analysis: unhappiness

[s.t. bischoff]

Thanks to all for the replies. One thing that strikes me as a result of
these responses is how my conception of linguistic concepts, objects, and
processes, if you will, is so surprisingly skewed and limited. I say
surprisingly because while I have been trained as a generativist I have
aspired to look at language from various perspectives and find that many of
those are more appealing various reasons. Yet, at some basic level,
generative linguistics seems to be my point of reference. I recall as a
graduate student one instructor noting that "they could no longer think of
language in any other way [than generative]"...that when they saw a sentence
they "saw trees." Curious...

On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 4:35 PM, George Lakoff <george.lakoff at gmail.com>wrote:

> Think about "undo" and "untangle."
>
> In addition, morphology may not reflect semantics. One might have
> un+happiness in surface morphology and [un+happy] ness for semantics, which
> is perfectly natural.
>
> George
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 5:46 AM, s.t. bischoff <bischoff.st at gmail.com>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
>>
>
>