse” (p. 145). Stress in adjectival, verbal and neoclassical compounds, especially in relation to informativity (p. 148), is also detailed as well as the special case of “triconstituent compounds” (p. 149) before the problem of compounding as pertaining to syntax or morphology is tackled.

4.7. Chapter 7

32 This chapter is much more abstract so it is rather intended for specialists who would like to check whether an overall theory of word-formation is possible (p. 162), its criteria being according to Ingo Plag “falsifiability”, “internal consistency”, “elegance”, “explicitness” and “empirical adequacy” (p. 163). He says it could be built around “the interaction of phonology and morphology”, “the ordering of affixes in multiply affixed words” along with “the form and nature of word-formation rules” (p. 163). That is how he comes to define degemination (p. 164) and in the context of generative grammar, to ponder the theories of “lexical phonology” and “stratal phonology”. He is particularly interested in the ways an affix might be selected by a base so that “base-driven” or “affix-driven restrictions” can be specified (p. 172). Morphological complexity can be construed with reference to Jennifer Hay as “a psycholinguistically real notion which heavily relies on the segmentability of affixes”, compared to other theories which are founded exclusively on “structural distributional evidence” (p. 173). Four theories are hinted at in relation to “the form and nature of word-formation rules”: the morpheme-based approach, the word-based approach, analogy – as in dieselgate which is modelled on Watergate – and Naive Discriminative Learning . According to Ingo Plag, the first one is “especially suited for the analysis of affixational morphology but there are problems with non-affixational processes” (p. 181). The second one has a lot in common with it as it also stems from the belief that “words are created by applying some abstract patterns instead of deriving them directly on the basis of other words” (p. 185). When dealing with analogy, more examples could have been provided page 187 especially to illustrate Royal Skousen and Thereon Stanford’s 2007 theory. In the fourth one, which “is based on a well-established theory of learning from cognitive psychology” (p. 188), there are no morphemes and no morphological boundaries. This is where the author gets even more technical so it might be a little difficult for students to follow.

4.8. Answer Key to Exercises

33 In the Answer Key to Exercises, we might wonder why on page 200 Ingo Plag writes that “Considering the meaning of slow vs. slowly , aggressive vs. aggressively , for example, there is no difference in meaning observable” when we know that the adjective refers to the state of something or someone while the adverb usually refers to the manner of doing something. Page 206, instead of “fill the gaps”, the usual phrase “fill in the blanks” might have been used. Page 210, the stress has been forgotten on the verb absolutize which is quite rare. Page 215, the example of choir with /kw/ for <ch> could have been taken into account since it contradicts the assertion according to which “<ch> is always pronounced [k]” though other examples like church have been given below to illustrate the pronunciation [tʃ]. Page 217, UFO has been transcribed as [jufoʊ] and [ju ε foʊ] and not in IPA as / ֽ ju:ef' F ʊ/. Page 225, no comma features after 2 in 2000 dollars and page 226 Dar.wi.ni.a.ni.sm sounds odd given that the usual term is Darwinism .

34 Although we have to keep in mind that the author does not always choose much when it comes to editing a book, a larger font would have been easier on the eyes, especially as the ink is quite pale and the paper not that white. A blacker shade of ink would have made our reading a lot more comfortable while the text would have looked less compact if lines had been left between paragraphs.

35 On page xv, you will find a list of “Abbreviations and Notational Conventions”, where it is a little confusing to notice that V is the abbreviation of “verb or vowel” while V refers to “the extent of use” defined by Harald R. Baayen as we later learn page 53. Three different symbols might have been preferable, for instance Vb for verb, V for vowel, and E for extent of use. The same goes for P, which stands for “productivity” and for “prepositional”, while “word” is symbolized by “Wd” in “prosodic word, PrWd” but by “W” in “word-formation rule, WFR”. Why not use the same symbol for that keyword? It would have made the abbreviations clearer and more consistent while their use might have been systematized throughout the book, thus enabling readers to memorize them more easily. It would also have become useless to remind them of the author’s choices, for instance page 5 where you can read “(fish brackets are used to indicate spellings, i.e. letters)”, or page 6 “(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)” and page 8 “(throughout the book I will use phonetic transcriptions as given in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English )”, etc. Although the aim is to make everything clear to readers who have skipped page xv, such repetitions or information provided in passing may seem superfluous to those who have not. The use of square brackets for phonetic representation instead of the conventional slashes surrounding IPA symbols is uncommon.

