Leonard Bloomfield Language Morphology

13.3. [...] The principle immediate constituents lead us, at the outset, to distinguish certain classes of words, according to the immediate constituents:

A. Secondary words, containing free forms:

1. Compound words, containing more than one free form: door-knob, wild-animal-tamer. The included free forms are the members of the compound word: in our examples, the members are the words door, knob, tamer, and the phrase wild animal.

2. Derived secondary words, containing one free form: boyish, old-maidish. The included free form is called the underlying form; in our examples the underlying forms are the word boy and the phrase old maid.

B. Primary words, not containing a free form:

1. Derived primary words, containing more than one bound form: re-ceive, de-ceive, con-ceive, re-tain, de-tain, con-tain.

2. Morpheme-words, consisting of a single (free) morpheme: man, boy, cut, run, red, big.

The principle of immediate constituents will lead us, for example, to class a form like gentlemanly not as a compound word, but as a derived secondary word, since the immediate constituents are the bound form -ly and the underlying word gentleman; the word gentlemanly is a secondary derivative (a so-called de-compound) whose underlying form happens to be a compound word. Similarly, door-knobs is not a compound word, but a de-compound, consisting of the bound form [-z] and the underlying word doorknob.

The principle of immediate constituents leads us to observe the structural order of the constituents, which may differ from their actual sequence; thus ungentlemanly consists of un-and gentlemanly, with the bound form added at the beginning, but gentlemanly consists of gentleman and -ly with the bound form added at the end.

3. Dwell on the role of word formation in the processes of verbalization. Compare the use of word formation to that of borrowing. Take into account the following statistics: of 6000 new English items given in the supplement to Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language 199 are borrowed, 1443 are formed by affixation, 1365 by compounding, 179 are shortenings, 26 are back formations, 97 are functional shifts, etc.

4. Study the following word forms and say whether they are analyzable into smaller meaningful segments. Say on what grounds their segmentability is based.

Quickness, temptation, walked, asks, smiling, morphology, learner, learners.

5. Analyze the derivational structure of the following words and say how many steps of derivation they have undergone.

Indisputableness, unknowableness, irresponsiveness, unseaworthyness, theatricalization, revitalization, dehydrogenizer, librarianess, petticoatless.

Find your own examples of words of 1-st, 2nd, 3^rd, etc. degrees of derivation.

6. State the productivity of the affixes given below. Say what parts of speech are formed with their help (Consult supplementary material).

-ness

-ous

-ly

-y

-dom

-ish

-tion

-ed

-en

-ess

-or

-er

-hood

-less

-ate

-ing

-al

-ful

un-

re-

im (in)-

dis-

over-

ab-

7. Read the information presented below.