Chapter 5: A word and its relatives: derivation
Reference: Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, An Introduction to English Morphology
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5.1 Relationships between lexemes
Perform
Performs PERFORM
• There are contexts where,
performed if any verb appears, it must
carry the third person
singular suffix -s, but there
performance are no contexts where, if a
noun appears, it must carry
• performance (singular) the suffix -ance.
PERFORMANCE
• Performances (plural) Ø The suffix -ance is not one
of the small class of
suffixes (so-called
‘inflectional’ suffixes)
• derivational morphology is concerned with one whose use is tightly
kind of relationship between lexemes. determined by grammar.
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5.2 Word classes and conversion
• word classes are the same as what in traditional terminology are called parts of speech
and what many contemporary linguists call lexical categories
• readers might think that the word class to which a lexeme belongs is mainly determined by
its meaning. That belief is incorrect.
Ø Can a lexeme have both noun forms (singular and plural) and verb forms (past, third person
singular present, and so on)?
Yes! HOPE and FEAR have both noun forms (her hope/fear for the future) and verb forms (she
hoped/feared that it would rain).
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5.2 Word classes and conversion
Does this mean that the concept ‘word class’, as I have used it, is too vague or
inconsistent to be useful?
No, for two reasons.
The first involves the proportion of our noun–verb vocabulary that is ambivalent in this way.
that is either purely noun-like in its grammatical behaviour (e.g. DOOR, SISTER, DESK,
JOY) or purely verb-like (e.g. HEAR, SPEAK, WRITE, BELIEVE)
A second kind of reason has to do with English in particular. Let us compare HOPE and FEAR
as verbs with other verbs that can be followed by that-clauses, as in:
1. She stated that it would rain.
2. her statement that it would rain
( the verbal construction in (1) is basic, the nominal construction in (2) being derived from it)
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5.2 Word classes and conversion
3) a. She hoped that it would rain.
b. She feared that it would rain.
4) a. her hope that it would rain
b. her fear that it would rain
Ø ‘zero-derived’, carrying a phonologically empty and therefore unpronounceable ‘zero
suffix’: HOPE-Ø, FEAR-Ø.
Ø Others have preferred to say that one of the processes available in derivational morphology
is conversion, whereby a lexeme belonging to one class can simply be ‘converted’ to
another, without any overt change in shape.
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5.3 Adverbs derived from adjectives
DIOECIOUS ‘having male and female flowers on different plants’.
DIOECIOUSLY
• DIOECIOUSLY is a distinct lexeme from DIOECIOUS, since it belongs to a different
word class, but it is not a distinct lexical item.
• Derivational processes: unlike inflection, they can change the word class of the bases to
which they apply.
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5.3 Adverbs derived from adjectives
• Not all adverbs end in -ly.
• Simple or monomorphemic adverbs (OFTEN, SELDOM, NEVER, SOON)
• Some other adverbs are morphologically complex (NOWHERE, EVERYWHERE,
TODAY, YESTERDAY).
• There are common adverbs that are formed by conversion:
• FAST (as in The car was driven fast) derived from the adjective FAST (as in a fast car).
• HARD (as in They worked hard), derived from the adjective HARD (as in hard work).
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5.4 Nouns derived from nouns
Ø Not all derivational processes change word class.
Ø English has derivational processes that yield nouns with meanings
such as ‘small X’ Book ‘booklet’
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5.4 Nouns derived from nouns
‘small X’: -let, -ette, -ie Booklet, droplet, cigarette, doggie
‘female X’: -ess, -ine waitress, princess, heroine
‘inhabitant of X’: -er, -(i) an Londoner, New Yorker, Texan, Glaswegian
‘state of being an X’: -ship, -hood Kingship, ladyship, motherhood, priesthood
‘devotee of or expert on X’: -ist, -ian contortionist,, Marxist, logician, historian
• Must count as lexical items. (A booklet is not merely a small book)
• These affixes are derivational rather than inflectional, even though they do not change word class.
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5.5 Nouns derived from members of other word classes (adj & V)
Nouns derived from adjectives:
(10) -ity, e.g. purity, equality, ferocity, sensitivity
(11) -ness, e.g. goodness, tallness, fierceness, sensitiveness (-ness is the most widely applicable)
(12) -ism, e.g. radicalism, conservatism
Ø All these three suffixes mean basically ‘property of being X’, where X is the base adjective.
Ø The great majority of nouns formed with it are not lexical items as defined in Chapter 2
Ø One noun in -ness is lexicalised: HIGHNESS, which means not ‘property of being high’ (for which we use
HEIGHT), but rather ‘royal personage’, as in Her Royal Highness.
