LINGUIST List 5.1376

Fri 02 Dec 1994

Sum: English Nouns in -ee

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1. Chris Barker, Sum: Eng Ns in -ee

More than a dozen LINGUIST readers responded to my request for
naturally occurring instances of English nouns in -ee (as in
_employee_, _escapee_, etc.)--THANKS! Special thanks go to Gregory
Grefenstette of Rank Xerox Research Center in Grenoble, who searched
half a gigabyte of recent newspaper articles. Several people reported
uses of _mentee_ `person who is mentored', and I had reports of
_standee_ `person required to stand (as on a bus)' from London, New
York, Louisiana, and British Columbia.

A paper draft containing a catalog of attested uses of over 400 -ee
noun word types is available through anonymous ftp at:

 ftp://ling.rochester.edu/pub/barker/Papers/Ee

Files available include the draft itself, a two-page summary abstract,
and most of the relevant entries from the second edition of the OED
(including quotations). The paper contains quite a lot of data, and
requires 48 pages to print.

The data suggest that formation in -ee is highly productive, that
analyses based on the syntactic argument structure of the stem verb
are either incomplete or severely disjunctive, and that formation of
-ee nouns obeys three essentially semantic constraints: an -ee noun
referent must be sentient, the denotation of an -ee noun must be
episodically linked to the denotation of its stem (I give a formal
semantic event-based definition of ``episodically linked''), and the
referent of an -ee noun must lack volitional control over some
relevant aspect of the event which qualifies it as being in the
extension of the noun in question. Taken together, I argue that these
semantic constraints amount to a thematic role type. If so, then
semantically defined thematic roles can actively guide formation of
new words.

An unsystematic selection of data contributed by readers of LINGUIST:

best wishee `...who has one lovable father, one lovable mother,
 one sick somebody, one successful somebody, one
 good-deed-doer, one poor pen pal, one best wishee,
 and two birthday celebrants for every nine letters you send.'
 The Washington Post, 15 July 1987, style section, page C5.

extractee `Recalling the earlier claim that RNR yields VP-level
 extractees ...'
 Paul Postal, `Parasitic and Pseudoparasitic Gaps',
 Linguistic Inquiry 25, 1994, page 113.

festschriftee `This bibliography attempts to cover all books
 and articles written, co-authored or edited by
 the festschriftee...'
 Joergen Dines Johansen and Harly Sonne, edds. (1986)
 Pragmatics and Linguistics, Festschrift for Jacob L.~Mey,
 Odense University Press, Odense p. 248.

firee `Some executives would rather begin by reciting the
 employee's virtues and recalling his contributions to the
 company. But one executive who tried that says the "firee"
 interrupted him to ask for a raise.'
 Wall Street Journal, 20 March 1987.

fuckee `There is an old joke in which two African-Americans want
 to sit in the front of the bus (in the old days when this
 was illegal). To accomplish this, they pretend to be lawyers.
 Lest they be discovered, they believe, after they board
 the bus that they should talk some lawyer talk. They begin
 to discuss a rape case, and one lawyer claims not to understand
 the other's case and asks: "Who duh fucker, an who duh fuckee?"'
 [Reported separately by Dennis Preston and Geoffrey S.~Nathan.]

laughee `Another device DeKoven uses is the Meetings Meter,
 a piece of software that functions like a taxi meter,
 displaying a continuing tally on how much the meeting is
 costing. The inspiration for the device came at a meeting
 with his attorney when DeKoven realized he wasted $11 telling
 a long joke to the $300-an-hour laughee.'
 San Francisco Chronicle 6 October 1993 page D7.