{"id":291935,"date":"2010-02-08T04:10:38","date_gmt":"2010-02-08T09:10:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2108"},"modified":"2010-02-08T04:10:38","modified_gmt":"2010-02-08T09:10:38","slug":"isms-gasms-etc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/291935","title":{"rendered":"Isms, gasms, etc."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The linguistic point that is so interesting about the <A href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2107\">PartiallyClips cartoon strip<\/A> that Mark just pointed you to is that the &#8220;suffixes&#8221; involved are not all suffixes.  The endings of the words are <NOBR><I>-like<\/I>, <\/NOBR> <NOBR><I>-esque<\/I>,<\/NOBR> <NOBR><I>-ward<\/I>,<\/NOBR> <NOBR><I>-proof<\/I>,<\/NOBR> <NOBR><I>-(a)thon<\/I>,<\/NOBR> <NOBR><I>-riffic<\/I>,<\/NOBR> <NOBR><I>-master<\/I>,<\/NOBR> <NOBR><I>-go-round<\/I>,<\/NOBR> <NOBR><I>-ism<\/I>,<\/NOBR> <NOBR><I>-kabob<\/I>,<\/NOBR> <NOBR><I>-(o)phile<\/I>,<\/NOBR> <NOBR><I>-(i)licious<\/I>,<\/NOBR> and <NOBR><I>-gasm<\/I>.<\/NOBR> Of these, I think I&#8217;d say (it is a theoretical judgment) that only <NOBR><I>-like<\/I>, <\/NOBR> <NOBR><I>-esque<\/I>, <NOBR><I>-ward<\/I>,<\/NOBR> and <NOBR><I>-ism<\/I><\/NOBR> should be called suffixes.<br \/>\n<span id=\"more-2108\"><\/span><br \/>\nI think words ending in <NOBR><I>-proof<\/I><\/NOBR>, <NOBR><I>-master<\/I>,<\/NOBR> and <NOBR><I>-kabob<\/I><\/NOBR> are best treated as compounds (formed of two roots, like <I>treehouse<\/I>, where  <I>tree<\/I> isn&#8217;t a prefix and <I>house<\/I> isn&#8217;t a suffix).  The element spelled <NOBR><I>-phile<\/I> or <\/NOBR> <NOBR><I>-ophile<\/I><\/NOBR> is a Greek-derived <B>combining form<\/B> (neither a suffix nor a word, but a separate word-formation element nonetheless). And the rest, most interestingly, represent cases of what Arnold Zwicky and I have called <B>playful<\/B> or <B>expressive<\/B> word formation. The endings aren&#8217;t really separate elements at all in the word formation system; they are salient pieces of words reattached where they don&#8217;t belong in a way that represents monkeying with the language system and having fun with it, not simply employing it. English has a suffix of the form <NOBR><I>-ism<\/I>,<\/NOBR> certainly; but (Reginald in the strip is wrong) it doesn&#8217;t have a suffix of the form <NOBR><I>-gasm<\/I>.<\/NOBR> At least, not yet (serious morphology from little jokes can grow). We discuss the distinction between plain and expressive derivational morphology, and lay out a few of its characteristics, in the paper that you can find <A href=\"http:\/\/ling.ed.ac.uk\/~gpullum\/bls_1987.pdf\">here<\/A> (PDF copy of a paper published in the proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistic Society in 1987). We have taken some flak from people who think we are making an invidious and untenable distinction between &#8220;proper&#8221; language and mere messing about; but we have given our reasons, and criteria, and we haven&#8217;t changed our mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The linguistic point that is so interesting about the PartiallyClips cartoon strip that Mark just pointed you to is that the &#8220;suffixes&#8221; involved are not all suffixes. The endings of the words are -like, -esque, -ward, -proof, -(a)thon, -riffic, -master, -go-round, -ism, -kabob, -(o)phile, -(i)licious, and -gasm. Of these, I think I&#8217;d say (it is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4148,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-291935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291935\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}