8.1
THE PRODUCTION LINE
Morphology needs to provide an account of our ability to work out the meaning of unfamiliar words and to make up new words. Word manufacture is not a task we leave to experts. We all do it. This chapter examines some of the ways in which we do it.
Morphological theory provides the tools for analysing ‘real’ words like shopkeeper and conversations which are listed in dictionaries and which probably most competent, adult speakers of English know. But if it stopped at that, it would be failing in its task of characterising the nature of speakers’ lexical knowledge.
For our knowledge of English vocabulary goes far beyond the INSTITUTIONALISED words listed in dictionaries. You know thousands of words listed in dictionaries. And you also know an indefinitely large number of words that have not been documented by lexicographers although they have occurred in speech or writing. Further, you have the ability to comprehend many POTENTIAL WORDS that have not yet occurred.
Obviously, a very considerable number of words must simply be memorised (see section (11.1.2)). If a word is made up of a single morpheme (e.g. zebra, tree, saddle), there is no way one can work out its meaning. Such words simply have to be committed to memory. However, as mentioned in our earlier discussion of compositionality in sections (4.4.3) and (6.1), if a word contains several morphemes and if you know what the morphemes mean, you are usually able to work out what the word as a whole means, even if you have never encountered it before. We made that point with the example of Lebanonisation in section (3.2). The same point is illustrated by the non-institutionalised word Hollywoodisation which I heard in a radio discussion in which someone lamented ‘the growing Hollywoodisation of the Cannes Film Festival’.
New words like these come off the production line all the time. In most cases there is no record of who first used a particular word. Only in relatively rare cases are the names of the individuals responsible for lexical creations known. But a few people who have manufactured colourful words are remembered. For example S. Foote is remembered for coining the word panjandrum in 1755. He intended this simply as a nonsense word; it acquired the meaning of ‘mock title for a pompous dignitary’ later.
However, in most cases words are manufactured anonymously. Take the word yuppie which was formed by adding the suffix spelled as -y or -ie to the initial letters of either ‘Young Urban Professional Person’ or
‘Young Upwardly Mobile Professional Person’. There is some uncertainty about the correct source of this word, which originated in America in the 1980s where it was used to describe youngish people who
received enormous (and possibly disproportionate) rewards for their services on the money markets. It is not known who coined it. But it caught on and for a time spawned numerous derivatives.
Imagine the year is 1987. You live in a run-down inner city Victorian neighbourhood of a British city which over a relatively short period has begun to change in character. Instead of ramshackle cars parked in the street, there have gradually appeared smart, high-powered German cars, with price tags to match. Many terraced houses that have been grimy for years have received a lick of paint and their interiors have been transformed by having fancy designer kitchens, bathrooms and stripped-pine furniture installed. Every conceivable Victorian feature has also been restored. Outside, the pigeon lofts in the back gardens have been replaced with bonsai trees, dwarf azaleas and children’s swings. Many of the cloth-capped men in blue overalls and their matronly wives have been replaced by women and men in grey pinstriped suits who clutch their briefcases, filofaxes, laptop computers and mobile phones when they leave for work in the morning. You see all this and think to yourself, ‘The neighbourhood is undergoing yuppification.’ You regret the transformation and long for the good old days. You long for the day when something will happen which might cause the deyuppification of the neighbourhood and restore the place to its earlier state.
I expect you not to have encountered the words yuppification and deyuppification before now. They are NONCE WORDS (words expressly coined for the first time and apparently used once) that are not institutionalised. But I am confident that, nevertheless, you figured out their meaning instantly. You analysed them as containing the root yuppie and the suffixes -fic meaning ‘make’ and -ation, which derives nouns of action. Given the context (and relevant context always does help), you knew that yuppification of a neighbourhood means turning it into a yuppie environment. Deyuppification was equally easy to analyse.
The prefix de- is a reversive verbal prefix meaning the undoing of whatever the verb means. So, you figured that if deyuppification happened, the yuppies (or their lifestyle) would be removed from the neighbourhood.