6. Strong points

36 The author is very didactic so “novices” will certainly find a wealth of resources in Word-Formation in English . The keywords are defined at every step and temporary definitions are completed in subsequent chapters so that the student can choose to read one part of the book independently of the others or in the succession Ingo Plag has opted for. The introductory paragraphs and concluding summaries help you memorize content very quickly as well as the numerous templates, tables and graphs.

37 The great asset of the book is the user-oriented approach it reflects: it is particularly intended for intermediate and advanced students, who can apply what they have learned in the very interesting exercises to which a very clear and detailed key has been provided. After perusing Word-Formation in English , they will inevitably become more proficient at linguistics, especially morphology, and will have gleaned a lot of suggestions for future research topics in the field.

Bibliography

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Hay Jennifer & Plag Ingo, 2004, “What constrains possible suffix combinations? On the interaction of grammatical and processing restrictions in derivational morphology”, Natural Language & Linguistic Theory , Volume 22, no.3: 565-596.

Nevis Joel N. & Stonham John T., 1999, “ Learning morphology: what makes a good textbook?” , Language , Volume 75: 801-809.

Ostnedorf Mari, Price Patti & Shattuck - Hufnagel Stefanie, 1995, Boston University radio speech corpus , Philadelphia, Linguistic Data Consortium.

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Plag Ingo & Baayen Harald R., 2009, “Suffix ordering and morphological processing”, Language , Volume 85, no. 1: 109-152.

Plag Ingo & Balling Laura W., 2017, “Derivational morphology : An integrated perspective”, in Pirrelli Vito, Dressler Wolfgang U. & Plag Ingo (Eds.), Word knowledge and word usage: A cross-disciplinary guide to the mental lexicon , Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter.

Plag Ingo, Dalton - Puffer Christiane & Baayen Harald R., 1999, “Morphological productivity across speech and writing”, English Language and Linguistics , Volume 3: 209-228.

Rescorla Robert A. & Wagner Allan R., 1972, “A theory of Pavlovian conditioning: Variations in the effectiveness of reinforcement and nonreinforcement”, in Black Abraham H. & Prokasy William F. (Eds.), Classical conditioning II: Current research and theory , New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts: 64-99.

Sander Gerald, 1988, “Zero derivation and the overt analogon criterion”, in Hammond Michael and Noonan Michael (Eds.), San Diego & London, Academic Press: 155-175.

Skousen Royal & Stanford Thereon, 2007, AM: Parallel, http://humanities.byu.edu/am .

Electronic reference

Cathy Parc , “ Ingo Plag , Word-Formation in English (2 nd Edition) ” ,  Lexis [Online], Book reviews, Online since 06 September 2020 , connection on 20 October 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lexis/4532; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/lexis.4532

About the author

Cathy Parc, ICP, France

Cathy Parc is Senior Lecturer in English at ICP, coordinator of English teaching at the Pôle Langues. She holds a Ph.D. in English Studies from the Sorbonne Université-Paris IV, and has passed the “agrégation” in English with a major in Linguistics. She is the author of Calvin et Hobbes de Bill Watterson. La philosophie du quotidien (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013. ISBN 978-2-343-00054-1. 132 p.), a French translation of Elizabeth Jennings’ s Collected Poems 1953-1985 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014. ISBN 978-2-343-04434-7, EAN 9782343044347. 640 p.), L’anglais du monde politique (Paris: Technip et Ophrys Éditions, Collection anglais de spécialité, 2014. ISBN 978-2-7080-1401-5. ISBN 978-2-7080-1402-2. Vol. 1: 280 p. Vol. 2: 224 p.), and English Words for Economics. Vocabulaire anglais contemporain de l’économie (Paris: Éditions Ellipses, 2015. ISBN 9782340-008373. 384 p.). She has published articles on linguistics and literature, especially poetry, as well as several book reviews in Lexis .

