Selected papers on theoretical and applied linguistics
Doi
Abstract
Latinate or Greek prefixes are extremely productive when attaching to Latinate or Greek verbal or nominal stems. Once archaic prepositions or adverbs in Latin and Greek, those word initial morphs behave as lexically attached prefixes in the sense that they obey to lexical word formation rules and are semantically non-compositional, i.e. despite a certain amount of commonality of meaning among them, they have no fixed meaning and also display distributional gaps. Moreover, the verbal or nominal stems they attach to become lexically derived composites. For instance, the Latinate in-, con-, re- and de-, and the Greek epi-, dia-, and pro- prefixes affixed to the Latinate and Greek stems -fer- and -gram- respectively, will produce semantically unrelated forms such as infer, confer, refer, defer and epigram, diagram and program. The main issue in this study is the treatment of such prefixes as lexically attached entities to classical (Latin / Greek) stems producing an abundant number of lexical units with distributional gaps and noncompositional semantics, even though morphologically transparent and segmentable. In our analysis, the more productive prefixes un-, dis-, in- and to a certain extent de-, en-, be- bearing a relatively constant lexical meaning the former as well as a categorial meaning (i.e. category changing prefixes) the latter, will not be taken into consideration
