analysis: unhappiness

[Daniel Everett]

Shannon,

There is a long literature on this under the heading of 'bracketing paradoxes'. One of the best articles came out in the early 90s in Language, by Andy Spencer. Though just about everyone and their dog was writing on it back then.

The generative analysis is what leads to the 'paradoxes', which are either a discovery or an error depending on your perspective.

-- Dan


On Sep 8, 2010, at 8:46 AM, s.t. bischoff wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I had an interesting exchange with a few generative
> syntacticians/morphologists (former classmates of mine) regarding an
> analysis of "unhappiness". Two things that they said surprised me a bit,
> they are the  following:
> 
> (1) un- (negation, 'not') only attaches to adjectives (now this clearly
> isn't the case, a simple cursory view of the etymology in the OED provides a
> number of examples of un- with nouns and verbs...though to significantly
> lesser degrees...in addition works on English morphology contain examples as
> well)
> 
> (2) the analysis of unhappiness can only be [[un-happy]-ness]...an analysis
> such as [un-[happy-ness]] is impossible (due to (1) above according to my
> former colleagues).
> 
> My questions are the following:
> 
> (1) Is there a good/well grounded reason to  believe un- "only" attaches to
> adjectives?
> 
> (2) What would be the consensus on an analysis of "unhappiness" that most
> linguists would agree on?
> 
> Thanks,
> Shannon