A Study On The Interaction Between Morphological And Semantic Features Of Antonymous Suffixes From The Perspective Of Construction Morphology

English,as is known to all,is a language with abundant morphological affixes which easily changes part of speech and meaning of a given word.Among various affixes,-er and-ee are very common.Their derivatives often appear in pairs,such as employer and employee,payer and payee.Therefore,suffixes-er and-ee are often regarded as antonymous suffixes.Scholars both at home and abroad have studied them from morphological,syntactic and semantic perspectives.Nevertheless,there is comparatively less research dealing with the comparison of-er and-ee.Studies on the interaction between morphological and semantic features have been even scarcer.Geert Booij's Construction Morphology is an applicable theory that studies the relationship between form and meaning on a word level.From the perspective of Construction Morphology,the thesis analyzes the form and meaning of-er and-ee from various aspects as well as the interactions between their morphological and semantic features.The main findings of this study are as follows: first,in terms of morphological features,both-er and-ee have a variety of bases.They are verbs,nouns,adjectives as well as compounds where verbs occupy the highest proportion while nouns,adjectives have a lower proportion.It is noticeable that-er also has the bases of adverbs,prepositions,numerals,and phrases.Also,there are numerous compounding-er words.Moreover,there are reduplication of the deverbal-er suffixation on phrasal verbs.Thus,-er is of complexity in the choice of bases.-ee,by contrast,is simpler than-er in terms of the word class of bases.It mainly attaches to deverbal bases.Compounding bases are not very common.Semantically speaking,it is found that-er and-ee are not simply in pairs of Agent-Patient.They have both relations of antonyms and synonyms.As for semantic referents,both-er and-ee can refer to person,animal and plant,tool,thing,event/activity.-er has more complex meanings and connotations;-ee derivatives often refer to Patient.With respect to interactions of form and meaning,both-er and-ee have frequent interactions.However,-er has a larger number of constructions as well as types.Finally,from a diachronic analysis,both-er and-ee follow their own rules in historical development.But in general,they expand their choices of parts of speech of bases.Also,their semantic extensions become wider.And in certain historical periods,they interact with each other and have certainproximity in historical development.