backformations (again)

[Dennis R. Preston]

>larry,

Congratulations on exposing yourself as a member of the club which
believes that "morphological existence" is, at least from one
persepctive, a psycholinguistic  matter (or, to put it bluntly, stuff
in the heads of living speakers). I've always been amused when what
might be called historical precriptivists comment on the "fact" that
many speakers do not "know" that the mopheme "apt," for example,
"exists" in the word "inept," or that there is no such negative
prefix as "sac-" in, for example, sacrilegious (or, worse, that the
morpheme "religious" does NOT exist in the word "sacrilegious"). How
many poeple have to have a morpheme in their heads before it is a
"real" one?

dInIs (who bets that the so-called nonexistence of "religious" in
"sacrilegious" is "known" to a pitiful minority)

PS: I hope this doesn't turn into one of those cut-off messages, in
which I simply congratulate larry for exposing himself.

>At 11:19 PM -0500 2/3/01, Fred Shapiro wrote:
>>On Sat, 3 Feb 2001, Beverly Flanigan wrote:
>>
>>>  Two last backformations (maybe):  Read in _The Nation_ just this
>>>  morning:  someone was "coronated" (figuratively) for something or
>>>  other.   And in another written text, "invocating" was used for
>>>  "invoking."  Interestingly, these were both written; I would guess more
>>>  such usages would occur in speech than in writing, unless they've already
>>>  become established and accepted?
>>
>>Neither of these is new (one dates from 1623, the other from 1526) and
>>neither is a back-formation.
>>
>>Fred Shapiro
>>
>In defense of Beverly's observations, it might be argued that
>
>(1) "coronate" and "invocate" represent instances of our
>resuscitation-of-dead-words thread
>
>(2) while neither is a back-formation, for the reason Fred cites,
>each of them may nevertheless be seen as an ontogenetic
>back-formation, in the sense that for a contemporary speaker, who has
>no access to these defunct verbs (and who, in fact, DOES have access
>to the verbs that "should" block them, "crown" and "invoke"), these
>verbs ARE back-formed from morphologically more complex items already
>in his/her lexicon, "coronation" and "invocation".
>
>larry

--
Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736