Unuses

[Laurence Horn]

>Thankyou for your extensive response which certainly gives food for thought.
>Can I share it with my students?

sure

>  My edition of the work (Penguin Books,
>publ. 1989) has on page 315 : "In addition, any word -this [..] applied in
>principle to every word in the language - could be negatived by adding the
>affix un-, or could be strengthened by the affix plus-, or, for still
>greater emphasis, doubleplus-." However, the author gives no example, either
>here in the Appendix, or indeed in the story itself, of these affixes on
>verbs.

right, and in general it's not clear what a "negatived" verb amounts
to.  For example, it's part of our knowledge of the language that to
"unlove", as in the country song verse below which also includes the
relatively innovative "undream" and "unfeel", cannot amount simply to
*not-love* (as it would be if it were a stative like "to love"
itself), much less to be in the opposite state, i.e. to *hate*, but
must rather be a verb with internal negation applying to an embedded
state (= 'to come to {not/no longer} love').

=======
Julie Roberts
"Unlove Me" (2004)

Unloose this hold you've got on me
Unlock this heart that can't get free
Unlive the night you kissed and hugged me
Undream the dreams that we both shared
Unfeel the feelin' that you cared
Before you leave me, please unlove me
=========
This impression is supported by other such songs (e.g. Lynn
Anderson's 1971 country classic "How Can I Unlove You?", and by text
citations from Chaucer

        I se that clene out of your mynde
Ye han me cast; and I ne kan nor may,
for al this world, withinne myn herte fynde
To unloven yow a quarter of a day!
                (Troilus and Criseyde, v. 1695-8)

to Brontë's Jane Eyre, who confides "I have told you...that I had
learned to love Mr. Rochester; I could not unlove him now."

The *noun* _unlove_ on the other hand has a predictably privative (=
'lack of ___') rather than a reversative ('cause to come to no longer
____') meaning, as in e. e. cummings's line'unlove's the heavenless
hell and homeless home/of knowledgeable shadows'.   So the concept of
what it is to "negative" a word is far from transparent.

>As for 'unsee', I remember having to do 'unseens' during my Classics
>studies. These were translations done 'cold', as it were, i.e. never seen
>before the examination itself. My problem :)) was with '[...]site' rather
>than sight, or 'sait'

That seems like a plausible zero-derivation:  to do something sight
unseen--> to do something unseen-->to do an unseen.  Compare "the
blind" in poker, a bet in poker by someone operating "in the blind",
i.e without seeing their hand or seeing it but not taking its content
into account.  (And the bettor in such circumstances is also a (or
the) blind.  The "unsite" does seem weirder.


Larry