The moral of this story is that many complex MORPHOLOGICAL OBJECTS are compositional. They need not be listed in the lexicon since their meaning can be worked out by anyone who knows the meaning of their constituent elements. In this words such as deyuppification differ from simple morphological objects (morphemes or simple words e.g. -ful, -ly, -less, zebra), which must be listed in the dictionary and memorised since they contain no clues to their meanings.
The upshot of this discussion is that the listing of words in the lexicographers’ dictionaries that we buy from bookshops are always partial. Even now, after yuppification and deyuppification have made their début here, they are unlikely to be institutionalised in such dictionaries. All dictionaries are selective. While no sensible lexicographer would omit obvious, commonly used, established words like house or travel, there is a considerable degree of selection when it comes to novel or unusual words (e.g. deyuppification) which may have been encountered by the dictionary compiler very rarely, or as a one-off in a single conversation.
Furthermore, many of the more esoteric technical terms or jargon used in various disciplines are often not included in general dictionaries. (Standard dictionaries are extremely unlikely to tell you what morphophonemics or allomorph mean, for example.)
The point that lexicographers are selective and that their dictionaries represent only a partial list of the lexical items of a language merits closer investigation. The fact that it is not in the dictionary does not mean it is not in the language. Take the word unleaving, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem ‘Spring and Fall’:
Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Although unleaving is attested here in the work of a major English poet, it is not recorded in the OED. But that does not mean that you cannot understand its meaning. Clearly, in the context unleaving means a tree shedding its leaves.
This puts a fresh complexion on things. Contrary to what many of us tend to believe (and are encouraged to believe by word games like Scrabble) words are not ‘proper words’ by virtue of being listed in a dictionary. Rather, words are proper words if they are linguistic signs which associate arbitrary sounds with meanings in a manner that is sanctioned by the rule system of a particular language. We can distinguish three types of word, and competence in a language must include a reasonable degree of ability to handle all three of them.
First, there are the institutionalised words listed in dictionaries, e.g. house. Second, there are uninstitutionalised words that have been manifested in use, e.g. unleaving and deyuppification. Third, there are potential words waiting to make their début as it were when a particular meaning is matched with a particular phonological representation. Today unreprissing is not an English word because although it is a phonologically permissible word, it has no meaning associated with it. If you care to find a meaning for it, it will become a word—perhaps only as a nonce word.
Many of the nonce, non-institutionalised words are compounds (cf. section (2.2.1)). If a speaker wants to express an idea which would normally be expressed by a syntactic phrase in a manner that heightens its concreteness and salience, it is possible as a oneoff, to make up a disposable, hyphenated compound. The newspaper columnist Melanie Phillips manufactured the word ‘anythinggoes-as-long-as-you-can-get-away- with-it-culture’ which is an excellent example of this phenomenon:
[8.1]
Public life has fallen into disrepute and the cynicism of the people knows no bounds. It’s the anything-goes-as-long- asyou-can-get-away-with-it-culture, and it is as prevalent in the corridors of Whitehall as in the joyriders’ ghettos.
(Phillips 1993)
The word stockpile of an individual and of the speech community as a whole is relatively stable and restricted. So, one might suppose that in principle it should be possible to list and count the words (in the sense of lexical items) that belong to the English language. In reality such an exercise is very problematic because the inventory of words is not static. People make up new words. I have made up yuppification, which I do not expect to stick. According to the OED, someone made up the word hydrofoil in the 1920s and scuba appeared on the scene in 1956. Both innovations were successfully institutionalised.
At the other end of the spectrum old words go out of use, e.g. wone meaning ‘home, abode’ is now obsolete. If I said to you ‘Where is your wone?’ you would have no idea what I was talking about. Then there is also the problem of separating the dialectal and the archaic words from obsolete ones e.g. porret
‘young leek or onion’. While wone is obsolete, porret survives in dialectal use but it is very rare. The line between ‘dialectal and very rare’ and ‘obsolete’ is a fine one. In spite of these difficulties, it does make sense to list words. Lexicographers have not got it all wrong. We just have to bear in mind the fact that a dictionary can only be a partial list of the lexical items of a language.
