From Speech Perception to Morphology: Affix Ordering Revisited
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This article presents corpus and experimental evidence in support of a parsability-based account of affix ordering in English: an affix that tends to be easily parsed out during speech perception should not occur inside an affix that does not. This generalization holds both at the affix level and the word level. At the affix level, this maxim, when combined with an understanding of the role of frequency and phonotactics in morphological processing, can account for the patterns generally attributed to level ordering. At the word level, it can explain the so-called dual-level behavior of some affixes—an affix may resist attaching to a complex word that is highly decomposable but be acceptable when it attaches to a comparable complex word that favors the direct access route in speech perception. Only a parsing account can afford this set of phenomena a unified explanation.*
Introduction
One of the most debated problems of English morphology is that of stacking restrictions amongst derivational affixes. Of the many potential combinations of affixes, only a very small proportion are actually attested. Many attempts to account for apparent restrictions on affix ordering have invoked some form of the affix-ordering generalization (Siegel 1979). The basic claim of the affix-ordering generalization is that affixes can be divided into two sets: level 1 and level 2. Level 1 affixation occurs prior to level 2 affixation, and so no level 1 affix can attach outside of any level 2 affix (hence *-ness-ic, *-less-ity, and so on).
I argue here that early accounts of affix ordering were overly restrictive and drew the line at the wrong level of abstraction. But more recent work, which has discarded the idea that there are any restrictions on ordering (beyond selectional restrictions), misses a number of important generalizations. Many facts about English stacking restrictions can be predicted if we reduce the problem to one of parsability. This can capture not only the range of generalizations about English stacking restrictions but also a large number of systematic, word-based exceptions to these generalizations.
In a paper widely cited as responsible for disproving the affix-ordering generalization, Fabb (1988) argues against a stratificational approach to affix ordering. He demonstrates that the affix-ordering generalization fails to rule out a large number of affix combinations, which nonetheless do not occur. He argues that affix ordering is constrained only by selectional restrictions:
all but a few non-occurring pairs of suffixes can be ruled out solely by a combination of selectional restrictions, of which one of the most extensive in its effects is a restriction against attachment to an already suffixed word.
(Fabb 1988:538)
One of Fabb’s observations, then, is that there seem to be a large number of affixes that do not attach to already affixed words. This observation, I argue, holds the key to understanding restrictions on affix ordering in English. Many affixes are sensitive to internal structure in potential bases. While some affixes basically tolerate no internal structure, others will tolerate structure to some minimum degree. The degree of internal [End Page 527] structure tolerated by an affix is not determined by selectional restrictions, but, rather, by how much structure that affix itself creates. Phrased in terms of processing, an affix that can be easily parsed out should not occur inside an affix that cannot. Details on how to operationalize the notion of ease of parsing are provided below.
I demonstrate that this maxim, when combined with an understanding of the role of frequency and phonology in morphological processing, accounts neatly for restrictions on affix ordering in English. We do not find any cases in which an affix attaches only to forms that are maximally decomposable, and not to forms that are relatively opaque, though there are large numbers of cases where the opposite holds true. The range of results put forward here cannot be accounted for by the classical affix-ordering account, nor by any account involving selectional restrictions.
The account presented here takes as its starting point some fundamentals of speech perception. Before turning to affix ordering, then, I will outline some basic assumptions about...
