- Cf. above, p. 15.
- We are paraphrasing a criterion used by the OED in another connection; cf. above, p. 40.
- These figures are based on the lexical material in the NID3.
- Cf. the remarks on Tukano, pp. 77–78 above.
- Edmond Privat, Esperanto in Fifty Lessons (New York, 1908), p. 153. The following examples are given: granda ‘large,’ malgranda ‘small’; longa ‘long,’ mallonga ‘short’; riĉa ‘rich,’ malriĉa ‘poor’; fermi ‘to shut,’ malfermi ‘to open.’
- Cf. also Joseph Rhodes, The English-Esperanto Dictionary (New York, 1908).
- The only Esperanto-English dictionary available to me did not list forms in mal- (they are of course translatable in terms of the meaning of the prefix and that of the base), so that I was forced to obtain my data, somewhat circuitously, through an English-Esperanto dictionary.
- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York, 1949), p. 305. Orwell's description of Newspeak is of considerable interest, not least for its Whorfian view of the influence of language on cognitive processes.
- Cf. Greenberg's remarks on different kinds of linguistic universals: (1) factual universals (true for all languages), (2) universal frequency distributions, (3) the more than chance frequency of distribution of certain characteristics (Joseph H. Greenberg, Essays in Linguistics [Chicago, 1957], p. 87). Our “universal” would at best belong to the third of these categories.
- Cf. above, pp. 34–35.
- A description of the tests referred to in the present discussion will be found in Section B of the Appendix.
- There are also a number of established forms that do not conform to our schema (e.g. unwell, which should be excluded because of the existence of sick, ill), but this problem is not very serious; such exceptions do not seem to be particularly numerous, and they can simply be listed.
- We are here taking the class of adjectives in -able as a representative example of a formally marked class where un- prefixation seems more or less unrestricted. There are others where the general situation seems to be the same in this respect, e.g. the adjectival past participles of transitive verbs. We might observe, incidentally, that such deverbal adjectives do not as a rule have any obvious antonyms, so that they seem particularly suited for préfixai negation.
- It appears on the whole that what we might call “item-familiarity” is less important in the evaluation of non- derivatives, possibly partly because individual non- forms are of relatively low frequency. Nor are there any obvious formally marked classes in terms of which we can specify the acceptability of such derivatives. We would therefore hope that our evaluative (and generative) hierarchy for non- derivatives is more realistic than the one we have outlined for un- derivatives would seem to be.
- Cf. in this connection our remarks on adjectives in a-/an- in English, pp. 26–27 above.
- It could presumably be argued that in such cases we are in fact dealing with two separate homonymous morphemes, but we shall not go into this issue here. In the present instance a two-morpheme interpretation would in any case not be of assistance to us in accounting for the behavior of the less productive variety of un,-
- unsullen was rejected by all the subjects to whom the test reported on in Section El of the Appendix was administered.
- For French in- we have noted a formal difference between what we have called the “historical” and the “productive” forms of the prefix; cf. pp. 49–51 above.
- Notice for instance that utterly seems to be used with “negative” rather than with “positive” adjectives (cf. utterly stupid and utterly intelligent); on the other hand “positive” adjectives seem to be preferred after none too (cf. none too intelligent and none too stupid).
- Cf. below, pp. 92–93.
- Cf. Wundt's remarks on the affective aspect of negation, quoted on p. 13 above; notice also the occasional use of negative affixes as pejoratives, or better, to avoid any assignment of priority, the occasional homonymity of negative and pejorative affixes.
- Cf. Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum, passim.
- Cf. Jhering's remarks quoted on pp. 10–11 above.
- Cf. some other suggestions for research in the area of lexical universals made by Weinreich (Universals of Language, pp. 151–52).
- Cf. Greenberg, pp. 89–94. It should perhaps be added that nonaffixal negative particles used in nexal negation also usually precede the verb.
- For some observations on the comparison of Russian adjectives in ne- see A. F. Kulagin, “Častica ‘ne’ i odnoimennaja pristavka v ix otnošenii k stepenjam sravnenija imen prilagatel'nyx,” Russkij jazyk v škole, XVII (1956), No. 1, 12–16.
- Chomsky, Word XVII, pp. 226–27.
WORD
Volume 20, 1964 - Issue sup1: Monograph No.5