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• Pius Ten Hacken ( ed .) , The Semantics of Compounding [Full text] Cambridge University Press, 2016, 264 pages Published in Lexis , Book reviews
• Cliff Goddard & Anna Wierzbicka , Words and Meanings. Lexical Semantics Across Domains, Languages and Cultures [Full text] Oxford University Press, 2016, 2014, 316 pages Published in Lexis , Book reviews
• Elisabetta Je ž ec , The Lexicon. An Introduction [Full text] Oxford Textbooks in Linguistics, 2016, 234 pages Published in Lexis , Book reviews
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9.1. Word formation processes

Sometimes, new words are added to a language, either due to neologism [niˈɑləd͡ʒɪzm̩ ] (the creation of a new word within the language itself) or due to borrowing (when one language, the recipient language, adapts words or other grammatical features from another language, the donor language).

Taboo avoidance is a special kind of neologism in which a word is replaced (either by a modified pronunciation or by a newly invented word) to avoid an obscene or taboo meaning, such as gosh for God . Taboo meanings are often centred on sexuality, bodily waste, and religion.

In this section, we will be using < and > symbols from historical linguistics to show the historical direction of change. For example, X > Y  means that the older form X was replaced by the newer form Y, while Y < X means the opposite, that the newer form Y originated from the older form X.

One of the most common ways to form new words is by adding new morphemes . There are two main kinds of morphemes, inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes. We will learn more about the difference between them in Chapter 9 , but for now, you can think about the two terms this way: inflectional morphemes add grammatical information to a word, such as plurality or a tense marker, while derivational morphemes create a new word.

Some examples of English derivational processes are shown in Table 1.

As shown by Table 1 examples (c) and (e), you can add more than one derivational morpheme to the same word.

When a grammatical pattern can be extended in predictable manners, it is called productivity . Some derivational morphemes are productive (like -ish ) and others are not (like -ness ), as shown in Table 2. While -ish can be used with all six stems, -ness can only be used with examples (a) to (c). We will discuss productivity more in Chapter 13 .

Another way that a language might acquire new words is through contact with another language.

In borrowing, the borrowed words are called loanwords and are often nativized , which means that the pronunciation, and sometimes the morphology, is changed to match the regular patterns of the recipient language. For example, the Innu word for pancake is tekanep , taken from French des crêpes /dekʀεp/. The determiner des is incorporated into the word, the /d/ is devoiced, /ʀ/ becomes /n/, and a vowel is added to break up the consonant cluster.

Borrowing can happen for a variety of reasons, including prestige (e.g., numerous French and Latin loanwords in academic English) and need (e.g., animal words such as moose, caribou, chipmunk, skunk, opossum , and raccoon have been borrowed into English from Algonquian languages). The direction of borrowing can often be inferred based on knowledge of phonology, sound change, morphology, cognates, real world geography, ecology, cultural differences, history, and so forth. Borrowing often occurs within particular semantic domains (food, religion, politics, and so forth), especially when very different cultures come into contact.

The same source word may take different paths and be borrowed multiple times into the same language. This may be because two languages are in contact over long periods of time and borrow the same word at multiple points in its history, with different pronunciations as the source language undergoes change. It also happens if the same word is borrowed from different dialects or varieties. For example, captain, chef , and chief all originate from caput , the Latin word for ‘head’, via French. Captain and chief were both borrowed in about the 14th century from the Old French words capitaine and chief . Capitaine came from the Latin capitaneus , a derived form of the word caput to mean ‘leader’ rather than ‘head’. Over the next few centuries, the French word chief became chef.  It was then borrowed again into English in the 18th century as part of the phrase chef de cuisine ‘head of the kitchen’.

A calque or loan translation is a specific type of borrowing that includes a direct translation of an idiomatic loanword, rather than a phonological nativization, for example English black market < German Schwarzmarkt, literally ‘black market’.

Root creation

Sometimes a word is invented without basis on any previously existing words, which is called root creation . This happens most often in product naming and fiction. Some examples include google ‘a search engine brand’ or lightsaber ‘a laser sword from the series  Star Wars ‘.  Sometimes, a product name expands to include all similar objects, regardless of brand. This is called genericization . Some examples include kleenex, thermos, or popsicle , which now refer to any facial tissue, double-walled food storage container, or frozen treat on a stick, regardless of brand. However, all three started as brand names originally. The word google is also well on its way in genericization. Do you call it googling even if you’re using a different search engine?

Shortening an existing word is called clipping or truncation , like with math < mathematics , phone < telephone , or flu < influenza .

