On the conjoinability of affixal morphemes in English

Abstract

We here examine the conjoinability of affixal morphemes in English, demonstrating that the strict correspondence between the morpheme boundaries and syllable boundaries, with the proper distribution of stress assignment, is the basic requirement for prefixes to stand alone in the position of conjuncts of coordinate constructions. They have to be word-like so as to be subjected to the syntactic operation of coordination, whose minimal target has been generally considered to be word-level units. The other key to understanding the problem of affixal conjuncts is the one-to-one correspondence between a word-level category and its head (in the sense of a category determinant). Both the impossibility of suffix conjunction and the productivity of prefix conjunction derive from this very simple general constraint on word-formation. In the end, we would like to claim that both the restrictions regulating the well-formedness of prefix coordination and the rule accounting for the ill-formedness of suffix conjunction actually do not refer specifically to affixal coordination; rather all of them are primarily general well-formedness conditions of word-formation.