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5.5 Nouns derived from members of other word classes (adj & V)
Nouns derived from adjectives:
• Some of these nouns are formed from bases other than the free form of the corresponding
adjective, e.g. FEROCITY from feroc- (not adj-ferocious)
• The FEROCITY pattern is fairly general for adjectives in -ious but not absolutely general
• Capacious -- CAPACITY
• Delicious -- DELICIOUSNESS
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5.5 Nouns derived from members of other word classes
Nouns derived from verbs:
(13) -ance, -ence, e.g. performance, ignorance, reference, convergence
(14) -ment, e.g. announcement, commitment, development, engagement
(15) -ing, e.g. painting, singing, building, ignoring (-ing is the most general)
(16) -((a)t)ion, e.g. denunciation, commission, organisation, confusion
(17) -al, e.g. refusal, arrival
(18) -er, e.g. painter, singer
• The suffixes in (13)–(17) all have much the same function (they form abstract nouns
meaning ‘activity or result of Xing’), but they are certainly not freely interchangeable: for
example, we have PERFORMANCE but no ‘PERFORMMENT’ or ‘PERFORMATION’,
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5.5 Nouns derived from members of other word classes
• It is true that some verbs allow a choice of suffixes (e.g. COMMIT), but the nouns thus
formed are not synonyms:
• one can commit a crime, commit an accused person for trial, or commit oneself to a task, but, of
the three nouns, only COMMISSION corresponds to the first meaning, only COMMITTAL to
the second, and only COMMITMENT to the third.
• Sometimes a noun’s meaning may even be quite far removed from that of the corresponding
verb:
• IGNORE means ‘deliberately refuse to acknowledge’, yet IGNORANCE means not
‘deliberate refusal to acknowledge’ but rather ‘unawareness’
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5.5 Nouns derived from members of other word classes
• -ing is the most general, and indeed all verbs can form nouns with it irrespective of whatever other
suffixes they may use
• but even -ing nouns may have semantic and grammatical idiosyncrasies (one can look at a
painting or a building, but one listens to a song rather than to a singing).
• -er is the one most generally used for forming nouns denoting a person performing the action of the
corresponding verb (agent nouns). (But it is not the only agent suffix (TYPIST and INFORMANT use other suffixes)
• This is not its only function; for example, DIGGER is more likely to denote a piece of
machinery than a person and we have already encountered -er in Section 5.4 with the meaning
‘inhabitant of ’ (e.g. LONDONER).
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5.5 Nouns derived from members of other word classes
• Although affixation is by far the most common way in which lexemes are derived in
English, it is not the only way. Some non-affixal ways of deriving abstract nouns are:
19) change in the position of the stress:
e.g. nouns PÉRMIT, TRÁNSFER alongside verbs PERMÍT, TRANSFÉR
(20) change in the final consonant:
e.g. nouns BELIEF, PROOF, DEFENCE alongside verbs BELIEVE, PROVE, DEFEND
(21) change in a vowel:
e.g. nouns SONG, SEAT alongside verbs SING, SIT.
Ø By contrast with some languages, however, the derivational use that English makes of vowel
change is minimal. Languages that exploit it much more consistently are members of the Semitic
family, such as Arabic and Hebrew.
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5.6 Adjectives derived from adjectives
• prefixes predominate
• The only suffix of note is -ish, meaning ‘somewhat X’, as in GREENISH
• The prefix un- meaning ‘not’ is extremely wide- spread: UNHAPPY
• Because it is so common, most dictionaries do not attempt to list all un- adjectives.
• This does not mean, however, that un- can be prefixed to all adjectives quite freely; we
do not find, for example, ‘UNGOOD’ with the meaning ‘bad’
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5.6 Adjectives derived from adjectives
• Another negative prefix is in-, with allomorphs indicated by the variant spellings il-, ir- and im-, as in
INTANGIBLE, ILLEGAL, IRRESPONSIBLE and IMPOSSIBLE.
• It is more restricted than un-
• it is worth noting the existence of pairs of more or less synonymous adjectives, one of which
is negated with un- and the other with in- or one of its allomorphs:
– eatable/uneatable edible/inedible
– readable/unreadable legible/illegible
Ø Such examples confirm that the use of in- is lexically restricted. As the negative counterpart of EDIBLE,
UNEDIBLE sounds possible, especially if the speaker has limited education and has not encountered, or has
momentarily forgotten, the form INEDIBLE. However, ‘INEATABLE’ as the counterpart of EATABLE is not a
form that any English speaker would spontaneously use.
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5.7 Adjectives derived from members of other word classes (verbs)
We met the suffixes -ed, -en and -ing, and vowel change, in passive and progressive
participle forms of verbs. However, such forms can also be adjectives:
a. not very interesting book
b. The party-goers sounded very drunk.
c. The car seemed more damaged than the lamp-post.