To sum up, although by and large the words of a language are listable in dictionaries, it is not possible to list all of them. Speakers actively manufacture words. The lexicon is not just a vast lexical warehouse, it is
also a production line where words are made in limitless quantities. For the most part, this is done by applying established rules: language users who have mastered these rules can use them to construct or unscramble words, be they old established words or new ones (cf. sections (4) and (6.1)).
8.2
KEEPING TABS ON IDIOMS
We have seen that simple words must be listed in the lexicon because their meanings are not compositional.
No matter how sophisticated your analytical technique was, you would not be able to work out the meaning of a word like tree or zebra which contains just one morpheme. In this respect morphology differs from syntax. Typically, sentences produced by syntactic rules do not need to be listed since they are compositional, while many words need to be listed in the dictionary because they are not compositional (cf.
Di Sciullo and Williams 1987). When we use language we do not try to re-cycle sentences that we have previously used. Normally, using general syntactic rules, we create fresh sentences to suit the communicative needs of the situation. If you know the meanings of the words in a sentence and if you can work out its structure, you can also work out its meaning even though you may never have encountered it before. Compare the sentences below: Although you almost certainly have never seen or heard the sentence in [8.2b], you had no difficulty understanding it because you were able to work out which words form syntactic constituents, and what their semantic relationships are. Hence, since sentences are formed compositionally, they do not have to be listed.
The trouble is that it is sometimes possible to create new lexical items by converting syntactic phrases into word-like vocabulary items. A consequence of this is to upset the neat distinction that we have drawn between words, as listed lexical objects, and sentences, as unlisted syntactic objects. Syntactic phrases used as lexical items are called IDIOMS. Idioms are peculiar in that they are non-compositional syntactic phrases. This means that their meanings cannot be deduced from the meanings of the words they contain (cf.
Di Sciullo and Williams 1987, Katamba 1993).
OCT. 21
The Emperor of Germany, who had been selected as Arbitrator in the dispute between Great Britain and the United States regarding the San Juan Boundary Question, gave his award to-day. It was in favour of the United States whose claims, the Emperor declared, justly accorded with the true interpretation of the Treaty of the 15th June, 1846.
HUMBLE PIE I am still the same John Bull, who of glory once supped full, Faced Europe with my subsidies, my soldiers, and my ships;
When I’d bites behind my barks, when I hit straight at my [8.2]
marks,
And found my foes in fisticuffs, as I found my friends in tips:
But now I’m all for a quiet life, ‘jowk, and let the jaw go by’;
Keep my feelings in my pockets, and put up with HUMBLE PIE.
Once foreigners looked up to me: a high head I could hold:
If my prestige cost me millions, those millions’ worth was mine:
Strong and safe were laid my bulwarks with British blood and gold;
Of a grander God than Mammon my island was the shrine:
Honour was given to honour, in those darkened days gone by;
Now honour’s sold for money…and my dish is HUMBLE PIE.
Then, in dealing with a bully, I was game to hold my own;
And the ground once wisely taken I stood to, stiff and stout:
In smooth tongues I had little faith, but much in teeth well shown,
And hands as strong to use the sword as slow to take it out.
The only kind of fighting I disliked was fighting shy,
And the one dish I would not eat, in those days, was HUMBLE PIE!
‘If the right cheek’s smitten, turn the left,’ was written then as now,
But the Quakers were the only sect who to that rule would agree:
So with so much Christian doctrine waiting practice, I allow, I applied that text to friends, not foes, and hit them who hit at me:
But now it’s ‘Give your coat to those who to steal your waistcoat try,’
And the end is peace and plenty—that is, of HUMBLE PIE!
Hear Baxter and Bow Lowe prove as plain as tongue can speak, How of all possible Governments this Government is the best, Who cares for the foreigner’s laugh in his sleeve, the foreigner’s tongue in his cheek?
The smaller John Bull sings, ’tis clear, the warmer he lines his nest.
Once shame, they say, made him bilious and lean, but that is all my eye—
There’s no meat he so thrives upon (see Baxter) as HUMBLE PIE!
