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[Isidore Dyen]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
 
I think that it might be important to add to the discussion that these
forms are artificialloy constructed and in that respect fall in with words
like AIDS or is it AIDs and CIA and G-man and the gamut that have
sprung up in at least a partial connection with writing and thus
differ from the types of analogical phenomena that appear in comparative
studies.
 
On Thu, 23 Jul 1998 chogan+ at york.mt.cs.cmu.edu wrote:
 
> ----------------------------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
>