• The modifier very and the comparative construction (more ... than) show that interesting, drunk and
damaged are adjectives here, not forms of the verb lexemes INTEREST, DRINK and DAMAGE
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5.7 Adjectives derived from members of other word classes (verbs)
Further suffixes that commonly form adjectives from verbs with their basic meanings, are:
– (24) -able ‘able to be Xed’: breakable, readable, reliable, watchable
– (25) -ent, -ant ‘tending to X’: repellent, expectant, conversant
– (26) -ive ‘tending to X’: explosive, repulsive, speculative
• Expectations derived from these basic meanings can, as usual in derivation, be overridden; for example, CONVERSANT
does not mean ‘tending to converse’.
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5.7 Adjectives derived from members of other word classes (nouns)
Suffixes that form adjectives from nouns are more numerous. Here are some:
(27) -ful, e.g. joyful, hopeful, helpful, meaningful
(28) -less, e.g. joyless, hopeless, helpless, meaningless
(29) -al, e.g. original, normal, personal, national
(30) -ish, e.g. boyish, loutish, waspish, selfish
Ø adjectives in -ful and -less tend to come in pairs, although the correspondence is not exact:
we have SLOTHFUL but not ‘SLOTHLESS’, and PENNILESS but not ‘PENNIFUL’.
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5.8 Verbs derived from verbs
• all the affixes are prefixes
• Most prominent are re- and the negative or ‘reversive’ prefixes un-, de- and dis-, as in the
following examples:
(31) paint, enter repaint, re-enter
(32) tie, tangle untie, untangle
(33) compose, sensitise decompose, desensitise
(34) believe, entangle disbelieve, disentangle
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5.8 Verbs derived from verbs
The relationship between:
(35) Transitive Intransitive •Transitive verbs (or verbs used transitively) are ones
LAY (past laid) LIE (past lay) with an ‘object’ noun phrase “usually indicating the thing or
person that is the goal of the action of the verb” (e.g. Sara laid the
RAISE (past raised) RISE (past rose) book on the table.)
FELL (past felled) FALL (past fell) •Intransitive verbs, such as lay lack such an object (e.g.
SET (past set) SIT (past sat) The book lay on the table.)
Ø The transitive verbs in (35) are all causative, that is they mean ‘cause to X’, where X stands for the meaning
of the corresponding intransitive.
Ø Causative–incausative verb-pairs are common in English, but they nearly all involve conversion, as in (37),
rather than either affixation or the kind of vowel change seen in (35):
(37) a. Jill boiled the water. b. The water boiled.
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5.9 Verbs derived from members of other word classes
• Some affixes for deriving verbs from nouns are:
(38) de-, e.g. debug, deforest, delouse
(39) -ise, e.g. organise, patronise, terrorise
(40) -(i)fy, e.g. beautify, gentrify, petrify
• There are also some common verbs that are derived by replacing the final voiceless
consonant of a noun (BREATH) with a voiced one (BREATHE)
• A meaning for de- at is clearly identifiable, namely ‘remove X from’
• However, neither -ise nor -ify has a clearcut meaning apart from its verb-forming function
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5.9 Verbs derived from members of other word classes
• The suffixes -ise and -ify can derive verbs from adjectival bases too, as in:
NATIONALISE, TENDERISE, INTENSIFY, PURIFY
• Hence, when the roots to which they are attached are bound (e.g. CAUTERISE, SANITISE,
PETRIFY, SATISFY, MAGNIFY), it is often impossible to decide whether these roots are
fundamentally nominal or adjectival.
• The suffix -ATE shows the same sort of ambivalence.
• en- (with its allomorph em-), which forms verbs meaning ‘cause to become X’ or ‘cause to
possess or enter X’ from a few adjectives and nouns: EMPOWER
• With the adjectives BOLD and LIVE as bases, the prefix en- is combined with a suffix -en:
EMBOLDEN, ENLIVEN. This suffix usually occurs without the prefix (DEEPEN)
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5.9 Verbs derived from members of other word classes
• The adjectives that can be bases for deriving -en verbs are all monosyllabic and all end
in plosives (the sounds usually spelled p, b, t, d, (c)k and g in English) or fricatives
(including the sounds usually spelled s, th, f and v).
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5.10 Conclusion: generality and idiosyncrasy
• English has few inflectional affixes; however, English is at least as rich as French and
German in its derivational resources.
• Suffixes play a larger role than prefixes in English derivational morphology.
• one might have expected that many of the processes involved would have been sufficiently
predictable in both their application and their meaning so that the lexemes thus derived
would not count as lexical items.
• However, only four of the affixes that we have discussed yield large numbers of lexemes that
one would not expect to find listed in a dictionary, namely adverb-forming -ly, negative
adjectival un- and nominal -ness and -ing.
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