LINGUIST List 15.1929

Sun Jun 27 2004

Sum: English Affix Reduplication

Editor for this issue: Steve Moran <stevelinguistlist.org>

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  • Andrew McIntyre, sum: english affix reduplication

    Message 1: sum: english affix reduplication

     Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 11:54:32 +0200
    From: Andrew McIntyre <mcintyrerz.uni-leipzig.de>
    Subject: sum: english affix reduplication


    Dear linguists,

    Here is my summary of responses to my query under (Linguist 15.1346) on reduplications and retriplications of the type 'washer-up-er', 'giver-out-er-er', 'fillers-inners'.

    Even with new references supplied by respondents, the constructions appear not to have had much airplay. The most complete list I can supply at the moment is:

    -Ackema, P., and A. Neeleman (2002). Morphological Selection and Representational Modularity. In G. Booij and J. van Marle (eds.) Yearbook of Morphology 2001. Dordrecht: Kluwer. 1-51.

    -Ackema, P., and A. Neeleman (2004). Beyond Morphology: Interface Conditions on Word Formation. Oxford: OUP. (to appear)

    -Bacchielli (1986), Termini frasali inglesi: aspetti e forme di produttivit� lessicale, Urbino, Quatttro venti.

    -Masini, F. (2002), Complex Verb Formation in English and Russian, Unpublished thesis, University of Bologna. (The author is willing to send you this if you contact her under fmasiniuniroma3.it .)

    -Miller, D. Gary, 1993. Complex Verb Formation. Amsterdam: Benjamins. (p132ff)

    -Simpson (1983), Discontinuous verbs and the interaction of morphology and syntax, in Proceedings of the WCCFL 2, 275-286.

    -Sproat, R., 1985. On Deriving the Lexicon. Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (p109-112)

    -Svenonius, P. 2004. The Zero Level. Ms. Tromsoe www.hum.uit.no/a/svenonius/paperspage.html

    I omitted some references I was given (e.g. on -er nominalisations in general) which mention the reduplication problem without an attempt at solving it. It will be noted that the studies above to which I have had access don't cover anything like the full spectrum of data; for instance, retriplications like giver-outer-er were either not known about or were left to languish in the 'too toxic' basket.

    Below some comments on raised by respondents.

    -Damien Hall pointed out the use of 'fixer-upper' (building whose buyer is meant to fix it up), interesting because the nominal is interpreted like a patient rather than an agent/instrument. The patient reading of the suffix seems rare in current English even with monomorphemic input (a precedent I heard being 'keeper' in sense 'that which is to be kept'), so it's unsurprising that cases of this with reduplication are not to be heard on every street corner.

    -Monica Macaulay drew to my attention the problem of 'fucked-up-edness', and judging by what I find on the net, it's pretty widespread. That the second 'ed' is pronounced with a shwa is, I guess, a purely phonological ploy to break up clusters, cf. 'marked' vs. 'markedness' (likewise 'cursedness, ashamedness'). But what the second 'ed' in 'f*cked-up-edness' thinks it is doing there in the first place is still unclear.

    -Cases of retriplication (giver-out-er-er) are not as rare as I thought earlier, cf. results for the string "picker-upperer" under www.google.com .And Rosta asked a dozen English students about this informally. A third of them preferred the retriplicated forms like 'washer-upperer', 'tidy-upperer'. He offerred the hypothesis that the extra suffix might be added to conform to some kind of prosidic template of the form trochee+dactyl. While one would want independent evidence for this, viable alternative accounts aren't available at all good bookstores. Perhaps the possibly related comparative morpheme retriplication in 'more betterer' (internet-attested and passively acceptable to me if I ignore prescriptive considerations) could also be 'phonological'. English periphrastic comparatives normally have the countenance of elsewhere forms used to get round the unavailability of the -er comparative with certain polysyllabic adjectives. But perhaps some varieties interpret the data in the reverse fashion: the periphrastic form is not an elsewhere form but has a filter debarring it from use with monosyllabic and certain bisyllabic adjectives, so dummy -er is inserted to make A conform to the filter. If this is right, we still have many questions to answer, e.g. why can this process produce the very result that haplology operations try to get rid of?

    -Some respondents dismissed reduplication and retriplication forms like 'picker-upper-(er)' as performance errors. Judging by the good attestation of the forms, it would have to be admitted that it is a fairly natural kind of 'error' for many speakers. If the notion 'natural speech error' is not oxymornic and is applicable here, the problem is still worth studying, since we may learn something about the grammar if we could find out why the grammar of these constructions causes slipups. I don't know if it's a good idea to dismiss the construction as some sort of idiosyncratic constructional template perpetuated by immitation. Its actual text frequency is extremely low; even very advanced L2 English learners are mostly unaware of its existence. I have known about the problem since at least 1995, and have since then come across only two examples in normal interactions with English speakers (i.e. excluding corpus work, etc.). One wonders if this is enough for us to learn 'picker upper(-er)' by direct evidence, or whether it is somehow a natural response to the the problem of how to affix left-headed structures given the less-than-wonderful status of non-reduplicative solutions ('washer-up', 'wash-upper') for a sizable set of speakers.

    Things that I got no further info on were cases with different affixes (picker-up-ee) and cases with suffixes other than '-er'. There do not seem to be event nominalisers of the type in 'comeuppance' but with reduplication, and *'fixable-uppable' sounds dreadful (here the bisyllabicity of the suffix introduces another potentially relevant variable).

    Thanks to the following people for writing to me in response to the query:

    Damien Hall Paul Justice Francesca Masini Monica Macaulay Mark A. Mandel Ad Neeleman Simon Overall And Rosta Martin Paviour-Smith Linda Thornburg

    Regards,

    Andrew

    *********************** Dr. Andrew McIntyre www.uni-leipzig.de/~angling/mcintyre