Chapter 2: Derivational Morphology (33–53)

Chapter 2
Derivational Morphology
In the last chapter i talked about how inflexional morphology takes lexemes from the lexicon and
prepares them to serve as actual words in actual sentences. In this chapter we're going to look at
how derivational morphology actually creates the lexemes that live in the lexicon.
Derivational morphology basically involves two general processes, affixation and compounding.
There are derivational affixes just as there are inflexional affixes, and many lexemes in many languages
are formed by affixation.
One of the most important things to understand about derivational morphology, as opposed to inflexional
morphology, is that derivational morphology can significantly change the words it plays around
with not only in form but in meaning and category. For instance, it is not at all unusual for derivational
affixes to change verbs into nouns or adjectives, adjectives into nouns or verbs, that sort of
thing. That's what i mean when i say derivational affixation can change category. Essentially, derivational
morphology can take a word from any one of the three categories verb, noun, adjective, and
return another, related word in either of the other two categories. In Fig. 2.1 i've given you a bunch
of examples of this sort of process taking place in English. In each row of Fig. 2.1, the word farthest
to the left is presumed to be the basic lexeme, or root, to which various derivational affixes are being
attached; the derivational affixes are printed in boldface.
Verb Noun Adjective Verb Adjective Noun
play player playful playfulness
teach teacher teachable
love lover lovable lovableness
friend friendly befriend befriended friendliness
grime grimy begrime
ring bering beringed beringedness
voice voiceless voicelessness
beauty beautiful beautify beautification
modern modernize modernization
passive passivity
impetuous impetuosity
electric electricity
Fig. 2.1 — Category Change Through Derivational Morphology
Of course, not all derivational affixes change category. In particular, negative affixes like un- or
dis- serve merely to create nouns, adjectives, or verbs that mean the opposite of the nouns, adjectives,
or verbs they're formed from, as in (1). The definition of derivational morphology is that it
creates new words, new lexemes that didn't exist previously, out of older ones, and accounts for the
possibility that different lexemes may be related.
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(1) belief unbelief clear unclear
interesting uninteresting understand misunderstand
interested disinterested respect disrespect
obey disobey legal illegal
Roots vs. Stems
In Chapter 1 i talked about stems, explaining that a stem is a lexeme to which inflexional affixes can
be added to produce word-tokens. In this chapter, as already noted, we are looking at how lexemes —
stems — can be formed and added to the lexicon.
From the point of view of inflexional morphology, a stem is basic; you take the stem as it is stored
in the lexicon and add inflexional affixes — prefixes, suffixes, infixes, circumfixes, whatever — to
it. Inflexional morphology is (usually) not interested in the internal structure of the stem to which it
is attaching affixes. This is a little bit like saying that to a chemist, atoms are basic; the chemist is interested
in how whole atoms can be combined with each other. To the physicist, however, an atom
is not basic; it's a combination of a nucleus consisting of protons, neutrons, etc., and a number of
electrons surrounding the nucleus. Likewise, while from the point of view of inflexional morphology
a stem, a lexeme, may be basic, that lexeme may very well have internal structure which, while totally
irrelevant to inflexional morphology, may be of some importance to derivational morphology.
In which case, from the point of view of derivational morphology a stem is not basic. What is basic
to derivational morphology is called a root.
The relationship between derivational and inflexional morphology can perhaps be described in terms
of a flowchart-type diagram such as that in Fig. 2.2. The processes of derivational morphology may
root
Derivational
Morphology
stems/lexemes/lexical words
Inflexional
Morphology
w o r d - t o k e n s
Fig. 2.2 — Derivational & Inflexional Morphology
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take a single morpheme — a root — and derive any number of lexemes from it. These derived lexemes
can then serve as stems for the processes of inflexional morphology, which can add various
inflexional affixes to them to provide the word-tokens we need in ordinary language use.
It is perfectly possible for a lexeme to be both a stem and a root. We noted in the last chapter that
words such as those in (2a) constitute single morphemes. These are lexemes and stems; as noted in
Chapter 1, they readily accept the appropriate inflexional morphemes such as the plural marker -s as
in (2b). They can also serve as roots for derivational processes forming words such as those in (2c)
But it's impossible to analyze them into any simpler morphemes; each of them is a single morpheme
on its own. Therefore, it is also a root.
(2) a. cat dog horse boy book bike
b. cats dogs horses boys books bikes
c. cattiness doghouse horseface boyhood bookish bike path
ungraciousness
un- prefix; negative
grace root
-ious suffix; derives adjectives from nouns
-ness suffix; derives abstract nouns from adjectives
indecipherability
in- prefix; negative
de- prefix; forms verbs of reversal
cipher root
-able suffix; derives adjectives from verbs
-ity suffix; derives abstract nouns from adjectives
antidisestablishmentarianism
anti- prefix; ‘against’
dis- prefix; ‘remove, reverse’
establish root
-ment suffix; derives abstract nouns from verbs
-ary suffix; derives adjectives from nouns
-an suffix; derives a noun referring to a person associated with the meaning of the stem
-ism suffix; derives an abstract noun referring to a political or similar ideology
unmicrowaveability
un- prefix; negative
microwave root
-able suffix; derives adjectives from verbs
-ity suffix; derives abstract nouns from adjectives
Fig. 2.3 — Some Complex Derived English Stems
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On the other hand, in a language like English some lexemes can be morphologically quite complex.
Witness the words in Fig. 2.3. 1 In each of these four examples, i have highlighted one morpheme
by printing it in boldface and labelling it ‘root’; this is in each case the root underlying the underlined
lexeme above it.
There are a few things that i particularly want to point out in connection with these examples of
complex lexemes. One is that, in the analysis of ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’, in my short note
explaining the use of the suffix -an, i mention the ‘stem’. This is in reference to the stem to which
the suffix is attached; in this case, ‘antidisestablishmentary’. The status ‘stem’ — like the synonymous
status ‘lexeme’ — belongs not only to the underlined words, the final result of (in these cases)
fairly extended derivational processes; it can be used for any stage in the sequence. As already indicated,
a root may itself qualify as a stem. The addition of each derivational affix creates a new stem,
to which new derivational affixes can be added. Of course, if each of these, including the root itself,
qualifies as a stem, this implies that it should be possible to attach inflexional affixes to them as well.
