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Problems in the Description of Processes of Word Formation




Word formation appears to occupy arather special place in grammatical description. In many cases the appli­cation of apparently productive rules leads to the genera­tion of compounds or derivatives that are, for one reason or another, felt to be unacceptable or at least very odd by native speakers, and the grammarian must decide what sta­tus he is to give to such rules and their output in his grammar. The decision is by no means easy, and can lie anywhere between the setting up of maximally general rules of a generative type, with little concern for the fact that much of their output may in some sense be ques­tionable, and the simple listing and classifying, in terms of syntactic function and internal structure, of attested forms. The latter procedure is of course safer, but it is the former which raises the more interesting problems. Are e. g. unbad and puppycat “grammatical but non-occurring” in the same sense as a sentence, such as Colorless green ideas sleep furiously? It can certainly be argued that they are; but if we are justified in asserting that the sentence status of the last example is clearer than the word status of the first two, then we are still faced with the question why this should be the case if they are all three grammatical. It would seem that the role of formal crite­ria in decisions about sentence status is likely to be much greater than it is in decisions about word status (it is, for one thing, probably generally true that there are, in the case of sentences, more formal criteria available onwhich a decision can be based). Processes of word formation often seem to belong to a somewhat vague intermediary area between grammar and lexicon, and while this need not prevent us from giving formal statements of these processes, it may often be necessary to state restrictions on their output in primarily semantic terms (i. e. to insure that their output is not “unsemantical”) if we want to hold on to the criterion of native speaker acceptance as an essen­tial measure of the adequacy of our description. Thus in the area of English nominal compounds it would seem that actually occurring compounds are not as a rule created like new sentences in order to refer to momentary condi­tions. Leaving aside the possible difficulties of stating such semantic considerations in a reasonably rigorous way in any given case, the problem is to determine, for the va­rious word-formative processes in which they appear to play a part, how they can most reasonably be accomo­dated within an over-all framework of grammatical and se­mantic description.

In our investigation of restrictions on the use of nega­tive affixes with evaluatively negative stems we shall at­tempt to deal with the question of how such restrictions are to be treated descriptively, and particularly whether rules for such restriction should be incorporated into a “generative” morphology. In this connection we shall be concerned with the notion of productivity as it is applied to morphological processes. The term “productive” is often used rather indiscriminately to refer both to certain as­pects of the behavior of the speakers of a language and to certain diachronic trends; while there is presumably in many cases a connection between these two aspects of pro­ductivity, it is necessary to keep the distinction in mind. Moreover, and more importantly, the concept of what we might term “synchronic productivity” is itself often used in a rather ill-defined way in the area of word formation, and it is in many cases difficult to decide just what is being implied when a morphological process is said to be synchronically productive. [...]


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