Sometimes people reanalyze a monomorphemic word to be polymorphemic, and then remove the extra morphemes. This is called backformation . For example, the noun editor existed before the verb edit . However, people misinterpreted the /-əɹ/ ending of editor to be the same as the derivational morpheme -er ‘one who does V’, and assumed that there must be a verb to edit to go with the noun editor . It is impossible to tell whether a word is a backformation without looking up which form came first in an etymological dictionary. Other examples of backformation include haze < hazy , diagnose < diagnosis , or Old English pise ‘pea’ (plural pisan ) > Modern English pea (plural peas ), with the singular formed by stripping of the supposed plural -s in the pise, even though pise was originally singular and had no plural morpheme.

Sometimes new words are coined by combining existing words. If you combine two roots and keep the whole of both roots, you’ve made a compound word , such as rainbow ,  blackboard , or  greenhouse . In contrast, if one or both words is not fully preserved in the resulting form, this is called a blend or portmanteau . Examples of blends include motor hotel > motel , smoke + fog > smog , or breakfast + lunch > brunch .

If you only keep the first letter (or two) of each word in a phrase, it’s an acronym if you pronounce it like a word, as with laser < light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation or radar < radio detecting and ranging . On the other hand, if each letter in the abbreviation is pronounced as a letter, it is known as an initialism or alphabetism . Some examples include FBI > Federal Bureau of Investigation or UK > United Kingdom.

Did you know?

The Internet slang initialism LOL  is claimed to have originated in Canada! Wayne Pearson, an IT consultant from Calgary, claims to have coined it as a teenager on a chatroom for Calgarians in the 1980s.

When a word that already exists is claimed to be an acronym, this is known as a backronym . There has been a recent trend of backronyms going viral on social media, masquerading as the true origin of the word. For example, a false idea now circulating says that  news  stands for  notable events weather and sports , when the term really comes from the word new from the early 15th century. It is best to check an etymological dictionary before clicking “share” on such posts.

Etymological dictionaries

People often guess the history of a word incorrectly, and folk etymologies which are not historically accurate often circulate in communities. Sometimes folk etymologies can even drive language change! For example, penthouse comes from the Old French word apentis  meaning ‘attached building.’ Due to similarity in meaning and pronounciation with the word house , its spelling changed over time to become the modern penthouse .

If you want to know the history of a word, you can look it up in an etymological dictionary. The best etymological dictionary for English is the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The OED is paywalled, but you can likely access it online through your university’s library.

Another good online etymological dictionary to explore is the Online Etymology Dictionary by Douglas Harper. Although it is not technically an academic source, this is a free and reliable etymological dictionary of English.

There are many more etymological dictionaries and other resources out there that cover a wide variety of languages! Check your university library to see what you can find!

Key takeaways

• New words are added to language in a variety of ways. Neologisms can come from other languages, which are called loanwords , they can be formed within the language itself, or they can be coined in a process called root creation .
• Word formation processes that involve shortening an existing word include clipping  and backformation .
• Word formation processes that involve combining existing words including compounding , blending , initialisms , and acronyms .
• The symbols < and > are used to show the direction of change in the study of historical linguistics. These symbols point at the newer form.
• You can look up the origins of a word in an etymological dictionary, such as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

Check your understanding!

References and further resources, attribution.

↪️ This section was adapted from lecture notes prepared by Nathan Sanders. Used with permission.

For a general audience

🧠 CrashCourse. 2020. Language Change and Historical Linguistics: Crash Course Linguistics #13. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNkMC92kFLA .

🎉 Hudes, Sammy. 2015, October 7. What’s it like to coin the term LOL? Calgary Herald . https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/whats-it-like-to-coin-the-term-lol .

Reference materials

📑 Harper, Douglas. 2024. Online Etymology Dictionary . https://www.etymonline.com .

📑 Oxford University Press. 2023. Oxford English Dictionary . https://www.oed.com .

The coining of a new word.

When a word from one language is adopted by another language.

The coining of a word in order to avoid use of a word that is socially unacceptable.

The smallest meaningful unit in language.

A morphological process that adds grammatical information, such as number, tense, gender, or case.

A morphological process that creates a new lexeme.

The property of language that allows language users to create novel utterances and have those utterances be understood by others.

Changing the part of speech of a word without changing its form.

A word that has been borrowed from another language.

The process of a borrowed word adopting the phonology and possibly the morphology of the language it is borrowed into.

