analysis: unhappiness

[A. Katz]

Many of the functionalist linguists I know take the opposite view that 
derviational morphology is not really active in English, and that people 
just memorize the lexemes "unhappy", "unhappiness", and 
"happy"/"happiness" separately. The idea is that while speakers recognize 
that these words are related, they do not rederive them every time, and 
they learned them from others, rather than putting them together by 
themselves.

I personally think derivational morphology is a little more active than 
that, but there you have your two theoretical extremes, the one you 
related about your former colleagues and the one I related about my former 
colleagues.

Best,

    --Aya

On Wed, 8 Sep 2010, s.t. bischoff wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I had an interesting exchange with a few generative
> syntacticians/morphologists (former classmates of mine) regarding an
> analysis of "unhappiness". Two things that they said surprised me a bit,
> they are the  following:
>
> (1) un- (negation, 'not') only attaches to adjectives (now this clearly
> isn't the case, a simple cursory view of the etymology in the OED provides a
> number of examples of un- with nouns and verbs...though to significantly
> lesser degrees...in addition works on English morphology contain examples as
> well)
>
> (2) the analysis of unhappiness can only be [[un-happy]-ness]...an analysis
> such as [un-[happy-ness]] is impossible (due to (1) above according to my
> former colleagues).
>
> My questions are the following:
>
> (1) Is there a good/well grounded reason to  believe un- "only" attaches to
> adjectives?
>
> (2) What would be the consensus on an analysis of "unhappiness" that most
> linguists would agree on?
>
> Thanks,
> Shannon
>
>