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

As for the remark made by several authors (see e.g. Williams (1981a)) that
the prefix en- potentiates the affix –ment in English and Catalan because the former is a
head, I argued that it is not he presence of en-, but simply the presence of any prefix
which triggers the suffix –ment. For that fact I suggested that the suffix –ment has a
certain feature [F] which needs to be satisfied, and that the prefix en- has the relevant
feature [F] (cf. Fabb (1988)). Obviously, this option needs to be further investigated to
find the real feature behind the potentiation of the suffix –ment.
Other questions also need more study. One has to do with the existence of
apparent synonyms with a locative reading in the English data (e.g. (en)circle). Do they
show that the [-c-m] features of the prefix are still available and that the process of
relinking these features to the base N has not died out completely? A further question
which also needs to be addressed is whether the process of relinking the [-c-m] role to
the base N also takes place in Catalan, given the not so high percentage (61.6%) of
speakers requiring the presence of the prefix in locatum Vs in my experiment. To
answer these questions a larger experiment (considering more speakers and pairs of
prefixed and unprefixed pairs of hypotetical Vs) should be carried out. For the moment I
leave these questions and the possibility of carrying a larger experiment for future
research.
56