Tài liệu ôn thi du học_3

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Tài liệu ôn thi du học_3 For more material and information, please visit Tai Lieu Du Hoc at www.tailieuduhoc.org 47Chapter 2: Studying Complex Wordssome independent property that all possible bases have and all impossible basesdon’t have. Strictly speaking then, we are not dealing with a rule that can be used toform new words, but with a rule that simply generalizes over the structure of a set ofexisting complex words. Such rules are sometimes referred to as redundancy rulesor word-structure rules. The redundancy rule for -th could look like this: For more material and information, please visit Tai Lieu Du Hoc at www.tailieuduhoc.org 48Chapter 2: Studying Complex Words redundancy rule for -th(24) phonology: X-/T/, X = allomorph of base {broad, deep, long, strong, true, warm} base: semantics: ‘state or property of being X’In most cases, it is not necessary to make the distinction between rules that can beused to coin new words and rules that cannot be used in this way, so that we willoften use the term ‘word-formation rule’ or ‘word-formation process’ to refer to bothkinds of rule. Before finishing our discussion of word-formation rules, we should addressthe fact that sometimes new complex words are derived without an existing word-formation rule, but formed on the basis of a single (or very few) model words. Forexample, earwitness ‘someone who has heard a crime being commited’ was coined onthe basis of eyewitness, cheeseburger on the basis of hamburger, and air-sick on the basisof sea-sick. The process by which these words came into being is called analogy,which can be modeled as proportional relation between words, as illustrated in (25):(25) a. a : b :: c : d b. eye : eyewitness :: ear : earwitness c. ham : hamburger :: cheese : cheeseburger d. sea : sea-sick :: air : air-sickThe essence of a proportional analogy is that the relation between two items (a and bin the above formula) is the same as the relation between two other, correpondingitems (c and d in our case). The relation that holds between eye and eyewitness is thesame as the relation between ear and earwitness, ham and hamburger relate to eachother in the same way as do cheese and cheeseburger, and so on. Quite often, words areanalogically derived by deleting a suffix (or supposed suffix), a process called back-formation. An example of such a back-formation is the verb edit which was derivedfrom the word editor by deleting -or on the basis of a propotional analogy with wordpairs such as actor - act. Another example of back-formation is the verb escalate, which For more material and information, please visit Tai Lieu Du Hoc at www.tailieuduhoc.org 49Chapter 2: Studying Complex Wordsoccurs with two meanings, each of which is derived from a different model word.The first meaning can be paraphrased as ‘To climb or reach by means of an escalator... To travel on an escalator’ (OED), and is modeled on escalator. The second meaningof escalate is roughly synonymous with ‘increase in intensity’, which is back-formedfrom escalation which can be paraphrased as ‘increase of development by successivestages’. The words in (26) can be called regular in the sense that their meaning canreadily be discerned on the basis of the individual forms which obviously haveserved as their models. They are, however, irregular, in the sense that no largerpattern, no word-formation rule existed on the basis of which these words couldhave been coined. Sometimes it may happen, however, that such analogicalformations can give rise to larger patterns, as, for example, in the case of hamburger,cheeseburger, chickenburger, fishburger, vegeburger etc. In such cases, the dividing linebetween analogical patterns and word-formation rules is hard to draw. In fact, if welook at rules we could even argue that analogical relations hold for words that arecoined on the basis of rules, as evidenced by the examples in (26):(26) big : bigger :: great : greater happy : unhappy :: likely : unlikely read : readable :: conceive : conceivableBased on such reasoning, some scholars (e.g. Becker 1990, Skousen 1992) havedeveloped theories that abandon the concept of rule entirely and replace it by thenotion of analogy. In other words, it is claimed that there are not morphological rulesbut only analogies across larger sets of words. Two major theoretical problems needto be solved under such a radical approac ...