bob@cadovax.UUCP (Bob "Kat" Kaplan) (02/14/85)
Has anybody ever considered the syntactic structure of words? For example, since the term "unemployable" is taken to mean "unable to be employed" rather than "able to be unemployed," the word must have an underlying structure of (un(employ able)) rather than ((un employ) able). "-able" is more tightly bound to "employ" than "un-" is. Is this because "employable" is a word and "unemploy" is not? (Or is it?) Has anyone done any thinking on this? I haven't, It just occurred to me recently while wishing to be "unemployable" in the second, less common sense. -- Bob Kaplan "All the clouds turn to words. All the words float in sequence. No one knows what they mean. Everyone just ignores them."
grass@uiucdcsb.UUCP (02/18/85)
/* Written 4:06 pm Feb 13, 1985 by bob@cadovax in uiucdcsb:net.nlang */
/* ---------- "Underlying Structure of Words" ---------- */
Has anybody ever considered the syntactic structure of words?
--
Bob Kaplan
/* End of text from uiucdcsb:net.nlang */
Morphology studies just these sorts of questions. Maybe someone out there
can give you a reference for English morphology. I could only
recommend texts on Slavic morphology.
- Judy Grass, University of Illinois - Urbana
{ihnp4,pur-ee,convex}!uiucdcs!grass grass%uiuc@csnet-relay.arpadoug@terak.UUCP (Doug Pardee) (02/18/85)
> "-able" is more tightly bound to "employ" than "un-" is. Is this > because "employable" is a word and "unemploy" is not? (Or is it?) So what about "notwithstanding"? -- Doug Pardee -- Terak Corp. -- !{hao,ihnp4,decvax}!noao!terak!doug
allen@osu-eddie.UUCP (John Allen) (02/19/85)
> Has anybody ever considered the syntactic structure of words? Yes, there is a whole field of linguistics devoted to just this. It is called morphology. > For example, since the term "unemployable" is taken to mean > "unable to be employed" rather than "able to be unemployed," > the word must have an underlying structure of (un(employ able)) > rather than ((un employ) able). > > "-able" is more tightly bound to "employ" than "un-" is. Is this > because "employable" is a word and "unemploy" is not? (Or is it?) Generally, each affix (includes suffixes, prefixes, and infixes) attaches to a specific subset of the parts of speech, (which in one theory are characterized as follows Noun-like Verb-like| + - -------------------- + | Adj Verb - | Noun Prep This allows you to say things like "z-" attaches to the category [+V], instead of saying that it attaches to verbs and adjectives.) In the above example "-able" attaches to [+V] with the approximate meaning of "able to be x-ed" (able to be employed) and the new word is an adjective. The prefix "un-" is slightly unusually in that there are actually two distinct prefixes with different meanings. "un-" attaches to verbs with the meaning of "to reverse the action of" (e.g. "unzip") and the resulting word is a verb. "un-" attaches to adjectives with the meaning "not" and the resulting word is an adjective. The reason that "unemploy" sounds strange is that it would have to mean something like "to reverse the action of employing, to fire?" It is interesting to note here that the word "unzippable" is ambiguous. "unable to be zipped" (un+(zip +able) ) verb adj adj "able to be unzipped" ((un+zip ) +able) verb verb adj Hope this helps John Allen allen@osu-eddie
rob@ptsfa.UUCP (Rob Bernardo) (02/21/85)
In article <382@terak.UUCP> doug@terak.UUCP (Doug Pardee) writes: >> "-able" is more tightly bound to "employ" than "un-" is. Is this >> because "employable" is a word and "unemploy" is not? (Or is it?) > >So what about "notwithstanding"? >-- I think there is a basic difference between "unemployable" and "notwithstanding". To most speakers of English, I would suppose that the word "unemployable" has an obvious structure that relates the meanings of its parts to the meaning of the whole. After all, "un" and "able" are common affixes in English that are routinely added to verbs to create words perhaps unheard of before with a predictable meaning. On the other hand, "notwithstanding" is lingustically-technicallys speaking an idiom, i.e. an expression whose meaning is not deducible from its structure and the meanings of its parts. To me, and I suspect to most speakers of English, "notwithstanding" is not semantically parsable; when you hear it or use it in speech, you treat it as an atomic vocabulary item, not as a collection of atomic vocabulary items. The only way in which "notwithstanding" may appear NOT to be an idiom, is that idioms are usually phrases or larger constructions, not single words. However, the fact that "notwithstanding" is WRITTEN without any spaces, instead of as "not withstanding" (or some such), is an idiosyncrasy of how we represent language on paper. -- Rob Bernardo, Pacific Bell, San Francisco, California {ihnp4,ucbvax,cbosgd,decwrl,amd70,fortune,zehntel}!dual!ptsfa!rob _^__ ~/ \_.\ _ ~/ \_\ ~/ \_________~/ ~/ /\ /\ _/ \ / \ _/ \ _/ \ \ /