unthaw

[Laurence Horn]

Sorry for jumping in late, but I've been away from my e-mail.  A few
points on "unthaw" and related items:

I wrote a paper on these, back in ESCOL '88 (proceedings of the 1988
East Coast Conference on Linguistics).  I referred to them "redundant
un-verbs", review the literature, and attempt to predict when and why
they occur.  My basic idea is that since the meaning of the un-verb
(with un-, de-, or dis- prefixes) is predictably "entropic", i.e.
privative or source-oriented readings denoting actions that "help
entropy along" in the sense discussed in that paper), speakers will
sometimes employ or invent them even when a synonymous unprefixed
verb exists:

============
[W]hen goal- and source-oriented readings are both plausible for a
given nonprefixed verb in combination with a given patient, an un- or
de- verb will serve usefully and unambiguously to signal the source
or entropic interpretation.  In other cases, the speaker may be
unsure whether the source reading is available for the simple base
verb , or even (as with ravel ) whether that base exists.  What
results is the nonce--or lexically institutionalized--creation of an
un- or de- verb semantically redundant with respect to a previously
existing entropic base:  ...Let's see, does boning a chicken involve
putting bones in or taking them out?  Can you pit  a cherry?  Better
be on the safe side:  debone that chicken, unpit (or depit ) that
cherry.
        This lexical uncertainty is responsible for the most
productive class of redundant denominals, that of the privative verbs
of removal formed with de- (cf. Gove 1966, Ross 1976, Andrews 1985).
The locatum here may represent part of the outer or inner structure
of the source (debark, debone, degut, dehull, dehusk, derind,
descale, destem) or simply an unwanted guest on the relevant host
(deburr, deflea, delouse, deworm).  In each class, the de-verb and
its base both refer to a process whereby the patient is returned to a
more basic or privative state.
============
An extreme exemplar of the ambiguity-avoidance motivation is Amelia
Bedelia, housekeeper-heroine of the eponymous children's book series
and literalist extraordinaire (she who dresses the chicken in
overalls, trims the fat with lace, and ices the fish with chocolate
frosting), coming upon a instruction to dust the furniture powder and
commenting "Did you ever hear tell of such a silly thing?  At my
house we UNdust the furniture.  But each to his own way", as she
proceeds to sprinkle some fragrant talcum powder over the sofas and
chairs.

Some additional examples (of varying degrees of currency) that I
discuss in the 1988 paper include "unbare", "undecipher", "unempty",
"unlax", "unloose(n)", "unrid", "unrip", "unsolve", and "unstrip", as
well as "disannul" and "dissever".  If children's innovated nonce
uses are included, the list expands a bit.

While redundant un-verbs (and de-verbs, and dis-verbs) constitute a
subclass of antonymous homonyms, that's a much more general
phenomenon as others have noted (on this thread and others in the
past), extending to examples like "cleave" or "sanction" that have no
prefix at all.  This more general phenomenon has produced a series of
books and the longest thread in the history of Linguist List, from
Jan. 1995 (see the summary on "Words that are their own opposites" by
the original poster, Alex Eulenberg, in Linguist List 6.74) to April
1995 (searchable on the web, for anyone intrepid enough), with
scattered additions in later years.  At the time, I was pushing
"antilogy" for this phenomenon, following the lead of John Train, who
began publishing trade books collections of these in 1980, but I
later co-sponsored "enantionym" with Lynne Murphy after some
discussions on this list.

Larry

P.S.  As Mark notes, Whorf has an interesting discussion un-verbs (in
his paper on "A linguistic consideration of thinking in primitive
communities" in the Carroll reader, although he doesn't single out
redundant un-verbs as such.  He proposed the notion of "cryptotype"
as a covert semantic category that determines the possibility of
applying given morphological rules.  In a recent paper on un-words,
"Uncovering the un-word: a study in lexical pragmatics" (Sophia
Linguistica 49 (2002): 1-64), I summarize and comment on Whorf's
proposal as follows:
================
Whorf (1956: 70-71) refers to the set of possible bases for un-verbs
as a CRYPTOTYPE, a "covert linguistic class" that constitutes "a
submerged, subtle, and elusive" [semantic class] that plays a
functional role in the grammar. [But] Whorf's characterization of the
relevant cryptotype for un-verb--"the transitive verbs of a covering,
enclosing, and surface-attaching meaning, the reactance of which is
that UN- may be prefixed to denote the opposite"--is too restrictive
to deal with lexicalized and especially novel un-verbs.  The verbs he
explicitly [bans] because they fall outside the cryptotype are either
attested (unbreak) or ruled out independently by blocking (unopen) or
by the constraint against atelics (unthink), while his dismissal of
unsay as "semiarchaic" is unconvincing.  (It may also be that the
advent of modern technology since 1936 (when Whorf wrote his
paper)--in particular the Rewind button and the toggle-erase key on
computer keyboard--has widened the net of possible un-bases for the
post-Whorfian generations.)
================
[Another example of an attested form clearly outside the Whorfian
cryptotype is "OK, I take it back--Unfuck you!"]