This is, in theory, true; it's limited only by the admitted fact that English has relatively little in the
way of inflexional morphology. I've tried to demonstrate the kinds of possibilities implicit in this
approach by the derivational field shown in Fig. 2.4, 2 which includes some inflected forms (indicated
by the broken arrows) of the stems in question.
ungracefulnesses ungracefulness ungracefully
ungraceful gracefully gracefulness gracefulnesses
disgracefulnesses disgraces graceful graces
disgracefulness grace's gracelessly
disgraceful disgrace (N) GRACE graceless
disgracefully disgrace (V) grace (V) gracelessness
disgraced disgracing graced graces gracing
disgraces gracious gracelessnesses
ungracious graciously graciousness
ungraciousnesses ungraciousness ungraciously graciousnesses
Fig. 2.4 — Derivatives of a Single Root
1 Some adopted, with thanks, from Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (William
Morrow: 1994), p.129.
2 Adapted from J. Tournier's Introduction descriptive à la lexicogénétique de l'anglais contemporaine (Champion-
Slatkine: 1985).
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I have said that the difference between a root and a stem is that, while a stem may incorporate any
number of morphemes, a root is by definition a single morpheme and therefore cannot be broken
down into smaller morphemes.
It is sometimes debatable whether a given lexeme can or cannot be broken down into smaller morphemes.
Consider, to take an example from Fig. 2.3, the word ‘microwave’. In Fig. 2.3, i identified
this word as the root of the noun ‘unmicrowavability’. But is ‘microwave’ really a single morpheme?
From the point of view of etymology, that is, the history of the word, it can be analyzed into two
smaller parts, the prefix ‘micro-’ meaning ‘small’ and the word ‘wave’. In this case, ‘wave’ has the
same meaning (波) that it has in the expressions ‘radio wave’ or ‘light wave’: a type of electromagnetic
radiation (電磁輻射). Microwaves are called ‘microwaves’ because they are shorter than ordinary
radio waves (it's all relative, of course; they're still quite a bit longer than light waves). So isn't
it more correct to say that in this case the root is really ‘wave’, with the stem ‘microwave’ being derived
from it by the addition of the prefix ‘micro-’?
Historically, this would be quite correct. But we're not concerned here with the history of the word.
Matters of language history will come up in Part II, in Section 9, the very last section of this book.
Here in this first part of the book, i'm concerned primarily with how language lives and functions
within the minds of its individual users. And to the best of my knowledge, most English speakers
do not tend to think of microwaves as a kind of ‘wave’, or of the word ‘microwave’ as being derived
from the word ‘wave’. For most English speakers, in fact, the noun ‘microwave’ refers not to a type
of electromagnetic radiation but to a machine that lives in one's kitchen; and the verb ‘microwave’
refers to the act of using this machine to warm up one's food. And it is specifically from the verb
that the noun ‘unmicrowavability’ is derived; it means the quality of being unsuitable for microwaving,
for warming up in a microwave oven.
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The analyses i've given in Fig. 2.3 are pretty one-dimensional; they tell you that these words are
formed from the morphemes given and that these morphemes occur in a certain order, left to right,
but they say nothing about the order in which the derivational affixes are actually added to previous
stems or in which each sequence of complex stems is built up. We will have more to say about the
details of how complex lexemes are composed in Chapter 10, but for the moment i will show you in
Fig. 2.5 the sequence of derivation of one of the words in Fig. 2.3. Each line in Fig. 2.5 represents a
distinct lexeme, a distinct stem, derived from the stem above it by the addition of the affix indicated
by the plus (+) sign; there are good reasons for believing that, in the derivation of ‘undecipherability’,
the affixes are added in precisely this order.
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cipher a secret code; writing a message in code
de+cipher recover a plain text from a coded message
decipher+able able to be deciphered
in+decipherable impossible to decipher
indecipherabil+ity the quality of being indecipherable
Fig. 2.5 — Sequence of Derivation of a Complex Stem
Another way of representing this analysis is by means of the tree diagram in Fig. 2.6, in which the
addition of each derivational affix results in a new node which is labelled with the part of speech (N
for ‘noun’, A for ‘adjective’, V for ‘verb’) that results from the addition of that affix. At the lowest
level, i have labelled the root ‘cipher’ as both a noun and a verb; this is because, at least historically,
the verb ‘cipher’ (譯成密碼) is based directly on the noun ‘cipher’ (密碼). The topmost node is
labelled ‘N’, indicating that ‘indecipherability’ is a noun. Tree diagrams are very useful in many
branches of linguistics; we'll see more of them in Chapters 8 and 22.
A
V
V
N
in- de- cipher -able -ity
A
Fig. 2.6 — Tree-Diagram Analysis of a Complex Stem
Productivity
An important issue with derivational affixes is their degree of productivity. Some affixes are more
productive than others, meaning they are used more freely. What does that mean, you may ask. Does
it mean that productive affixes are used in more words than non-productive ones? Sometimes this
is true; however, a more important distinction has to do with the difference (already mentioned with
regard to the analysis of possible roots) between history and current usage: More productive affixes
can still be used to create new words today, while less productive ones may have been used in the
past to create a lot of words, but aren't used much any longer.
For instance, in English we have a number of suffixes that form abstract nouns from more concrete
nouns or adjectives. Some of these are -ness, -ity, and -hood. In the right-hand column of Fig. 2.1
you see some examples of -ness, such as ‘playfulness’, and ‘lovableness’; you also see some examples
of -ity, such as ‘impetuousity’ and ‘electricity’; ‘productivity’ itself is also an example, of course.
In (3) i give you some examples of -hood; but actually, there aren't a lot of words made with -hood
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N

in modern English, and most of those that are have been around for awhile. We don't use the suffix
-hood much to create new words, at least not in the dialects of English i'm most familiar with. In
technical terms, it is not as productive as -ness or -ity.
