analysis: unhappiness

[Diane Frances Lesley-Neuman]

 You are getting into the Lexical Phonology of English debate over strata.  To begin with consult:

April Mcmahon (1999) Lexical Strata and the History of English
Hans Giegerich  Lexical Strata in English

The old literature was debated throughout the 1980's: Paul Kiparsky, K.P. Mohanan (with Morris Halle), Jerzy Rubach and Geert Booij come to mind.  Toni Borowsky as well, although her analysis has come under question.  i also think that Ricardo Bermudez-Otero, an English lexical phonology and stratal OT specialist at Manchester somewhere has a critique of the various models or can guide you further.  In general this is the object of study of the English phonology faculty at Edinburgh where Mcmahon and Giegerich are and I think an another specialist person to weigh in on the issue would be Patrick Honeybone, a specialist in the diachronic phonology of English also Edinburgh-based.   

______________________________
Diane Lesley-Neuman
Linguistics Program
Wells A-614
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824 Quoting "s.t. bischoff" <bischoff.st at gmail.com>:

> 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
>