Table Of ContentProcesses and Paradigms in
Word-Formation Morphology
W
DE
G
Trends in Linguistics
Studies and Monographs 131
Editor
Werner Winter
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
Processes and Paradigms
in Word-Formation Morphology
by
Amanda Pounder
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York 2000
Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague)
is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin.
© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines
of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pounder, Amanda, 1960-
Processes and paradigms in word-formation morphology /
by Amanda Pounder.
p. cm. - (Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs ;
131)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 3-11-016867-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Grammar, Comparative and general — Word formation.
2. Linguistic models. 3. Semantics. 4. German language -
Word formation - History. 5. Linguistic change. I. Title.
II. Series.
P245 .P64 2000
415-dc21 00-048999
Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme
Pounder, Amanda:
Processes and paradigms in word formation morphology / by
Amanda Pounder. - Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter,
2000
(Trends in linguistics : Studies and monographs ; 131)
ISBN 3-11-016867-7
© Copyright 2000 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 10785 Berlin
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this
book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechan-
ical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, with-
out permission in writing from the publisher.
Printing & Binding: Hubert & Co, Göttingen.
Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin.
Printed in Germany.
Preface
This book is an attempt both to apply a theoretical model of morphology
to a historical problem and to use a historical problem to test a theoretical
model, so that it should have something to offer to theoreticians and to those
working in historical linguistics or specifically on the history of German
word-formation. The latter may linger longer over the detail of sections
7.1.6., 7.2.6, and 7.3.6., while the former may prefer to skim or skip these
sections.
The book has been a long time coming... It started out as a translation of
my 1987 Vienna thesis, Systemangemessenheit in der Wortbildung am
Beispiel desubstantivischer Adjektivableitung im Deutschen. It took me over
a year and a completed first draft to confirm my initial suspicions that I was
a terrible translatress. When I again had the opportunity to work on the book,
it was largely independently of both the original and the translation. I eventu-
ally abandoned the project, as I could not give it the time and attention it
required. After some years, however, I decided that I had had some important
things to say and that I should take it up again. I hope that the passage of
time has not been entirely detrimental to the result: both teaching and work
on other problems, particularly within inflection, have refined my thinking
about a number of theoretical issues in morphology, and the addition of new
text material to the database and the implementation of statistic analysis have
made my results more robust. The theoretical chapters were completed in
1996; I have endeavoured to refer to newer literature where possible, how-
ever. I then began work on the empirical investigation, which takes quite a
different approach to its predecessor, while arriving at the same basic results.
There are many people and institutions who, in one way or another, have
helped this project along, and it is my great pleasure to acknowledge them.
First, the Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik provided very generous
support in 1988-1989, and I benefited from much good advice and encour-
agement there. The Linguistics Department at Memorial University of New-
foundland also supported my work, among other things in providing me with
a research assistant. Faculty of Humanities and University of Calgary re-
search grants allowed me to engage a research assistant and to travel to
Germany to gather data. The Faculty of Humanities and the Department of
Germanic, Slavic, and East Asian studies also contributed to proof-reading
costs.
vi Preface
Aditi Lahiri gave me useful comments on my first "translation" draft, and
Veronika Ehrich gave me the excellent advice, which I ultimately took, to
forget about translating the original thesis and write the book afresh.
The late Helmut Feldweg was infinitely generous with advice and help on
everything computer-related, including setting up the original database. He
had the very original idea of adapting the CHELDES system for child lan-
guage to historical data. I'm also grateful for his hospitality during my stay
in Tübingen in 1997.
Thanks go to Marie-Louise Willett and Pamaz Rafatjou for work on the
database. Marie-Louise did corrections and Parnaz did inputting and analysis
of new data. Parnaz Rafatjou also formatted the tables for Chapter 7.
David Bird set up a new database system, advised me on statistics, and
designed a computer spreadsheet for the statistical analysis.
I thank Rosvita Vaska for bibliographic detective work.
I benefited also from the helpful comments of the series reviewer for
Mouton de Gruyter.
When it came time to prepare the final camera-ready copy of the book for
publication, I had the assistance of Leslie Blair and Melanie Blair in proof-
reading; they have saved me, I'm sure, from much embarrassment. I take
responsibility, of course, for anything we all missed. Nicholas 2ekulin and
David Bird rescued me from many a struggle with the text-editing software
(on whose designers I hereby lay a fatal curse!).
And now for my family: my husband David did all the things admirably
that husbands in acknowledgements do: extra cooking and household tasks
during the last stage, moral support in those darkest formatting moments —
and yes, he helped with the index. Our cats supervised the project conscien-
tiously throughout, as only cats can. They were all three wonderful compan-
ions and guardians of my sanity during the preparation of the final manu-
script.
To all these, and to my friends and colleagues for their forbearance, my
most heartfelt gratitude.
I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of my good friend,
Helmut Feldweg.