(3) manhood neighbourhood parenthood personhood
There are limits on the productivity of the suffix -ity; although it generally converts adjectives into
nouns, as in the examples in (4), there are some adjectives to which it will not attach. For instance,
as shown in (5) there is no word ‘*fiercity’ from ‘fierce’, although ‘fierceness’ is not only a possible
but an actual English word. Part of the problem with ‘*fiercity’ is that there is already an English
word ‘ferocity’, formed by the suffix -ity from a root very close to ‘fierce’, that means exactly what
‘*fiercity’ would mean if there were such a word. I would say that ‘-ity’ is a suffix that was more
productive at a certain time in the past than it is now, and most of the English words that include it
were coined at a time when it was more productive. 3
(4) a. scarce scarcity
b. sincere sincerity
(5) fierce *fiercity fierceness ferocity
On the other hand, some derivational affixes are extremely productive. -ness is definitely one of the
more productive affixes in Modern English. Another is the suffix -er, added to verbs to form nouns
meaning ‘person who does’ the action referred to by the verbal stem. These nouns are called ‘agentive
nouns’ or ‘agent nouns’. I've given you a bunch of examples in (6), together with the verbs from
which they're derived.
(6) Verb Agentive Noun Verb Agentive Noun
write writer kill killer
play player win winner
run runner farm farmer
open opener scrape scraper
xerox xeroxer
The real point of (6) is not just the relatively large number of words in English that are formed using
the suffix -er. It's that new ones are being added to this list quite frequently. There are at most a
very few verbs in English that cannot take the suffix -er — i think i would have trouble accepting
words like ‘*be-er’, ‘*have-er’, ‘*can-er’. 4 But apart from this very limited set of exceptions, as far
as i can tell, once you know that something is a verb you know that the suffix -er can be added to it
3 A few years ago i tried to coin the word ‘baroquity’ from the adjective ‘baroque’; several of the people i tried this word
out on were uncomfortable with it, although i still like it.
4 The words ‘caner’ and ‘canner’ do exist in English, but they are not derived from the modal verb ‘can’. ‘Canner’ is
derived from a different verb ‘can’ that is itself ultimately derived from the noun ‘can’ referring to a metal container for
food. To can something is to be put it in a can, and a canner would be someone (or, possibly, a machine) that does this.
‘Caner’ derives ultimately from the noun ‘cane’ (藤) through a verb ‘cane’ that refers either to the making of furniture
with cane or the use of cane as an instrument of punishment.
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to form an agent noun. There's an example of this sort of thing at the bottom of the left-hand side of
the list in (6). Xerox is the name of a company that makes photocopy machines. Their photocopy
machines have justly become so famous that nowadays — much to the Xerox company's chagrin —
a lot of English speakers use the word ‘xerox’ to refer not just to a photocopy machine made by the
Xerox company but to any photocopy machine. And the word has become a verb; we often say ‘to
xerox’ meaning ‘to photocopy’. Now, as soon as xerox became a verb, it became possible to have a
noun xeroxer, meaning usually ‘the person in our office who is responsible for doing all the photocopying’,
often also meaning ‘the person who is responsible for taking care of the photocopy machine’.
And indeed it is so; the word exists, and as far as i know began to be used not long after
xerox began being used as a verb.
Affixes like -ness and -er are so productive that one is apt to find a new word using one or another
of them any day. Another example is the suffix -ize, used to form verbs, usually from adjective
stems. Recently i was reading a brochure and came across the word ‘cyrillicize’, meaning to convert
the spelling of some word, typically a name, into the Cyrillic alphabet used in Russia and other
Eastern European countries. Although i've had plenty of opportunity, i don't remember ever seeing
this verb before, and i suspect the writer made it up on the spot. Yet it was immediately obvious to
me what was meant. That's the power of a highly productive derivational suffix like -ize.
Some derivational processes are so productive that (rather like the verbs in incorporating languages
that we looked at at the end of the last chapter) they can swallow up whole phrases as well as words.
This is what seems to be happening in the passage in (7), quoted from Lewis Carroll's Through the
Looking Glass. During a conversation with my wife, i came up with the word ‘unputdownability’,
meaning a quality manifest by a book that is so exciting or interesting that you are unable or unwilling
to put it down. I've provided in (8) a tree-diagram analysis of this word, in the manner used in Fig.
2.6. As i hope is clear from this analysis, ‘unputdownability’ is derived from the complex verb ‘put
down’
(7) ‘What is an un-birthday present?’ N
‘A present given when it isn't your birthday, of course.’
A
(8) unputdownability A
V
un- put down -able -ity
I experienced a more extreme example of this kind of thing a few weeks before i left the States to
come to Taiwan in 1997. I came home from some errand to find our landlady ((女)房東) busy
about our yard. When i asked her what she was doing, she said, ‘I'm de-dead-branchifying this tree.’
Now, in saying that, she was creating a new word on the model of the established Modern English
word ‘de-icing’ or ‘de-ice’, which means to remove the ice, usually from a car or a road. This verb
is formed by the negative prefix de-, which not only means ‘not’ but, especially when attached to
verbs, means ‘remove, take away’. But note that, although ‘ice’ is usually a noun in English, it is
also a verb; we can ‘ice a cake’, and, more appropriately, we can ‘ice’ something by freezing it. So,
like ‘cipher’ in Fig. 2.6, ‘ice’ is already a verb before receiving the negative prefix de-. ‘Dead branch’,
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on the other hand, isn't a verb; it's not even a word; it's a noun with a modifying adjective — what in
the tree-diagram in (9) i have labelled ‘N′’. 5 So what my landlady did was to convert that whole
phrase into a verb by means of the highly productive suffix -ify, then add to that rather complex verb
the prefix de-, to get a very complex expression meaning ‘to remove the dead branches from’. 6 Now
bear in mind, our landlady is not a linguist. She's a very intelligent and well-educated person who
likes to play word-games, but she's not, so to speak, a professional at it as i am. But this kind of
trick works for her as well as it would for me. This is just another example of how creatively we
human beings — all of us — use language.
