UN-words

[Laurence Horn]

At 7:56 AM -0500 10/29/03, Davis, Boyd wrote:
>I'm asking for my UNC-C colleague, Fred Smith, disjecta at cetlink.net, who's
>looking at style in authors publishing just prior to WWII:
>
>Is it true that there was in the last century, sometime prior to WWII,
>something of an "explosion" of words using the prefix "un-"?  I have found
>in the OED SUPPLEMENT such words as the following:  "unpublished" (1934),
>"unphysiologi-cal" (1934), "unquote" (1935), "unpornographic" (1938),
>"unproble-matic" (1944), etc.

Dear Fred (and list),

I think there are a number of separate issues involved here.  I've
written a couple of papers on un-words recently, in which I try to
distinguish them by category based on whether we're dealing with
un-adjectives, un-verbs (reversatives like "unzip", "undo"), or
un-nouns ("uncola", "unmartini", and the related cases involving
compounds, going back to Lewis Carroll's "unbirthday present").  Un-
has always been quite productive in forming adjectives from other
adjectives, especially morphologically complex ones with a stem in
deverbal -able or participial -ed , -ing, to the point that
dictionaries may not list many un-adjectives separately.  The example
I like to use is "unxeroxable", which would never be listed (indeed,
"xeroxable" probably wouldn't be either) but could readily be
constructed as needed.  Totally productive, no lexical listing.
Hence "unproblematic", "unpublished", "unphysiological", and many
other such forms are being "created" all the time without our being
conscious of this or registering the result as a new word.  This is a
case where derivational morphology approaches inflectional in its
productivity. "Unpornographic" is a bit trickier because generally
and all things being equal (as recognized by Jespersen, Zimmer, and
others) un- prefers semantically positive or neutral stems, thus
yielding evaluatively neutral or negative outputs, whence the
distinctions between unhappy and *unsad, unkind vs. *uncruel, and so
on.  This makes "unpornographic" somewhat marked and perhaps a bit
more remarkable, although I do have cites for e.g. "unsullen".  Your
"unquote" is a bit different, because I'm not quite sure how to
describe it's category when used in metalinguistic contexts like
"He's a quote linguist unquote" or "He's a quote unquote linguist".
(The AHD lists it as a noun, but I'm not sure I agree.)

  If there's been any explosion of un-words over the post-WWII (and
more specifically since the early 1970's), I'd argue it's been among
un-nouns, often but not always created for jocular and/or commercial
purposes, sparked (it would appear) by the use of "un-cola" in
commercials for 7 Up.  With Beth Levin I've been collecting these
innovations for some time and would be happy to attach a copy of our
list (with contexts of occurrence) to Fred on request, or the papers
I've written on the topic.  But none of the examples you cite above
exemplify un-nouns, so I'm not sure that's what you're really asking
about.

best,
Larry Horn