The typological status of old English word-formation

1990 ◽  
pp. 205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dieter Kastovsky
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
English Word ◽  
Word Formation

scholarly journals CLOSING SUFFIXES IN OLD ENGLISH: A STUDY BASED ON RECURSIVE AFFIXATION

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 27-54
Author(s):  
Roberto Torre Alonso ◽  
Darío Metola Rodríguez
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
English Word ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Lexical Database ◽  
Lexical Categories ◽  
Productive Process

ABSTRACT This paper takes issue with the lexicon of Old English and, more specifically, with the existence of closing suffixes in word-formation. Closing suffixes are defined as base suffixes that prevent further suffixation by word-forming suffixes (Aronoff & Furhop 2002: 455). This is tantamount to saying that this is a study in recursivity, or the formation of derivatives from derived bases, as in anti-establish-ment, which requires the attachment of the prefix anti- to the derived input establishment. The present analysis comprises all major lexical categories, that is, nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs and concentrates on suffixes because they represent the newest and the most productive process in Old English word-formation (Kastovsky 1992, 2006), as well as the set of morphemes that has survived into Present-day English without undergoing radical changes. Given this aim, the data retrieved from the lexical database of Old English Nerthus (www.nerthusproject.com) comprise 6,073 affixed (prefixed and suffixed) derivatives, including 3,008 nouns, 1,961 adjectives, 974 adverbs and 130 verbs. All of them have been analysed in order to isolate recursive formations.

Productivity and graduality in the Layered Structure of the Word

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 202-226
Author(s):  
Carmen Novo Urraca ◽  
Ana Elvira Ojanguren López
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Layered Structure ◽  
English Word ◽  
Word Formation

Abstract This article deals with two theoretical aspects of lexical derivation, productivity and graduality. After a discussion of transparency and opaqueness in Old English word-formation, it focuses on lexical productivity and puts forward a typology of recursive phenomena. On the basis of this typology, the morphological template of the Layered Structure of the Word is revised. The main conclusion is that a more diachronically oriented analysis is likely to opt for a decompositional template, whereas a more synchronically directed study which seeks typological validity will probably favour the template with one functional slot. If the focus is on diachronic linguistics, a template based on minimal constituent analysis can guarantee a detailed description of the derivational steps of the word, including non-affixal derivation and semantically opaque affixes.

scholarly journals Alternation vs. Allomorphic Variation in Old English Word-Formation: Evidence from the Derivational Paradigm of Strong Verbs

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 63-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carmen Novo Urraca ◽  
Laura Pesquera Fernández
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
English Word ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Strong Verbs

Abstract This article addresses the question of Old English alternations with a view to identifying instances of allomorphic variation attributable to the loss of motivation and the subsequent morphologization of alternations. The focus is on the strong verb and its derivatives, in such a way that the alternations in which the strong verb partakes can be predicted on the basis of phonological principles, whereas allomorphic variation with respect to the strong verb base is unpredictable. Out of 304 derivational paradigms based on strong verbs and comprising 4,853 derivatives, 478 instances have been found of phonologically motivated vocalic alternations. The conclusion is reached that the most frequent alternations are those that have /a/ as source and those with /y/ as target, because /a/ is the point of departure of i-mutation and /y/ its point of arrival. Sixteen instances of allomorphic variation have also been found, of which /e/ ~ /eo/, /e/ ~ /ea/ and /i/ ~ /e/ are relatively frequent.

scholarly journals Joint Semantic Synthesis and Morphological Analysis of the Derived Word

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 33-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Cotterell ◽  
Hinrich Schütze
Keyword(s):  
Neural Networks ◽  
Recurrent Neural Networks ◽  
Probabilistic Model ◽  
Morphological Analysis ◽  
Semantic Representation ◽  
English Word ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Additive Models ◽  
Segmentation Accuracy ◽  
Morphological Productivity

Much like sentences are composed of words, words themselves are composed of smaller units. For example, the English word questionably can be analyzed as question+ able+ ly. However, this structural decomposition of the word does not directly give us a semantic representation of the word’s meaning. Since morphology obeys the principle of compositionality, the semantics of the word can be systematically derived from the meaning of its parts. In this work, we propose a novel probabilistic model of word formation that captures both the analysis of a word w into its constituent segments and the synthesis of the meaning of w from the meanings of those segments. Our model jointly learns to segment words into morphemes and compose distributional semantic vectors of those morphemes. We experiment with the model on English CELEX data and German DErivBase (Zeller et al., 2013) data. We show that jointly modeling semantics increases both segmentation accuracy and morpheme F1 by between 3% and 5%. Additionally, we investigate different models of vector composition, showing that recurrent neural networks yield an improvement over simple additive models. Finally, we study the degree to which the representations correspond to a linguist’s notion of morphological productivity.

Repetitions which are not repetitions: the non-redundant nature of tautological compounds

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 431-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
RÉKA BENCZES
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
English Language ◽  
English Word ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Right Hand ◽  
Oak Tree ◽  
Main Factors ◽  
The Right

In English morphological literature, the term ‘tautological compound’ has been typically used to refer to two distinct – but closely related – phenomena: (1) compounds composed of a hyponym and a superordinate term (such as oak tree); and/or (2) compounds based upon two synonymous units (such as subject matter). Such combinations are one of the quirkiest – and least researched – phenomena of English compounding. Their oddity can be attributed to two main factors. First, as their name, ‘tautological compound’ implies, at face value such combinations can be considered as prime examples of the redundancy of language. Second, they do not follow normal compound-forming rules in the sense that both constituents can function as the semantic head (as opposed to ‘normal’ English compounds, which follow the Right-Hand Head Rule).Perhaps it is the quirkiness of tautological compounds that accounts for the fact that not much has been said about them in traditional accounts of compounding, which typically relegate them to a marginal area of the English language. However, there is more to tautological compounds than meets the eye. What the present study wishes to demonstrate is that the term ‘tautological compound’ is a misnomer, as such combinations are far from being tautological or redundant in their meaning. Accordingly, the article first clarifies the notion of tautological compound, and then aims to give an account of the various roles that such combinations play in language, thereby demonstrating their non-tautological and non-redundant nature – in order to assign this much-neglected category to its proper, well-deserved place within English word formation.

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