(9) ‘I'm de-dead branch-ifying this tree.’ V
N′
V
de- dead branch -ify
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Backformation
Another indication of the creative power of productivity is a phenomenon called backformation.
This is a historical process and in that sense perhaps belongs more properly when we talk about the
history of languages and how and why languages change in Section 9. But i'm going to mention it
here. Backformation is essentially the reversal of a productive derivational process; it involves taking
a word that already exists in the language and that at least appears on the surface to include a
derivational affix, and removing that affix to reveal an apparently simpler word that nevertheless
hasn't existed in the language previously. I've got some examples in (10). Notice that what we have
here are pairs of verbs and what at least appear to be agent nouns derived from them. But in each
case the agent noun has been around longer, at least in English. In some cases, the agent noun really
was derived from the indicated verb — but not in English; rather, the derivation happened in some
other language which happened to have the same, or nearly the same, agentive suffix -er. In other
cases, such as ‘burglar’, the noun in question was not derived from any verb at all.
(10) Verb Agentive noun Verb Agentive Noun
peddle pedlar beg beggar
hawk hawker scavenge scavenger
swindle swindler edit editor
burgle burglar sculpt sculptor
lase laser
5 Technically, that's called an ‘N-bar’, but you don't need to know that.
6 I immediately told her that sentence was going into this text.
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Most of these nouns came into English many centuries ago, and their associated verbs were formed
some time later and added to the language's vocabulary. But the last entry in the left-hand column
is an interesting case of a similar process happening within the past half century. The word ‘laser’
is what's properly referred to as an acronym, a word made up of the initials of a longer expression,
as shown in (11). Laser technology developed in the late 50's and early 60's, and that's how old this
word is. As you can see from (11), the last two letters of the word ‘laser’ have nothing to do, at
least as far as their origin is concerned, with the agentive suffix -er. That doesn't matter. Once the
word was settled into the English language by the mid-60's, there was really nothing to stop people
who design and work with lasers to come up with a verb ‘lase’, as in ‘this gas lases well’, meaning
when properly treated it will efficiently generate a beam of coherent light, a laser-beam.
(11) Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation = ‘laser’
The examples in (10), therefore, are presented in a manner that is not true to their history; the layout
in (10) suggests that the nouns were formed from the verbs, whereas in fact historically the opposite
is the case. In (12) i've given you some further examples of backformation in English with the true
historical process more correctly displayed. Again, we have a set of nouns, each of which ends with
what most English speakers would unhesitatingly recognize as a productive derivative affix, in this
case the suffix -ion as in ‘institution’ or ‘contribution’ or ‘formation’. And, because of this parallel,
English speakers have seen fit to treat the verbs in (12) as legitimate verbs and as the stems from
which these nouns are derived. Now, legitimate verbs they are; we use them all, and if the community
of English speakers says they're legitimate then no one can disagree with us. But they aren't the
stems from which these nouns are derived; quite the contrary, at least as far as English is concerned.
As mentioned earlier, some of these -ion nouns are in fact derived from verbs, but in some other language.
For instance, ‘resurrection’ comes to English ultimately from Latin, which has a derivational
suffix something like -ion, 7 and in that language the noun ‘resurrection’ actually was derived from a
verb ‘resurrex’, meaning roughly ‘to stand up again’. But the English verb ‘resurrect’ did not come
directly from Latin or any other language; it was derived in English by the removal of what appeared
to be a derivational affix. Some of the other verbs in this list, such as ‘electrocute’, ‘televise’, and
‘emote’ are much more recent than ‘resurrect’, indicating that this process continues in our own time.
(12) Noun Backformed Verb Noun Backformed Verb
resurrection resurrect vivisection vivisect
electrocution electrocute television televise
emotion emote donation donate
backformation backform
The last entry in the left-hand column in (12) is included as a commentary from a professional linguist
both on backformation and on my profession. Among linguists specializing in this kind of
thing, you can increasingly hear the use of the verb ‘backform’. But ‘backformation’ is not derived
from any such verb. ‘Backformation’ is derived from the word ‘formation’ by the prefix ‘back’. It's
true that ‘formation’ itself is derived from a verb ‘form’, but the prefix ‘back’ was never attached
directly to the verb ‘form’ to form ‘backform’. ‘Backform’ is derived from ‘backformation’, which
7 Actually, it's more like -tion.
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itself is of course a piece of technical jargon in linguistics just as ‘laser’ is a piece of technical jargon
in physics and technology, and so in both cases the derived verb is even more a piece of technical
jargon.
Just as another example of backformation in the history of English, this one involving an apparent
inflexional affix instead of a derivational one, i offer you the progression in (13). Back in the Middle
Ages there was no word ‘pea’ in English referring to a kind of vegetable. Instead, there was the word
‘pease’, which referred to a collection of the little green spheres that this plant produces; you'd have
a bowl or a basket of these little things, and the whole thing was called ‘pease’. Eventually, that
word was reinterpreted as a plural involving the usual English plural suffix -s, which invited us to
come up with the singular form ‘pea’ to refer to each individual kernal.
(13) pease > peas > pea (豌豆)
In spite of what i've said, backformation is neither regular nor completely productive. The processes
shown in (14) have never taken place. 8 Which is interesting because, like ‘resurrection’, these
words really were derived from verbs by means of the -able suffix — but not in English. Unless i'm
much mistaken, ‘malleable’ and ‘feasible’ came from French; French has a derivational suffix almost
identical to the English -able 9 and at least at one time French had verbs from which these two
adjectives were derived. But English borrowed the adjectives, not the verbs, and has never bothered
to coin the verbs.
(14) malleable ‘可鍛’ *malley
feasible ‘可行’ *fease
The point of this discussion of backformation here is that backformation depends on the recognition
of productivity. Because it's so easy to form new words by the addition (in English) of affixes like
-able, in-, -ness, de-, and -er, English-speakers tend to assume when they encounter a word that
seems to include one of these affixes that the stem resulting from the deletion of that affix must also
be a legitimate lexeme in the language. But this can only happen if English-speakers recognize
these affixes and others like them as particularly productive, as freely attachable (and, by extension,
detachable) to any stems that meet their conditions.
