analysis: unhappiness

[L. Amber Wilcox-O'Hearn]

On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 6:46 AM, s.t. bischoff <bischoff.st at gmail.com> wrote:

> (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)

Maybe what they are saying is not that there is no un- attaching to
verbs, there obviously are many examples.  But in those cases, un- is
not negation, it is a reverse action - 'untie' does not mean 'not
tie'.



\   L. Amber Wilcox-O'Hearn * http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~amber/   /
-\  Graduate student * Computational Linguistics Research Group  /-
--\   Department of Computer Science * University of Toronto    /--