A borrowed phrase which is a direct translation of a phrase in another language.

Coining a word without basis on any previously existing words.

When a brand name becomes the common name for all similar items.

The formation of a new word by shortening an existing one.

A process whereby a language user reanalyzes a monomorphemic word to be polymorphemic and removes the additional morphemes.

A word with two or more roots.

A word formed by combining portions of two or more roots. At least one of the roots must be truncated in order to be a blend.

A word formed by combining portions of two or more roots. At least one of the roots must be truncated in order to be a portmanteau.

When the first letter or two of each word in a phrase is combined to form a new word, which is pronounced as a whole.

synonym: alphabetism When the first letter or two of each word in a phrase is combined to form a new word, which is pronounced as a string of letters.

synonym: initialism When the first letter or two of each word in a phrase is combined to form a new word, which is pronounced as a string of letters.

When a word that already exists is claimed to be an acronym.

A commonly believed etymology of a word that is not historically accurate.

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Article contents

Derivational morphology.

• Rochelle Lieber Rochelle Lieber Department of Linguistics, University of New Hampshire
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.248
• Published online: 29 March 2017

Derivational morphology is a type of word formation that creates new lexemes, either by changing syntactic category or by adding substantial new meaning (or both) to a free or bound base. Derivation may be contrasted with inflection on the one hand or with compounding on the other. The distinctions between derivation and inflection and between derivation and compounding, however, are not always clear-cut. New words may be derived by a variety of formal means including affixation, reduplication, internal modification of various sorts, subtraction, and conversion. Affixation is best attested cross-linguistically, especially prefixation and suffixation. Reduplication is also widely found, with various internal changes like ablaut and root and pattern derivation less common. Derived words may fit into a number of semantic categories. For nouns, event and result, personal and participant, collective and abstract noun are frequent. For verbs, causative and applicative categories are well-attested, as are relational and qualitative derivations for adjectives. Languages frequently also have ways of deriving negatives, relational words, and evaluatives. Most languages have derivation of some sort, although there are languages that rely more heavily on compounding than on derivation to build their lexical stock. A number of topics have dominated the theoretical literature on derivation, including productivity (the extent to which new words can be created with a given affix or morphological process), the principles that determine the ordering of affixes, and the place of derivational morphology with respect to other components of the grammar. The study of derivation has also been important in a number of psycholinguistic debates concerning the perception and production of language.

• word formation
• reduplication
• productivity
• lexical semantics
• transposition
• competition

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The scope of word-formation research

2015, Schmid, Hans-Jörg, "The scope of word-formation research". In: P.O. Müller, I. Ohnheiser, S. Olsen and F. Rainer, eds., Word-Formation. An International Handbook of the Languages of Europe. Vol. I. Berlin - Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 1-21.

The first article of a handbook, this paper presents an introductory survey of the scope of word-formation research. It defines and demarcates the subject-matter of word-formation and explains the basic notions related to the internal structures of complex lexemes and the cross-linguistically important word-formation patterns. Major approaches, analytical and descriptive levels and models in the field of word-formation research are outlined from a bird’s eye view. The final section deals with productivity and lexicalization.

Related papers

The article presents the properties of the system of word formation taking into account the coexistence of two word-formation systems in modern German. Relying on the works of foreign researchers who identify tendencies in the German word formation related to the processes of internationalization and development of the euro-language, the author defines the properties of word-formation as marking of the means used; presence of unmotivated word-building elements and elements with unmotivated alternations in the basis and affixes; the presence of a special word-formation unit-confix; limited distribution of borrowed word-building elements. The article describes in detail various approaches to the division of borrowings into elements and related problems of motivated and unmotivated phonetic alternations in borrowed elements-foundations and affixes. It is established that the unmotivated nature of such alternations during word formation indicates the isolation of the exogenous system in the German language. Particular attention is paid to a unit of the word-formation system, such as confix: the views of scientists on the legitimacy of the selection of this word-building element and its basic properties are examined. Confix is defined by the author as a connected word-formative element, possessing its own lexical-semantic meaning and combining with other elements directly or with the help of a connecting element-o, capable, independently or in combination with another similar element, to form the basis, participate in composing and have unlimited distribution. Thus, confix reflects the tendency to integrate two word-formation systems coexisting in the German language. The conducted research proves the isolation of the system of word formation in the German language. Its results can be used to further analyze two coexisting systems of word formation in the German language and to reveal their characteristic features.