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Limits on Productivity
No matter how productive they may be, however, derivational affixes usually have some constraint
on their application. Typically, a derivational affix can only attached to a certain kind of stem; for
instance, -ness can only be attached to adjectives. And there are restrictions that are narrower than
that. Let's look at (15) and consider the suffix -able, which forms adjectives out of verbs. -able is
8 I've given you Chinese equivalents of the adjectives ‘malleable’ and ‘feasible’, in case you're not acquainted with these
words.
9 In fact, we got the suffix itself from French, as we shall see in Chapter 23.
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extremely productive. You can see in (15) that there are many adjectives formed with it. If you
look down at the bottom of the left-hand column, you will see that it is approximately as productive
as the agent-noun suffix -er, which as mentioned in connection with (6) could be added freely even
to a brand new verb like ‘xerox’. ‘Fleeb’ is not a word in actual English. But there is experimental
evidence to show that, if you take a bunch of English-speaking children and introduce them to the
imaginary word ‘fleeb’ in a context that lets them know that it's a verb, they immediately understand
that, if ‘fleeb’ is a verb, than ‘fleebable’ is a perfectly legitimate adjective. This is the standard test
for the maximal degree of productivity for a derivational affix.
(15) Verb Adjective Verb Adjective
read readable wash washable
break breakable drink drinkable
move movable dye dyable
fleeb fleebable
But now consider the cases in (16). It is impossible to derive adjectives from the verbs in (16) by
means of the suffix -able — that's what the stars mean; they mean that the forms ‘diable’, ‘cryable’,
‘goable’, and ‘sleepable’ are not acceptable English words, even though they're formed in exactly
the same way as the perfectly acceptable adjectives in (15). 10 What's wrong with the verbs in (16),
or with the suffix -able that it can't attach to them?
(16) die *diable go *goable
cry *cryable sleep *sleepable
The answer, as far as anyone has been able to tell, is that -able is a suffix that forms adjectives out
of verbs — but it can only be attached to transitive verb (他動詞) stems. This is reasonable, when
you think about it. What does an adjective in -able mean? Consider the examples ‘readable’, ‘breakable’,
‘washable’. We say that a book is ‘readable’; we say that a mirror is ‘breakable’; we say that
a shirt is ‘washable’; right? But a book is something that is read, something that reading is done to;
the book itself doesn't read. A shirt is something that can be washed, something that washing can
be done to; it doesn't itself wash other things. And when we say that a mirror is breakable, we are
say-ing that we can break that mirror, that the mirror can be broken, not that it can break something
else. In each case, the noun that is modified by the -able adjective corresponds to the object (賓語),
not the subject (主語), of the verb from which that adjective is derived. So, if an -able adjective is
used to describe a possible object of the verb from which it is derived, then that verb must be transitive,
it must be itself capable of taking an object.
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This hypothesis is confirmed by a couple of apparent counterexamples to the claim that only transitive
verbs may serve as hosts for the suffix -able. Consider the words ‘walkable’ and ‘runnable’.
These are acceptable English words, obviously derived from the verbs ‘walk’ and ‘run’. Now, ‘walk’
10 I included in (14) a verb that is pronounced exactly like ‘die’ to show that an adjective in ‘-able’ could be formed from
that verb, even though it can't from ‘die’.
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and ‘run’ in their most normal usages are not transitive; one normally says just ‘i walk’ or ‘he ran’.
But if you look at (17–18), you can see that ‘walkable’ and ‘runnable’ aren't really exceptions to the
rule at all. The verbs ‘walk’ and ‘run’ do have transitive senses, as demonstrated in (18) — and it
is precisely those transitive senses that provide the basis for the adjectives ‘walkable’ and ‘runnable’,
as is clear from (17). If we say ‘the dog is walkable’, we are talking about something that can be
done to the dog, not something the dog can do; likewise, to say ‘the race is runnable’ is not to say
something about anything the race does but rather that people are able to do in the context of the race.
(17) a. The dog is walkable.
b. The race is runnable.
(18) a. She walked the dog.
b. He ran the race.
Classes of Derivational Affixes
Before going on to talk about compounding, i'm going to take a few minutes to tell you about an interesting
complication in the grammar of derivational affixes. There is evidence that not all derivational
affixes are alike from the point of view of grammar. In particular, they seem to fall into two
classes, which unfortunately have been given the rather unimaginative and unilluminating labels
‘Class I’ and ‘Class II’ affixes. 11 The difference can be seen in the different behaviour of the English
suffixes -able and -ion, which attach to verb stems to form, respectively, adjectives and nouns. In
(19) i've given you a few examples of each affix attached to a verb, and i've underlined the stressed
syllable in each case. You'll notice that when the suffix -able is added to a verb stem, the stress stays
on the same syllable that it appears on when the stem surfaces in its basic, verbal self. But the suffix
-ion has the property of dragging the stress toward itself, so that the stress falls on the last syllable
before the suffix, no matter where it falls on the verb.
(19) Verb -able Adjective -ion Noun
irritate irritable irritation
appreciate appreciable appreciation
investigate investig(at)able investigation
In (20) i've given you similar examples, this time involving the suffixes -ness and -ity, both of which
form nouns out of adjectives. As you can see, -ness behaves like -able with regard to stress, while
-ity behaves like -ion. Morphologists are generally agreed that the English suffixes -ion and -ity belong
together in Class I while -able and -ness belong together in Class II, and part of the difference
is this affect or lack of affect on stress.
(20) Adjective -ness Noun -ity Noun
luminous luminousness luminosity
passive passiveness passivity
impetuous impetuousness impetuosity
11
The morphologist Elizabeth Selkirk has proposed calling them respectively ‘root’ and ‘word’ affixes, which i feel is
more descriptive of what's at issue, but unfortunately so far as i know her proposal has not caught on.