Contents
Preface ν
1. Introduction 1
2. Psycholinguistic research in morphology 5
2.1. Introduction 5
2.2. The lexicon 7
2.2.1. The lemma (head word) and the lexical entry 8
2.2.2. The status of affixes as lexical units 16
2.2.3. Structure of the lexical entry 19
2.2.4. Structure of the lexicon 21
2.3. Morphological processes 23
2.3.1. Analysis 23
2.3.1.1. Recognition 25
2.3.1.2. Manner of recognition 26
2.3.1.3. Stem recognition 27
2.3.1.4. Complex-word recognition 28
2.3.1.5. Affix recognition and segmentation processes .. 28
2.3.2. Synthesis 29
2.3.2.1. Role of the lexicon 29
2.3.2.2. Synthesis processes 30
2.3.3. Semantic analysis and synthesis 30
2.3.3.1. Semantic ambiguity 31
2.3.3.2. Semantics and analysis processes 31
2.4. Conclusion 33
3. Formal concepts: model-building 35
3.1. Introduction 35
3.2. Elements of a model of the morphological component 35
3.2.1. Introduction 35
3.2.2. Morphology as a component of grammar 35
3.2.3. Word-formation and the lexicon 44
3.2.4. The morphological component 46
3.2.4.1. Word-formation vs. inflection 46
3.2.4.2. Dimensionality of word-formation 49
3.3. Form and meaning relations in word-formation 50
3.3.1. The separation of form and meaning 50
viii Contents
3.3.2. Semiotics and word-formation 53
3.3.2.1. The (linguistic) sign 53
3.3.2.2. Structure of the sign 56
3.4. Units of analysis in word-formation 57
3.4.1. Lexical units 57
3.4.1.1. The word-form 57
3.4.1.2. The lexeme 58
3.4.2. Morphological units 60
3.4.2.1. The morph 60
3.4.2.2. The morpheme 60
3.4.2.3. The stem 62
3.4.2.4. The affix 63
3.4.3. Formal representation of lexical and morphological units 64
3.4.3.1. The signifiant of the linguistic sign 64
3.4.3.2. The signifie of the linguistic sign 64
3.4.3.3. The syntactics of the linguistic sign 65
3.5. The morphological operation 65
3.5.1. Base of the operation 65
3.5.2. Nature of the morphological operation 66
3.5.3. The signifiant of the operation: form rules 68
3.5.3.1. Conversion 69
3.5.3.2. Segmental form rules 71
3.5.3.2.1. Concatenation (affixation) 71
3.5.3.2.2. Modificatory form rules 72
3.5.3.3. Non-segmental form rules 73
3.5.3.4. Compounding 74
3.5.4. The signifiant of the operation: semantic rules 74
3.5.5. The signifiant of the operation: syntactic rules 76
3.5.6. The signifiant of the operation: rule-mappings 77
3.5.7. Constraints 79
3.6. Summary 80
3.7. The word-formation paradigm 82
3.7.1. The existence of the word-formation paradigm 82
3.7.2. The nature of the word-formation paradigm 84
3.7.3. Modelling the word-formation paradigm 87
3.7.3.1. Redundancy rules: the lexical paradigm 87
3.7.3.2. Van Marie (1985): On the Paradigmatic Dimen-
sion of Morphological Creativity 88
3.7.3.3. Guilbert (1975): La creativite lexicale 90
3.7.4. Model of the word-formation paradigm 92
Contents ix
3.7.5. Problems 93
3.7.5.1. Degree of abstraction of the representation 93
3.7.5.2. Membership in the paradigm: the operation .... 93
3.7.5.3. Base of the paradigm: lexical semantic criteria .. 94
3.7.5.4. Individual differences 94
3.7.6. Paradigm structures in the process-and-paradigm model . 95
3.8. Conclusion 96
4. The semantics of word-formation 97
4.1. Introduction 97
4.2. Word-formation meaning vs. lexical meaning 97
4.3. Formal possibilities of representation for word-formation mean-
ings 103
4.3.1. Labelling 104
4.3.2. The paraphrase 104
4.3.3. Componential analysis 107
4.3.4. Relations and functions as (an) expression of word-
formation meanings 107
4.4. Design of a system of word-formation functions 108
4.4.1. List of word-formation functions 109
4.4.1.1. Primary functions 110
4.4.1.2. Secondary word-formation functions 120
4.4.1.3. Special functions 122
4.4.2. Problems - 122
4.4.3. Inflectional meaning and derivational meaning 123
4.5. Lexical relationships 124
4.5.1. Lexical relationships between word-formations 124
4.5.2. Word-formation meaning and paradigmatic relationships 124
4.5.3. Lexical meaning and the paradigm 126
4.5.3.1. Polysemy and synonymy 126
4.5.3.2. Lexicalization 127
4.5.3.3. Core meaning vs. figurative meaning 128
4.5.3.4. Extra-linguistic information 128
4.5.3.5. The situational or participant role 129
4.6. Semantics in the lexical and word-formation paradigms 131
5. Productivity and norm 133
5.1. Introduction 133
5.2. Productivity 133
5.2.1. Notions of productivity 133
