phrase + affix

[Dick Hudson]

Dear Tom,
Some English ones for your collection
A.  brown-eyed, three-legged, bearded, etc.  It seems that -ed (pronounced
/Id/ except after a vowel) is added to a noun plus any pre-modifier that
may be needed in order to make it distinctively atypical. I wrote about it
last century in a short squib (Problems in the analysis of -ed adjectives,
Journal of Linguistics 11, 69-72, 1975), but I imagine they're discussed in
any of the big reference grammars.
B. the -ish construction as in "five o'clock-ish", "five past three-ish".
C. ordinal numerals - "twenty-seventh", "five hundred and seventy first".
They're really interesting because the suffix varies according to the last
word of the phrase, although semantically it's clear that the suffix
combines with the whole phrase.
Best wishes,
		Dick


Richard (= Dick) Hudson

Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London,
Gower Street, London WC1E  6BT.
+44(0)20 7679 3152; fax +44(0)20 7383 4108;
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm