The work from the MorphLab on morphologically complex words in English has generally investigated words with one (overt) suffix. An exception is Yohei Oseki’s dissertation research (published in Oseki et al. 2019 and Oseki & Marantz 2020), which investigated combinations of prefixes and suffixes with an eye to long-distance relationships between the prefix and suffix. For example, un– attaches as a negative prefix to adjectives and as a “reversative” prefix to a subset of reversible verbs. The string unbeat is ill-formed as is, since beat is not one of the verbs semantically compatible with reversative un-, but unbeatable is fine, since the –able suffix creates an adjective from the verb, to which adjective the negative un– may attach. English prefixes are limited, and these combinations of prefixes and suffixes constitute a very small part of the general English vocabulary.

What about combinations of suffixes, as in nation-al-iz-ation? Here a consideration of the possible combinations yields some insights into the classification of morphemes cross-linguistically as “derivational” vs. “inflectional” and raises questions about whether we should expect morphological processing to reflect real differences in the function and nature of different morphemes.

A good starting point for a dive into multiple suffixation in English is Nigel Fabb’s (1988) article on affix order. While the literature has since produced many critiques questioning some of Fabb’s data and conclusions, his general overview of the data and the issues has proved foundational for further studies. Sticking only to English “word” suffixes (those that attach to stems that can be used as independent words, as opposed to bound stems like toler– in tolerate, tolerance and tolerable), Fabb finds strikingly few possible combinations of suffixes, even accounting for the category preferences of the suffixes (e.g. –able attaches to verbs). Most suffixes attach only to a finite set of stems and to a specific list of other suffixes. Some suffixes generally attach only to stems.

Particularly striking is Fabb’s conclusion (p. 535):

“A few suffixes are subject to no selectional restrictions other than those involving part-of-speech. These are:

(3)        [1] -able
            [17] deverbal -er
            [37] -ness”

(The numbers in square brackets reflect the affixes’ order in Fabb’s list of 43 suffixes.) Note that –able and –er attach to verbs while –ness attaches to adjectives. Fabb finds no selectional-free affixes that attach to nouns. Conspicuous in their absence from Fabb’s list are the participle endings –ed and –ing that create adjectival/stative passives and event nominalizations respectively; it’s not clear what motivated him to leave these out. The availability of an adjectival passive for a given verb depends on certain semantic and syntactic properties, not morphological or phonological ones. Similarly, –ing event nominalizations are generally OK on any verb semantically compatible with an event nominal. If we add –ing and –ed to the suffixes in (3), we get a plausible list of category-changing morphemes that could be part of the extended projection of verbs and adjectives. That is, the meanings in this list – for verbs, agentive nominals, event nominals, abilitative adjectives, result/state adjectives; for adjectives, property nominals – may be universal uses of verbs and adjectives and part of the paradigm for any (semantically compatible) verb or adjective in a language.

Note that nounhood is a dead end for this set of derivational suffixes. Verbs can yield nouns and adjectives, and adjectives can yield nouns, but none of the suffixes mentioned take nouns as their input. The maximum depth of derivation given these suffixes is two: verb-able/ed–ness. Examples would include: brok-en-ness, say–able-ness, close–d-ness, etc. However, nouns do enter into productive derivations, e.g. with –ish and –like: dissertation–like, farmer–ish, etc. For some reason, Fabb leaves –like off his suffix list and claims that –ish doesn’t attach outside other suffixes. However, –like and –ish seems amenable to an analysis similar to that of compounds, particularly since they may attach to phrases: I-don’t-care-like attitude, je-ne-sait-quoi-ish expression.

To go beyond three suffixes of the non-compound-ish type – and to consider the possibility of recursion in derivational morphology – we need to look at a set of Latinate affixes that Fabb identifies, including –al, –ion, –ity, –ism, –ist, and –ize, which interact with Latinate –ify, –ate, –ic, –ive, –an, –ous, and the previously mentioned –able. In particular, –al somehow gets us around the usual dead end of nouns, creating adjectives from nouns, and –ize allows the creation of verbs from adjectives. Since we can create nouns from verbs, we now can get adjectives from these nouns and verbs from the resulting adjectives, giving us the recursion noted by Lieber and others: nation-al-iz-ation-al-iz-ation-al-…  Where do –al and –ize fit into a universal set of morphemes perhaps associated with the extended projection of nouns and adjectives respectively?