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Another factor in the difference between Class I and Class II derivational affixes is that, while both
may be added to the same stem, they have to be added in that order. Words like ‘ridiculousness’ and
‘activityless’ are perfectly fine; in these words, a Class I affix is attached first, forming the words
‘ridiculous’ and ‘activity’ respectively, and a Class II affix is then added to that derived word. But
you can't put them on in the opposite order. See what happens in (21) when we try to add either a
Class I or a Class II suffix to a word that already has a Class II suffix on it. The Class II suffix -ness
goes on just fine, but the Class I suffix -ity can't be added after the Class II suffixes -less or -ish.
(21) Adjective -ness Noun -ity Noun
tasteless tastelessness *tastelessity
voiceless voicelessness *voicelessity
boyish boyishness *boyishity
bookish bookishness *bookishity
↑↑↑隨便↑↑↑隨便↑↑↑隨便↑↑↑隨便↑↑↑隨便↑↑↑隨便↑↑↑隨便↑↑↑隨便↑↑↑隨便↑↑↑
Compounding
Compounding is a process that, as far as i know, exists in all human languages; it involves joining
together two or more lexemes that could, at least in theory, exist on their own, and forming a new
lexeme from the combination.
As you can see from (22), English orthography tends to prefer keeping the members of compounds
separate at least to the extent of putting spaces between them, especially when they get complex.
‘Sailboat’ is itself a compound, but it's relatively short and it has only two elements and it's been
around for a long time. The other, longer expressions in (22) are perfectly good English expressions,
but we tend to prefer to spell them as indicated, with spaces between the individual elements, even
though each of them can be viewed as a single lexeme. Another example of this sort of thing is shown
in (23). Originally the expression ‘blackboard’ was spelled as two words. As it became more and
more commonly used, however, it started being hyphenated. Nowadays it's usually spelled as a
single word. One consideration promoting this change is that ‘blackboards’, in the sense of large
sheets that can be written on with chalk and that get hung up on classroom walls, aren't always black;
in my experience at least, they're often green. Spelling the expression as a single word allows us to
use it to refer to the classroom implement even when it isn't black, while nowadays the two-word
spelling usually means ‘a board that is (literally) black’.
(22) sailboat
sailboat rigging
sailboat rigging design
sailboat rigging design training
sailboat rigging design training institute
(23) black board black-board blackboard
German, as you may know, feels differently about this. It has no compunction about running words
together visually as well as structurally; witness the examples in (24).
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(24) Unfallversicherungspflicht ‘obligation to insure against accidents’
Nachtschattengewächse ‘plants that grow, bloom, etc. during the night’
Bound Roots
A moment ago i said that the elements used to form a compound could in theory stand on their own
as independent lexemes; the distinction between affixation and compounding in derivational morphology
is rather fuzzy, at least with regard to the issue of bound vs. free morphs. You'll remember that
in Chapter 1 i mentioned the distinction between bound and free morphs; a free morph is one that can
stand on its own as a full-fledged word while a bound morph has to be attached to some other morpheme
in order to function properly; the examples i gave were the word ‘cat’ and the plural marker
-s. And you'll remember that i mentioned that affixes are by definition bound morphs. That goes
for derivational affixes as well as inflexional affixes. I mentioned also that, in some languages, an
inflexional stem — a lexeme — may also be bound, in the sense that it needs to have some inflexional
affix attached to it before it can surface as a usable word. But there are morphemes in some languages
that are not free but which we hesitate to regard as either affixes or lexemes in the strict sense.
The morphemes in question are often, at least by English-speaking grammarians, called ‘cran morphs’.
The reason for this expression has to do with a set of words in English referring to different kinds of
berries. The English name for a specific kind of edible berry typically consists of a compound of
the generic word ‘berry’ with some distinguishing characteristic. Some examples are given in (25).
(25) blueberry raspberry strawberry cranberry
Now, ‘blueberry’ is pretty obvious. The objects in question are berries and they are blue, or at least
a sort of bluish-purple. Calling them ‘blueberries’ is transparently descriptive. There is in English
a word ‘blue’, referring to a particular colour, just as there is a word ‘berry’, and this is obviously
just a compound of those two words. No problem.
‘Raspberry’ is a little harder to analyze as a compound. There is a word ‘rasp’ (粗銼) in English,
but what does it have to do with ‘raspberry’? Well, i suppose it could be argued that rasps are sharp
little things with sharp little teeth on them, and raspberries have a rather sharp, tart taste, but that
explanation has always sounded rather far-fetched to me. 12
‘Strawberry’ is worse. There is a word ‘straw’ (草) in English, but it clearly has nothing to do with
‘strawberry’. Although the word feels like a compound, just as much as ‘blueberry’ does, it isn't
really analyzable as such.
And now we get to ‘cranberry’. Again, it feels like a compound, but of what? Take the morpheme
‘berry’ away, and what's left? There is no word ‘cran’ in standard English. So is it an affix? But
what does it mean? Remember our definition: a morpheme is supposed to have a consistent meaning,
consistent in all the words of which it may form a part. But ‘cran’ only occurs in this one word, and
12 My dictionary says ‘raspberry’ is actually a backformation from the Middle English name of a kind of sweet wine.
Obviously, most English-speakers can't be expected to know this, so the derivation of the word ‘raspberry’ remains
pretty opaque to most of us.
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in a few others that are obvious derivatives of it. Therefore, the only meaning that can be assigned
to it is something like ‘that which distinguishes cranberries from other kinds of berries’, which is
pretty circular, if you ask me.
And so linguists have coined the term ‘cran morphs’. 13 A ‘cran morph’ is a bound morph which is
used in so few words — as we say, it is so unproductive — that no consistent meaning can reasonably
be attached to it apart from the definitions of the actual words of which it forms a part.
There is another kind of complication that arises from the facts of language history. Consider the
words in (26). In the first four lines, we seem to have pairs of words sharing the same prefixes and
having different roots; in some cases, the prefixes are readily recognizable as occurring in other
English words as well: ‘return’, ‘perform’, ‘compass’, etc. In the last line, there's another pair of
words that seem to involve the same roots as the words above them along with other prefixes that,
again, are recognizable as occurring in other English words: ‘defend’, ‘deposit’, ‘advise’, ‘address’.
All of which encourages us to identify ‘ceive’ and ‘mit’ as roots. But what do they mean? And
how come they don't actually occur as independent words in English?
(26) receive remit
transceive transmit
perceive permit
conceive commit
deceive admit
The answer is rather like that to the problem of the non-existence of the verbs ‘*fease’ and ‘*malley’
mentioned earlier (cf. (14)). The words in (26) all came into English as loans from Latin. In Latin,
they were all coined by normal means of word-formation, by the adding of productive prefixes to
roots — and ‘ceive’ and ‘mit’ do in fact represent honest-to-God roots in Latin. But English never
borrowed those roots by themselves from Latin, and has never bothered to recover them by backformation,
at least in part because although the words in each of the two columns in (26) seem to be
obviously related to each other morphologically (and in fact are related historically), their meanings
have changed so much over the centuries that it's now impossible to come up with a common meaning
that could be assigned to their putative roots. What do the meanings of ‘receive’, ‘perceive’,
and ‘deceive’ have to do with each other?
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I've said that all languages engage in compounding. But there are subtle differences in how they go
about it. Consider the English and German words skyscraper and Wolkenkratzer in (27). Besides
meaning the same thing, they are very similar in structure. Each word consists of a noun followed
by an agent-noun which itself is derived from a verb meaning ‘scrape’ or ‘scratch’. The differences,
besides the obvious superficial differences in vocabulary, are that first of all, the English word speaks
of something — a building — so tall that it (supposedly) can touch, and scrape, the sky; the German
13 In the process, of course, we have actually elevated the element ‘cran’ to the status of an actual word, although it's a
word of pretty restricted usage.
48

word, perhaps a little more conservatively, speaks instead of a building that can scratch the clouds.
Secondly, the German word refers to the clouds in the plural; Wolken is the plural of Wolke, meaning
‘cloud’. German grammar tends to prefer using plural forms in these kinds of compounds, while
English prefers singulars.
(27) skyscraper Wolkenkratzer gratte-ciel
It is understandable that the English and German words should have very similar structures; after
all, historically English and German are merely two dialects of the same language, and these similarities
continue to manifest themselves even in words like ‘skyscraper’ or ‘Wolkenkratzer’, which
were coined long after the two languages separated. Consider now the equivalent word in a more
distantly related language, French. In French a skyscraper is called gratte-ciel. Here we have exactly
the same idea as the English word — ‘ciel’ means ‘sky’ and ‘gratter’ means ‘scratch’. 14 But the
structure is quite different. First of all, whereas in English and German the verbal element ‘scraper’
or ‘Kratzer’ comes at the end of the compound, in French it comes at the beginning; this is typical
of French. Secondly, in the English and German words the verbal element, as i called it, isn't actually
a verb but an agent-noun derived from a verb; in French it actually is a verb, not a derivative. We
shall discuss this difference further in Chapter 10, when we discuss how the meanings of words are
related to their form.
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Does Chinese have Morphology?
OK, i've been talking about a lot of different languages, but i haven't said much about your own yet,
have i? To quote the angels in the Bible, Fear not (不要懼怕!) Like the angels, what i am about
to say is likely to be rather controversial, but i for one am convinced that it is true. Does Chinese
have any morphology? As admittedly one single linguist who is not by any means fluent in the
language but wrestles with it on a day-to-day basis, i think i can confidently say it most certainly
does. Frankly, it amazes me to come across statements to the contrary, some of them by intelligent
people, some of whom are competent linguists.
It is true that, with the possible exception of the element men 們 used to mark plurals on personal
pronouns and occasionally on nouns referring to human beings, Chinese has nothing that can be
recognized as inflexional morphology; even though Chinese verbs are susceptible to marking for
aspect and negation, the relevant markers are, with some reason, regarded as separate words. And
when it is reported that Chinese has no morphology, i strongly suspect that this is what is meant,
that Chinese has no inflexional morphology. But i have done my best in this section to make clear
to you that linguistic morphology involves both inflexion and derivation, and the derivational morphology
of Chinese is, to me, quite impressive; i'm finding it quite a challenge to get the hang of all
of your compound verbs, like those in (28), and the methods by which they are coined.
14 In fact, English ‘scratch’, German ‘kratzen’, and French ‘gratter’ are all derived historically from the same verb.
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(28) 吃過 吃得了 想不到 想得起來 聽得出來
From what i have learned so far of the language, it is apparent that Chinese includes some derivational
affixes, such as those in (29). While it may be true that these are not necessarily bound
morphs in the strict sense, they do seem to be used an awful lot in at least colloquial Mandarin as
suffixes; i'll get back to this in a minute.
(29) 兒 子
And there seem to be a goodly number of bound morphs too. I've provided in Fig. 2.7 a partial list
of morphemes that are classed as ‘bound’ by Jerome L. Packard, a leading expert in this area. 15 In
labelling these morphemes as ‘bound’, Packard is claiming that they can’t occur just any old where;
they always occur associated with one or another of a small, limited number of other morphemes.
It's important to understand a few things about a list like this. First of all, Packard (and, by extension,
我自己) is talking about Modern Mandarin, not Classical Chinese. He admits (p.67) that e.g. 言
was ‘perfectly acceptable as a free word in the classical Chinese language’, meaning that if you look
through the body (or ‘corpus’, to use the technical term) of Classical Chinese literature you will undoubtedly
find plenty of examples of 言 being used freely, without being bound to any of the morphemes
listed alongside it in Fig. 2.7. That isn't relevant to Packard's claim (though it would certainly
be of interest to the student of the history of the Chinese language); he's talking about Mandarin
Chinese as it is used nowadays, at the beginning of the 21 st century, by native speakers thereof.
Bound Morph Morphemes to which it typically attaches
言 -語-, 方-, 文-, 格-, 寓-, 流-
桌 書-, 飯-, -子
孩 男-, 女-, 嬰-, 小-, -子, -兒
袋 衣-, 口-, -子
名 姓-, 人-, 地-, -字
母 父-, -親
腦 電-, -子, -汁, -兒
Fig. 2.7 — Examples of Bound Morphs in Mandarin
15 Cf. his book The Morphology of Chinese: A Linguistic and Cognitive Approach (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000),
especially pp. 67 ff.