As you can see in [8.3], the structure of idioms is similar to the structure of ordinary syntactic phrases. The same rules that generate ordinary syntactic phrases also generate idioms:
Obviously, knowing the grammatical structure and the meaning of the words in the idiomatic expressions in [8.3] is no help in understanding what the idioms mean. The meanings of these idioms must be listed in the dictionary along the lines shown in [8.4]:
[8.4]
Idiom Example
a. save someone’s bacon ‘save someone a lot of trouble’ Thanks for talking to the police officer. You have saved my bacon.
b. take something with a pinch of salt ‘be sceptical’ I’d take whatever any politician says with a pinch of salt.
c. keep tabs on someone ‘check up on’ (‘keep an eye on’) Probation officers keep tabs on young offenders on parole.
d. in high spirits ‘slightly drunk and excited’ They were in high spirits when they got back from the party.
An indefinitely large number of syntactic phrases can be turned into idioms by assigning them idiosyncratic, lexicalised meanings. This is one of the ways in which a limitless supply of lexical items is assured, and another reason why all the lexical items of a language cannot be listed in a dictionary.
8.3 CLITICS
In this section we shall turn our attention to CLITICS. A clitic is a bound morpheme which is not an affix but which, nevertheless, occurs as part of a word (cf. (4.2.2)). We are going to see that CLITICISATION (the process of attaching clitics) takes place postlexically after the word-formation rules of the lexicon have applied, and following the application of syntactic rules. (By contrast, affixes are attached at the lexical level:
cf. sections (6.5.1) and (6.5.2).
There are two classes of clitics:
[8.5]
Class 1 clitics
These always occur as appendages to words. They are totally incapable of appearing on their own as independent words. The GENITIVE ‘S’, (as in a farmer’s wife, the parson’s nose) is the only example of this kind of clitic in English.
Class 2 clitics
These are forms which are capable of appearing as independent words in some cases but are also used as dependent appendages to words. This is exemplified by the reduced auxiliary verbs e.g. ’ll, ’ve, ’d (as in I’ll, we’ve, she’s, they’d which are derived from will or shall, have, is, had).
[8.3]
The thing that all clitics have in common is some phonological deficiency which debars them from functioning as independent phonological words. In English, it is crucial for a phonological word to have a vowel. (There are no vowelless words like *tpngs, *tvmrk, *sntd, *s, *kvpl.) Clitics do not qualify for word status because they lack vowels. The requirement that words must contain vowels is inviolable. To become pronounceable any form like ’s or ’d must be annexed to a word. The word to which a clitic is appended is called a HOST.
We will now consider the two types of clitic in turn, starting with the class 1 type of clitic, i.e. the genitive ’s:
[8.6]
a. the farmer’s wife b. a day’s work
The genitive ’s construction in English is used to indicate that a noun (to be precise, NP) on the left which hosts the ’s is a syntactic modifier which specifies more narrowly the meaning of the noun on the right which is the head of the entire NP. The exact semantic value of the ’s genitive construction varies, as you can see from the following section of examples based on Quirk and Greenbaum (1973):
[8.7]
GENITIVE ’S PARAPHRASE
a. Possessive genitive
the farmer’s cattle the cattle belonging to the farmer the farmer’s tractor the tractor belonging to the farmer
the farmer’s wife the wife of the farmer
b. Genitive of origin
the farmer’s messenger the messenger sent by the farmer the farmer’s story the story told by the farmer c. Genitive of measure
two years’ imprisonment imprisonment lasting for two years
a day’s journey a journey lasting one whole day.
Frequently the noun on the left is the possessor of the entity that is on its right which functions as the head of the entire NP, as in [8.7a]. ‘Possessor’ is a misleading term for this relationship in many cases.
Often the meaning of this construction is not one of ‘owning’. The farmer may own the cattle and tractor, but not the wife. She is his partner, not his chattel. The genitive in this latter case indicates a relationship, not possession.
The fact that the ’s genitive is not necessarily a marker of possession is even clearer in the rest of the examples in [8.7b] and [8.7c]. The farmer’s story is a story told, not owned, by the farmer and a day’s journey is a journey that lasts a whole day—not one that is owned by the day.
Thus the syntactic and semantic relationship of the genitive ’s with its host is variable. The syntactic role of this ’s is to mark a NP as being syntactically subordinated to another NP on its right, which it modifies. The