derivational affixes & phrases

[Philip Miller]

At 14:36 28/03/2002 -0800, Tom Hukari wrote:

>I am looking for literature on apparent morphology/syntax mismatches where
>derivational affixes combine with phrases.


As mentioned by Frank Van Eynde, my thesis (electronically available
through my homepage) analyses the possessive 's in English and pronominal
clitics in French (and determiners in the French NP) as phrasal affixes.
But if the analysis is correct, they would be inflexional rather than
derivational affixes.

One case where there is a possible analysis of derivational affixes
applying to phrases is affixes with wide scope over coordination.

E.g. in French, the ordinal affix "-ieme" can have scope over a
coordination of cardinals: e.g. le cinq ou sixieme (meaning "the fifth or
sixth")
Similarly in Spanish, it is possible to give the adverbial suffix "-mente"
scope over a coordination of adjectives: "clara, concisa y correctamente"
(clearly, concisely, and correctly). This was possible in old French and
apparently also in old italian.

Finally, there is the whole literature on synthetic compounds in English,

e.g. Screw-driver

Where there have been long debates as to whether the structure is

Screw N + Driver N => Screwdriver N
[Screw-drive]V + er => Screwdriver N

The first version has the advantage of not requiring any non existing
intermediate word forms, but raises some semantic problems (one does not
ordinarily say : to drive screws).

The second requires a non existing intermediate form, but has been claimed
to be more semantically transparent, though I'm not really sure that this
is the case, as, presumably, whatever one makes up for combining the
meaning of "screw" and "driver" in the first version is going to be
precisely what one needs to combine the meanings of "screw" and "drive" in
the second...

Best,
Philip


************************************************************

Philip Miller
Professeur de linguistique generale et linguistique anglaise
Directeur de l'U.M.R. 8528 SILEX du CNRS
Universite Lille 3
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