Prefixation in English and Catalan - Departament de Filologia ...

may be considered negative by some, and can explain the observed dependencies
between prefixes like a-, des-, en- and the suffix –miento in Spanish, or the prefixes en-,
be- and the suffix –ment in English (cf. e.g. Alcoba [in Varela (1993)] and Williams
(1981a) respectively), it faces some problems. Having a circumfix would imply ternary
branching, an option that would be very marked in morphology, if it exists at all. This
untenable structure would be an exception to the general principle of binary branching,
embodied in Aronoff’s (1976) Binary Branching Hypothesis (BBH), according to which
one affix is added at a time, resulting in morphological trees branching in a binary
fashion (see e.g. Cabré (1994) and Drijkoningen’s (1999) defence of the BBH).
2.4.2.2 Two constituents
A second alternative would be the structure [prefix [x]], which has been proposed for
languages whose inflectional paradigm does not contain (at least visibly) the thematic
vowel. In this structure the prefix would be category-changing. Although it would be an
exception to the generalization that prefixes do not change category, at the same time it
would explain the fact that en-, being a head, is able to potentiate the suffix –ment (cf.
e.g. Siegel (1979), Williams (1981a), Selkirk (1982), 13 Fabb (1984), Gavarró (1990),
Lieber & Baayen (1993)). Concerning the prefix under analysis, it is generally assumed
that en- subcategorizes for [+N] bases to form Vs (e.g. [em[bitter]A]V, [en[danger]N]V),
thus conforming to the Modified Unitary Base Hypothesis (MUBH) of Aronoff (1976),
according to which an affix may be attached only to bases that form a syntactic class
specifiable in terms of a single syntactic category feature. 14 As and Ns share the same
feature specification: [+N]. However, this account leaves unexplained words like
en-livenV, en-lightenV or en-closeV, where the prefix en- has been attached to a V. This
clearly goes against the MUBH: there is no way to derive a single syntactic feature that
includes As, Ns and Vs. In addition, another alternative should be found for Catalan as
well as for English. Apart from the overt prefix en-, Catalan contains a visible
inflectional suffix (cf. 14) and, as it will be shown, English words like encase contain a
13 Selkirk (1982) regards the small set of English category-changing prefixes (a-, be-, de-, en-) as not
exceptions to the Rel. RHR, since the prefixes would constitute the rightmost element within the structure
which has such a syntactic category and thus would be the head with respect to this feature. However, I
still consider this small number of prefixes exceptional, given that these would be the only ones that are
able to change the category of the word they attach to.
14 Following the decomposition of the four major lexical categories into the features [+/-N] [+/-V], the
following picture is derived: Noun [+N-V], Adjective [+N+V], Verb [-N+V], and Preposition [-N-V].
14