50

Secondly, Packard is talking only about Mandarin Chinese, not about any of the other 方言; a morpheme
may be free in one but bound in another. 16 Thirdly, Packard claims that 木 is a bound morph
in its most basic meaning of ‘tree’ or ‘wood’ but acknowledges that it is free in the derived meaning
of ‘numb’ as in ‘我舌頭木了’; 17 likewise, 工 is bound when it means ‘labour’, ‘art’, or ‘industry’
but free when it means ‘work’ or ‘job’. He believes that these are really examples of polysemy —
one word or morpheme being listed in the lexicon more than once, or (another way of thinking of it)
two different lexical entries being identical in their pronunciation and written representation. 18
For what it's worth, my own (very limited) experience of modern Mandarin Chinese confirms Packard's
judgments in this area. I never hear the morphemes 孩, 桌, 袋, or 母 except in combinations like 孩
子, 女孩, 桌子, 袋子, or 母親 — but i do hear those combinations a lot! And i distinctly remember
one occasion when i was asking a friend for her daughter’s name, and i said, ‘妳女兒的名是誰?’,
and she corrected me, saying ‘名字’. From experiences like this, i conclude, as does Packard, that
in modern Mandarin there is no word 名; 名 may be a 字 but it is not a 詞; according to Packard,
these are the technical terms traditionally used in Chinese linguistics. The English equivalent would
be to say that 名 is a morpheme but not a word.
In this connection, there's something i've avoided pointing out throughout this section, partly because
it's rather obvious but also partly because this seems to be the most appropriate point to mention it.
I've talked about prefixes and suffixes; there are inflexional prefixes and suffixes, and there are derivational
prefixes and suffixes. It's worth noting that in all cases, a prefix is a prefix and a suffix is a
suffix. For instance, in English we have a prefix un- as in the words in (30a); the strings in (30b)
don't exist in English, precisely because un- is a prefix, not a suffix, and given the rules of English
grammar can never function as a suffix. 19
(30) a. uneaten unadmired ungrammatical
b. *eatenun *admiredun *grammaticalun
So far in my admittedly very limited experience of the language, i have the impression that Chinese
has very few constraints of this kind. For instance, i notice that both members of the pairs in (31)
16 On the basis of my experience in Hong Kong in the summer of 2001, i suspect that 慢 may be free in Mandarin but not
in Cantonese.
17
And, of course, Packard is also talking specifically about Mandarin Chinese as used on the Mainland, not in Taiwan,
where, one of my students informs me, 麻 is the commonly-used word for ‘numb’, not 木.
18
Examples in English would be the separate entries for the noun ‘present’ (禮物) and the adjective ‘present’ (到場), or
the general sense of the word ‘love’ and the specialized sense in tennis, where it means a score of 0.
19 This is not to say that in some other language there may not be a suffix expressing negativity; while i don't know of
any offhand, i wouldn't be at all surprised if such languages exist. Likewise, i'm not claiming that some other language
might have a suffix of the form -un; i'm sure such languages exist. I'm talking here about a peculiar fact of English
grammar.
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exist; it's not clear to me how much they differ in meaning. However, while i quite frequently come
across the expression in (32a), i would be very much surprised if i ever encountered the one in (32b).
(31) a. 兄弟 弟兄
b. 語言 言語
c. 朋友 友朋
(32) a. 袋子 *子袋
It's partly for this reason that i have the impression that most Chinese morphology has to do with
compounding; the possibility of the existence in the same language of both forms in the pairs in (31)
is the sort of thing one might expect from compounding processes; similar things are not unheard of
in other languages. The impossibility of (32b), on the other hand, strongly suggests that 子 in (32a)
and many similar expressions is a suffix, not an independent element.
I mentioned earlier that, as far as i can tell, the morphemes listed in Fig. 2.7 seem only to occur, at
least in modern Chinese, in compounds. Jerry Norman has noted the apparent existence in Chinese
of a few morphemes consisting of two syllables; 20 cf. (33). It is not clear to me whether these are
truly single morphemes, or whether we're dealing here with something along the lines of cran morphs
— morphemes that exist only in these combinations. I note that, according to at least one of my
dictionaries, the morpheme 拉, and possibly 瘩 as well, does seem to have independent existence in
the language.
(33) 蜘蛛 耷拉 疙瘩
I will mention here an issue that will be discussed further in Chapter 5. It has been traditional to
translate the Chinese expression 字 into English as ‘word’. However, strictly speaking it is more
correct to understand the Chinese 字 as equivalent to the English ‘morpheme’. 21 This brings us
back to the issue raised in the introduction to this first section of the textbook, What is a word?
What qualifies as a word?
There is evidence that people fluent in Chinese regard some elements within a compound as more
closely bound together than others, regard some compounds as composed of units that are larger
than the basic morphemic level; to put it another way, Chinese-speakers seem to recognize a level
of organization somewhere between the whole phrase or compound expression and the individual
morpheme (字). I've noticed especially that some longer compound expressions in Chinese can be
abbreviated. For instance, here in Taipei the institutions officially known by the names in (34a) are
routinely referred to by the abbreviations in (34b). And on exams for this course i routinely see students
writing (35b) for the course title rather than the fuller (35a). To me at least, this constitutes
fairly strong circumstantial evidence that Chinese-speakers, at least here in Taiwan, at some semi-
20 Jerry Norman, Chinese (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 8–9.
21 Of course, the average English-speaker isn't familiar with the technical term ‘morpheme’, so for practical purposes the
more usual translation ‘word’ must be maintained.
52

conscious level regard the expressions in (36) as real things that are as distinct from the longer phrases
they may be used in as they obviously are from individual 字. I don't know if you have a formal
term for intermediate-level units such as those in (36); speaking as a Westerner who's used to compound
words, i have no trouble at all thinking of these as ‘words’, each of which is a compound of
two or three morphemes.
(34) a. 台灣大學 師範大學
b. 台大 師大
(35) a. 語言學概論 b. 語概
(36) 台灣 師範 大學 概論 語言學
53