Adjective forming –al creates an adjective from a noun with the meaning, “of or pertaining to the noun.” In English, for nouns like lake that resist the –al suffix, the noun itself can serve as a pre-nominal modifier: lake house, lake boat. For the same modification in predicative position, the noun would appear with a preposition: a house on a lake, a boat for the lake. It’s an interesting question whether languages generally have a way of creating a “of or pertaining to” modifier from a noun via affixation. Perhaps this question has been addressed in the literature, but if so, I haven’t seen the work.

For –ize, the question is whether languages generally have a way to create a causative accomplishment verb from an adjective. In English, the default construction for this meaning is a periphrastic “make NP Adj” construction (I made them happy, *I happyized them), but English lacks a productive derivational method to create causatives even from e.g. intransitive change of state verbs. So one could imagine a language with affixal causative constructions also having causatives formed from adjectival stems (or not).

This limited recursivity of derivation for English (and Indo-European languages in general) is not really parallel to what we see in agglutinative languages like Turkish. An example from Ergin, Morgan and O’Donnell (2020) illustrates the contrast.

Kur: set up
Kur-um: institution
Kur-um-sal: institutional
Kur-um-sal-laş: become institutional
Kur-um-sal-laş-tır: institutionalize
Kur-um-sal-laş-tır-ıver: institutionalize quickly
Kur-um-sal-laş-tır-ıver-e-me: cannot institutionalize quickly
Kur-um-sal-laş-tır-ıver-e-me-yecek: will not be able to institutionalize quickly
Kur-um-sal-laş-tır-ıver-e-me-yecek-ler: they will not be able to institutionalize quickly
Kur-um-sal-laş-tır-ıver-e-me-yecek-ler-imiz: those that we will not be able to institutionalize quickly
Kur-um-sal-laş-tır-ıver-e-me-yecek-ler-imiz-den: one of those that we will not be able to institutionalize quickly
Kur-um-sal-laş-tır-ıver-e-me-yecek-ler-imiz-den-miş: it has been heard/reported that (it) is one of those that we will not be able to institutionalize quickly
Kur-um-sal-laş-tır-ıver-e-me-yecek-ler-imiz-den-miş-siniz: it has been heard/reported that you are one of those that we will not be able to institutionalize quickly
Kur-um-sal-laş-tır-ıver-e-me-yecek-ler-imiz-den-miş-siniz-ce-sine: it has been heard/reported that you are as if one of those that we will not be able to institutionalize quickly

The first stages of the illustrated Turkish affixation mirror English institut-ion-al-ize, with the added feature of distinguishing the formation of the accomplishment verb from the adjective as an unaccusative (-laş) and the causativization of the unaccusative verb (-tır). After institutionalize, however, Turkish veers into non-English directions, piling on heads that correspond to independent words in English sentences, including adverbs (-yecek  ‘quickly’) and evidential-like heads (-miş  ‘it has been heard/reported’). It’s not clear whether these suffixes are derivational or inflectional on standard definitions, or whether it’s correct or insightful to call them “paradigmatic,” except if we use “paradigmatic” to describe words formed along the extended projection of a verb.

Various (sets of) affixes seem to have their own linguistic stories, resisting a general classification e.g. as “derivational” or “inflectional” suffixes. It is therefore unclear whether or not our processing models should themselves treat suffixes in a uniform manner. Time will tell.

 

References

Ergin, R., O’Donnell, T., & Morgan, E. (2020). Storage and Computation of Multimorphemic Words in Turkish. Cognitive Science Society 2020.

Fabb, N. (1988). English suffixation is constrained only by selectional restrictions. Natural language & Linguistic theory, 6(4), 527-539.

Oseki, Y., Yang, C., & Marantz, A. (2019). Modeling Hierarchical Syntactic Structures in Morphological Processing. Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, 43-52.

Oseki, Y., & Marantz, A. (2020). Modeling Morphological Processing in Human Magnetoencephalography. Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 3(1), 209-219.