A Study On Morphological Constructions And Cognitive Mechanisms Of English Affixoids

The affixoid is a kind of language phenomenon existing in the transformation process from independent morphemes to affixes, and its formation even dates back to the old English period. During its evolution, some of the affixoids still possess their original meanings, while others take on semantic bleaching to some degree, forming new restricted meanings which are different from their original meanings. According to Naumann & Vogel, “the notion of affixoid has been proposed as a descriptive label for hybrid items”(2000, p.929). Being various in forms and easy to understand, affixoids become one of the most productive constructions to coin new words. Booij claims that affixoids are morphemes which look like parts of compounds and do occur as lexemes, but have a specific and more restricted meaning when used as a part of compound(2010). The previous researches on affixoids are mainly on semantic bleaching, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics and lexicographic approaches. These researches mainly analyze the bleaching semantic or the formation of a certain affixoid, few of which focus on the form, sound change and semantic systematically. However the findings of the studies do lay a sound foundation for the analysis of affixoid in Construction Morphology, which is a method to extract the same structure of a certain language phenomenon by focusing on its pair of form and meaning. Booij puts forward that “the notion of affixoid is only a descriptive term, which refers to words in the blurred boundary between derivation and compounding”(2009, p. 9). According to the related researches of some linguists on affixoids, its characters can be generalized by Construction Morphology.In order to understand the bleaching degrees, schema and mechanism of affixoids, five affixoids mostly mentioned in researches of Booij are studied in this paper. They are –ful,-ship,-some,-gate and-hood. This paper applies both qualitative and quantitative analysis to solve the following questions: 1) How the schemas of the common affixoids in English can be presented? 2) What are the bleaching degrees of the target affixoids? 3) What are the generative mechanisms of affixoids?To solve the above mentioned questions, this research is conducted based on Construction Morphology. It applies COCA(Corpus of Contemporary American English) and EXCEL to find out the features of affixoids-ful,-ship,-some,-gate and-hood, which also make the research systematic. In addition, this paper regards the ratio of bleaching meanings as the representation of the degree of semantic bleaching and probes into the generation mechanism of affixoids to generalize the rules of its word formation. It shows that:1) There exists bleaching ratio distinctions between the target affixoids,-hood(100%) 、-ship(84%) 、-some(64%) 、-ful(58%) 、-gate(31%). As all of the pronunciations of independent words will be weaken when developing into affixoids, pronunciations will act as the standards to classify target affixoids. According to whether form or pronunciation changes, affixoids can be divided into four groups. Bleaching degrees of target affixoids are presented as:-hood/-ship(affixoids with change in both form and pronunciation)>-some(affixoids only with change in pronunciation) >-ful(affixoids only with change in form)>-gate(affixoids without change in form or pronunciation). It shows that in the evolution of target affixoids, the influence of sound change is more obvious than form change.2) The semantic of affixoids can be generalized and abstracted, forming a semantic network composed by schema and sub-schemas. The schema of-ful is: [[[X]V/N k[-ful]i]A/N j ←→[[SEMi with R to SEMk ]ENTITY ]j ]. Based on the data of COCA, its base words are mostly verbs and nouns and it often forms adjective and nouns. The schema of-ship is: [[[X]N/V/A k [-ship]i ]Nj←→[SEMi with R to SEMk]ENTITY]j]. The base words of it are often nouns, verbs and adjectives, and its compounds are nouns. The schema of-some is: [[[X]N/A k[-some]i ]A j←→[[SEMi with R to SEMk]ENTITY]j]. Its base words are nouns and adjectives, and its compounds are adjectives. The schema of-gate is: [[[X]N/A k[-gate]i]N j←→[[SEMi with R to SEMk]ENTITY]j]. Its base words are nouns and adjectives, and its compounds are nouns. The schema of-hood is: [[X]N/A k [-hood]i ]N j←→[[SEMi with R to SEMk]ENTITY]j]. Its base words are nouns and adjectives, and its compounds are nouns.3) Compositionality can be regarded as one of the most significant features in the process of affixoid evolution. The results provide the fact that the independent morphemes which are compositional in semantic and whose stresses are on the head are easier to develop into affixoids. In the process of the formation of affixoids, there are changes to some sense in not only semantic bleaching, but also pronunciation and form. Among the target affixoids, the form or pronunciation of-ful,-ship and-hood change, while affixoid-some only changes in its pronunciation. Affixoid-gate dose not experience these changes. These new forms and pronunciations are recomposed to form new pairs of form and meaning.4) The formation of affixoids experiences the process from economy principle of language, metonymy and lexicalization to grammaticalization. The economy principle of language is the outer factor influencing its formation, which needs the minimum efforts to earn the largest effects. The effect of lexicalization is combining the existing language into one single unit in both form and pronunciation. That?s how new affixoids are formed. In addition, some affixoids are formed by metonymy, like –gate. With all these factors, independent words have the possibility to transform into affixoids. Finally with grammaticalization all the expressions like affixoids are fixed.In conclusion, affixoids experience bleaching meanings in different degrees. Its semantics can be generalized into schema to form construction network and its formation is restricted by cognitive mechanism. The research on affixoids from construction perspective can not only verify Construction Morphology, but be significant to understand the relationship between construction and language change. In addition, the analysis of morphological constructions of English affixoids also offers some enlightenment of second language teaching and lexicography.