No subject

[chogan+ at york.mt.cs.cmu.edu]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> Me again.  Is there an accepted name for the slightly peculiar process
> in which a piece of a word is somewhat arbitrarily ripped out of it
> and then used as a kind of affix for forming new words?
>
> I'm thinking of cases like these:
>
> alcoholic --> -(o)holic --> workaholic, chocoholic, shopaholic,...
> etc.
 
The article on "Derivation" by Robert Beard in _The Handbook of Morphology_
(Blackwell Publishers, 1998) has this to say:
 
        Analogical forms like workaholic, chocaholic and cheeseburger,
        fishburger, chickenburger differ from regular derivations
        in that they require prosodic identity.  Genunine suffixes
        like -ing may be added to stems of any length or prosodic
        structure.  Pseudo-derivates like chocaholic, however, must
        additionally fit the prosodic template of their analog, in
        this case, alcoholic: the output must contain four syllables
        with penultimate accent.  Thus chocolaholic, shoppingaholic,
        and handiworkaholic do not work as well as chocaholic, shopaholic,
        and workaholic.  When we begin to find acceptable violations
        of this extragrammatical principle like chickenburger, we
        usually find that the remainder, in this case burger, has become
        an independent back-formed word capable of undergoing regular
        compounding.    (p. 57)
 
So I guess it's an "analogical form".
 
--chris