Celtic: A Journal of Culture, English Language Teaching, Literature and Linguistics, 2018

The aims of this study were to identify the processes of word formation in English new words and to know which word formation processes were the most productive one(s). The researcher used qualitative research design in order to obtain the data from the document of OED online. OED online is the online dictionary which consists of list of English new words. Therefore, the research object was the lists of English new words from year 2012-2016. Document analysis was used as the instrument to collect the data. The data were presented in the form of table. The findings of this study showed that there are some processes in creating English new words, such as a) affixation, b) folk etymology, c) compounding, d) abbreviation, e) acronyms, f) borrowing, g) blending, h) clipping, i) back-formation. Besides, there are also found the double word formation processes, such as j) folk etymology + compounding, k) compounding + affixation, m) blending + affixation, n) clipping + blending. The result showed that the most productive process of creating English new words was affixation.

Corela, 2013

The Construction of Words, 2018

In Construction Morphology, morphological patterns are expressed by constructional schemas that motivate properties of existing complex words, and state how new complex words can be formed. This article briefly summarizes a number of theoretical assumptions of Construction Morphology, and how they play a role in the various contributions to this volume on advances in Construction Morphology. Key features of this theory are that morphology is word-based, that morphological patterns are interpreted as constructions (form-meaning pairs), and that there is no strict separation of grammar and lexicon. Paradigmatic relationships play an essential role in structuring lexical and grammatical knowledge. These ideas can be applied fruitfully to the study of sign language, visual language, language change, language acquisition, and language processing.

Social Science Research Network, 2016

Conference Abstract: The main aims of the conference are to present advances in the interdisciplinary research into word formation (derivation and compounding) in intra-and interinguistic contexts, to analyze relevant problems in the field of tension between intrinsic language change and language interference and to address the need of using the combined methods of synchronic, historical and computational linguistics as well as the united competence of leading European specialists in these specific linguistic disciplines in order to improve the conceptual and methodological apparatus necessary for working in the fields of descriptive, comparative and historical morphology, lexicology, and syntax. To meet each aspect of this interdisciplinary target, the conference aims, on the one hand, at giving space to various theoretical and practical issues regarding word-formation in the course of the language development within and between several groups of Indo-European (Indic, Iranian, Greek, Italic, Anatolian, Germanic) and Semitic languages (Akkadian); on the other hand, it will provide an impetus to research into word-formation in contexts of multilingualism (within Indo-European, within Semitic, but also between Indo-European and Semitic languages, e.g. in Anatolian and Near-Eastern contexts) through the joint input of morphologists and scholars of historical (socio-)linguistics working from comparative and contrastive perspective.

In the framework of Word Manager (WM), morphological dictionaries are produced by the classification of lexemes in terms of a rule database. The intricate structure of the resulting lexical resources, conceived primarily for flexible use, also offers novel opportunities for the validation of the lexical specification. Many of the inconsistencies and errors encountered in lexical specification in a text file are excluded in WM, because the lexicographerr s interface supports decisions by the exploitation of the procedural nature of inflection and word formation rules. There remains a set of lexicographic decisions, based on facts of the language and on the theoretical analysis of these facts, which cannot be supported in this formal way. They include the contents of the lexicographic guidelines. For the validation of these decisions, two types of browser are provided, the tree browser which gives access to partitionings of the set of lexemes, and the lexeme browser which concentrates...

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Competition in Word-Formation (Benjamins), 2024

The Mental Lexicon, 15 (1), 2020

Linguistica Pragensia, 2015

World Englishes, 2010

(2015) Categories of word-formation. In: Peter O. Müller et al. (eds.) Word-Formation: An International Handbook of the Languages of Europe Bd. 2 (= HSK 40/2): 1020–1034., 2015

Zeitschrift für Wortbildung / Journal of Word Formation, 2020

Anglica , 1994

Jurnal ELink, 2019

Syntax in English: Word Formation, 2023

An International Handbook of the Languages of Europe, 2015

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Roots in Word-Formation: The Root Hypothesis Revisited

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(2005). Roots in Word-Formation: The Root Hypothesis Revisited. In: Roots and Patterns. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 63. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3244-7_7

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