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

In front of these counterexamples to the RHR, one is faced with different alternatives to
explain them. 3 The first one is to say that these words have no head. However, this is
not a very attractive option since all complex words seem to have a head. The notion of
head, which plays an important role in syntax, can also be applied to the internal
structure of words. Work on heads in morphology has been well-established for a long
time (cf. Williams (1981a), Selkirk (1982), Scalise (1984, 1988), Di Sciullo & Williams
(1987), to mention just some of the earliest works).
A second option is to ascribe the prefix en- the attribute of a head and assign it
to the category V. For instance, Williams (1981a) provides two arguments to support
this view for English, the first of which is that it accounts for the systematic assignment
of en-X words to the category V. The second argument is that en- potentiates the affix
–ment, as seen in ennoblement, enragement, and endearment. As is usually observed in
morphology studies, the potentiation of affixX by affixY indicates that the latter must be
in the head position. In this sense, it seems plausible to say that en-X words have
leftmost heads. (See section 2.4.2 where this second option is developed further for both
English and Catalan).
A third alternative to deal with the counterexamples to the RHR is not to treat
them as exceptions, which is the view defended by Neeleman & Schipper (1992) when
dealing with apparent category-changing verbal prefixation in Dutch. The authors argue
that prior to prefixation there is a conversion process of As and Ns to Vs, by means of a
zero-affix. Some evidence for this conversion-analysis comes from the argument
structure of Vs, assuming that the Θ-grid of a complex word is derived from the
thematic information of its morphemes via Θ-role percolation. The Dutch prefix verprovides
a Theme when it attaches to a V. That becomes clear if the V dobbelen (5a),
which takes an Agent, is contrasted with the prefixed version of the same V (5b), which
takes an Agent and a Theme. However, when ver- is attached to a N/A, there is a Theme
(which in this case originates in the A due to the Rel(ativized) RHR), and an optional
Agent which cannot have originated in the prefix (see (6)), assuming that the prefix verprovides
a stable Θ-role. In (5) it was established that the prefix provides a Theme,
although its features are sometimes not visible, i.e. when the base on its right has the
same features, as seen in (6). Another source for the Agent has to be found. Hence, the
postulation of the conversion suffix.
3 I discard the possibility that in Catalan the final suffix is responsible for the category change, since this
suffix is part of the inflectional paradigm and inflectional elements do not change category.
3