MORPHOLOGICAL PRODUCTIVITY OF ADJECTIVE-FORMING PREFIXES IN ENGLISH AT THE LEVEL OF WORD-FORMATION RULES

Abstract

This paper studies the morphological productivity of adjective-forming prefixes at the level of word-formation rules. The productivity at the aforementioned level is the union of the productivity at the level of word-formation types and morphological types. The aim of the paper is to offer pieces of information on the interaction of different concepts within different word-formation types together with the morphological aspect through different morphological types. We find 267 examples of adjectives and analyse 31 prefixes interacting with various simple or complex adjectives in the corpus comprised of news, literary, academic and TV registers. After analytic, descriptive and statistical methods, we conclude that they fall into 5 different conceptual categories, i.e., wordformation type clusters (Quality, Location, Quantity, Time and State). The majority of clusters show that the stem is determining the conceptual category while prefixes refine it. The highest productivity rates are recorded with such word-formation types. The only exceptions are Quantity and Time where the conceptual category depends on the prefixes and stems equally. The results from the morphological analyses show that most of the prefixes are inserting additional semantic pieces of information, usually recording the highest PR and not changing the conceptual category of the stem and appearing within one or multiple clusters, with exceptions for Quantity and Time.