For my final paper I was thinking about focusing on words being complex or simplex.  While it is typically easy to determine which of these two terms would be used to describe a particular word, sometimes it’s not so easy.  For this class’s blog post #1 assignment the class was given a set of words (forbid, forget, forgive, forgo, and forswear) and was asked to determine if these words were simplex or if “for” was an affix, meaning that they would be considered complex.  I would like to expand on this idea in my paper because I found this topic and assignment to be particularly intriguing.  When completing this assignment I had initially thought that they would be complex because they all started with the word “for”.  After considering all of the definitions for the given words as well as the definitions of what would be the stems of the words, I noticed that adding “for” to the ‘stems’ didn’t produce a parallel effect on all of them.  Due to this, I wound up leaning towards the words being simplex.  It is interesting to think that viable arguments most definitely can be made for both sides- I guess it just depends on everyone’s personal analysis of the words.  I would like to come up with my own set of words and ask a few sets of people to give their opinions.  If I would be able to survey a group of students and a group of Linguistics professors, I feel as though I would be able to write my paper based on all of the responses, and then expand on that by comparing the results of one group to the results of the other.  I’m curious as to whether or not the responses will show a divide between these two groups of people, seeing as how I feel that the group of professors would be much more familiar with and knowledgeable on this topic.  I could also go even further than that by forming a group of people who are not familiar with linguistics (most people- definitely everyone that I know), showing them excerpts from the textbook which explain the difference, and then asking them to give their opinions on the set of words.  I’m also curious about what those results would be in comparison to the two groups of people which are in the field of Linguistics.  

 

1. “bubblegum” (endocentric) (head=”gum”) [[bubble]N[gum]N]N
2. “cheeseburger” (endocentric) (head=”burger”) [[cheese]N[burger]N]N
3. “watermelon” (endocentric) (head=”melon”) [[water]N[melon]N]N
4. “pineapple” (exocentric) (it’s not a type of pine, or a type of apple) [[pine]N[apple]N]N
5. “hazelnut” (endocentric) (head=”nut”) [[hazel]N[nut]N]N

1. A suffix that nominalizes verbs is (-ion).

The rule for this suffix is [[X]y ion]n, where y= V or A.

Examples include:

Relate -> Relation, Create -> Creation, and React -> Reaction.

 

2. A suffix that verbalizes nouns is (-ate).

The rule for this suffix is [[X]n ate]v.

Examples include:

Assassin -> Assassinate, Decor -> Decorate, Saliva -> Salivate.

 

3. Relation -> Relationate

Creation -> Creationate

Reaction -> Reactionate

When I used the outputs from (1) as inputs for the rule in (2), the new outputs were not well formed.  They are also not words that already exist.  I think that this process doesn’t work because of the fact that the stem words are verbs.  Therefore, it seems that in order to change the nouns that were formed from the rule in (1) back into verbs, the suffix that was added must be dropped- as opposed to adding yet another suffix.

These verbs can appear to be complex because if you analyze the words, you will see that they can be broken down into a prefix, “for”, and each of the verbs that they derived from (or stems), “bid”, “get”, “give”, “go”, “swear”.  All of these verbs have a specific meaning, but with “for” added to the front of the words, they have different meanings.  Therefore, it can be argued that these original verbs are stems to all of the derived words within this paradigm.

These verbs can also appear to be simplex because although “bid”, “get”, “give”, “go”, and “swear” are all verbs with a particular meaning, if “for” was a prefix in this paradigm then the affix would have a parallel meaning throughout all of these words.  For example, adding the suffix “-ed” to any verb creates a word form of the lexeme which represents that the action has happened in the past.

I think that the words in this paradigm are simplex because despite the fact that it seems they all share a prefix, the ‘prefix’ does not have the same meaning in each word.  For example, if you compare 1)”give” and “forgive” to 2)”bid” and “forbid”, you will see that adding “for” to “give” changes the meaning from “to present voluntarily and without expecting compensation; bestow” to “to grant pardon for or remission of; absolve”.  Whereas, adding “for” to “bid” changes the meaning from “to command; order; direct” to “to command (a person) to not do something, have something, etc.”  In comparing these two examples you will see that adding “for” to each of the ‘stems’ does not create the same change.  Therefore these word forms are not systematically related to their original lexemes.  So I feel that it is safe to assume that “for”, in this given set of words, is not a morphological constituent.