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Uncovering the un-word : a study in lexical pragmatics
- In this paper I seek to account for the productive word-formation process resulting in the current proliferation of un-nouns, the semi-legitimate offspring of Humpty Dumpty´s un-birthday present (1871) and 7-Up´s commercial incarnation as The Un-Cola (1968), a construction that can be linked to the more well-established categories of un-adjectives and un-verbs, whose formation constraints we will also examine. Drawing on a large corpus of novel un-nouns I have assembled in collaboration with Beth Levin presented in the Appendices to this paper, I will invoke Rosch´s prototype semantics and Aristotle´s notion of PRIVATIVE opposites, defined in terms of a marked exception to a general class property, to generalize across the different categories of un-words. It will be argued that a given un-noun refers either to an element just outside a given category with whose members it shares a salient function (e.g. un-cola) or to a peripheral member of a given category (an unhotel is a hotel but not a good exemplar of the class-not a HOTEL hotel).
Author: | Laurence R. Horn |
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30-1107547 |
ISSN: | 0287-5357 |
Parent Title (English): | Sophia linguistica / Graduate School of Languages and Linguistics, Linguistic Institute for International Communication, Sophia University : working papers in linguistics |
Document Type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of Publication (online): | 2008/10/07 |
Year of first Publication: | 2002 |
Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
Release Date: | 2008/10/07 |
Tag: | lexical semantics; morphological derivation; pragmatics; prefix; word formation |
Issue: | 49 |
Page Number: | 64 |
First Page: | 1 |
Last Page: | 64 |
Note: | Signatur: Zs 16210 |
HeBIS-PPN: | 358842395 |
Dewey Decimal Classification: | 4 Sprache / 40 Sprache / 400 Sprache |
Sammlungen: | Linguistik |
Licence (German): | ![]() |