- Otto Jespersen, A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, Part VI: Morphology (Copenhagen, 1942), p. 466.
- This further specification will of course operate so as to bring about the result described by Jespersen, namely:
- un- (negation) + “positive” base vectoră “depreciatory” (“negative”) derived form.
- The ‘+’ here is a symbol for the combination of morphemes in a derivational process, which, in terms of “positive” and “negative” values, has the effect of algebraic multiplication rather than of addition. Thus un- combined with a “negative” base would result in a “positive” derived form, while un- combined with a “neutral” base would result in a “neutral” derived form.
- Rudolf v. Jhering, Der Zweck im Recht (8th ed.; Leipzig, 1923), II, 61–63. The first edition appeared in 1883.
- Jhering remarks in a footnote that gut vs. böse or schlecht, which of course is, in his terms, a positively expressed opposition, is not originally a contrast on the moral level, but has been transferred to it from the general opposition nützlich vs. schädlich.
- Jhering does not mention any earlier references to this peculiarity of negative affixation, nor do any of the other discussions of it that I have been able to find. Thus we can tentatively credit him with the first discovery. I myself rediscovered it independently, but soon began to come across notices of previous occupancy.
- Wilhelm Wundt, “Das Sittliche in der Sprache,” Deutsche Rundschau, XLVII (April-June, 1886), 70–92.
- Wundt, Deutsche Rundschau, XLVII, 84. All the quotations from and references to Wundt's article are from Deutsche Rundschau, XLVII, 84–86.
- While Wundt does not indicate which Latin forms he counted, it can perhaps be assumed that they were those beginning with in-.
- Jac. V. Ginneken, Principes de linguistique psychologique (Paris, 1907), pp. 207–208.
- This conclusion is to be compared with Wundt's hypothesis about the psychological content of negation.
- In his discussion of affixal negation, A. Noreen (see the following footnote) remarks that v. Ginneken's figures strike him as being somewhat high. The question is, of course, just which forms in un- “entrent en ligne de compte pour le sentiment.” If all more or less neutral forms (like unzählbar) are excluded, v. Ginneken's figures may well be correct. It would then, however, be more accurate to say that negative affixation produces a negative connotation in those cases where a “favorable—unfavorable” judgement is involved. (See Noreen's figures, especially for the neutral category.)
- Adolf Noreen, Vårt Språk: Nysvensk Grammatik, V (Lund, 1904), 566–67. The entire discussion of the derivation of adjectives by means of negative affixes covers pp. 562–71.
- Otto Jespersen, Negation in English and Other Languages (Kgl. Danske Videnskabernes Selskab: Historisk-filologiske Meddelelser, Vol. I, No. S; Copenhagen, 1917), p. 144.
- The dimensions indicated by such “positive” and “negative” terms and their opposites would presumably all have a high loading on the “evaluative” factor isolated in the studies of Osgood and his associates; cf. Charles H. Osgood, George J. Suci, and Percy H. Tannenbaum, The Measurement of Meaning (Urbana, Ill., 1957), especially pp. 35–39.
- Many of these “neutral” terms might of course turn out to be rated positively or negatively on evaluative scales such as those used in the “semantic differential” studies (cf. The Measurement of Meaning). It should be remembered, however, that in such studies the subjects are usually instructed to give a rating for all terms on all scales, and are thus not at liberty to decide whether they want to rate a particular term on a given scale or not. Thus smooth was rated as being near the “good” end of the “good-bad” scale by the subjects in a semantic differential study (cf. James J. Jenkins, Wallace A. Russell, George J. Suci, “An Atlas of Semantic Profiles for 360 Words,” The American Journal of Psychology, LXXI [1958], 688–99), but on the basis of some informal testing of speakers of English we find that, given the choices of “favorable judgment or desirable state,” “unfavorable judgment or undesirable state,” “no decision without further information,” a considerable majority put the statement They are smooth in the third of these categories.
- I am adhering to the distinction made by Charles W. Morris in Foundations of the Theory of Signs (Chicago, 1938).
- Cf. Uriel Weinreich, “On the Semantic Structure of Language,” Universals of Language, ed. Joseph H. Greenberg (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), p. 156, n. 12.
- Word formation is taken to comprise both compounding and derivation. Clearly the following remarks will apply only to languages where there are grammatical processes that can usefully be subsumed under these headings. While the illustrative examples in this section are all drawn from English, the theoretical discussion is intended to be, with whatever qualifications may be necessary in a given case, of wider pertinence.
- There are of course word-formative processes that operate without restrictions. Thus in Turkish any non-negative verb stem can be made negative by the addition of the morpheme -me(-)/-ma(-).Such cases require no further discussion in this context. Nor is there any need to concern ourselves here with cases of derivational formation that are clearly no longer productive (e.g. the derivation by means of the suffix -th of English nouns such as wealth, stealth).
- It should also be kept in mind that in this area we must reckon with the possibility that previous acquaintance with a given derived or compounded item may be a factor in its being considered acceptable; this is an important difference between the output of at least some word-formative rules and that of purely syntactic ones.
- It would surely strike most speakers of English as odd if the well-known conversation between Hamlet and Polonius were to have run as follows:
- Hamlet. Do you see yonder camel cloud?
- Polonius. By the mass, and 'tis a camel cloud, indeed.
- Hamlet. Methinks it is a weasel cloud.
- Polonius. It is a weasel back cloud.
- Hamlet. Or a whale back cloud?
- Polonius. Very like a whale back cloud.
- (cf. Hamlet, Act III, end of Scene 2.)
- We might point out that lack of intelligibility (or vagueness of meaning) does not appear to play any role here, as opposed to its presumable importance in the evaluation of compounds (compare camel cloud and unstupid—whatever may be odd about the latter form, it is not that we have difficulty in finding a meaning for it).
- Thus in Bernard Bloch and George Trager's Outline of Linguistic Analysis (Baltimore, 1942) we find the statement that “AFFIXATION is by far the most common process in the formation of English derivatives… many of the affixes are productive, in the sense that a speaker of English can form new derivatives which he has never heard by adding these affixes to appropriate bases” (Bloch and Trager, p. 62), while a little later, under INTERNAL CHANGE, we come across the observation that “only the accentual changes [e.g. pérmit, permít] are productive” (ibid., p. 63). Clearly two different kinds of productivity are involved.
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Volume 20, 1964 - Issue sup1: Monograph No.5