Göran Kjellmer

Why Weaken But Not *Strongen? On Deadjectival Verbs

0. Introduction A recent help-wanted advertisement in a newspaper sought ‘a counselor to help embiggen the lives and possibilities of the developmentally disabled’. The verb embiggen is not to be found in modern dictionaries, and yet its meaning is quite clear, viz. ‘make big(ger)’. There are patterns according to which we interpret it, represented by e.g. embolden ‘make bold(er)’ or enlighten ‘make light(er)’, and also by enlarge ‘make large(r)’ and harden ‘make hard(er)’. An adjective often operates in a verbal function by being included in a verb phrase. Such verb phrases are be/become/go/grow/get/turn ADJ, or make/render sb/sth ADJ, or cause sb/sth to be ADJ. But as with embiggen, a different way of giving the adjective verbal function is the creation of deadjectival verbs by derivation. The two ways exist alongside each other, and often both can be used alternatively. We can say both to make something domestic and to domesticize it, both to make something pure and to purify it, both to turn red and to redden. In other cases, however, derivation does not seem to be possible. Pleasant, brilliant, adequate, experienced, skilled, wooden, barren, permanent, confident, careful, wonderful are all examples of adjectives where the existence of corresponding deadjectival verbs seems very unlikely. The occurrence of a verb like embiggen, clearly formed from the adjective big, raises interesting questions. For instance, what kinds of deadjectival verbs are there and what is the relation between them? And as for the adjectives, which kinds of adjectives lend themselves to verbalisation? Why are some so used and not others? Do certain adjectival suffixes preclude or encourage verbalisation? One may also ask whether general tendencies can be established for deadjectival verb productivity, which at least initially seems irrational and unprincipled. For example, weaken, ‘to make or become weak(er)’, and shorten ‘to make short(er)’ are frequent verbs whereas *strongen and *longen do not seem to exist. That general truths in this area are difficult to establish is suggested by Lipka 1982:11, who discusses quieten vs. to quiet and burglarize vs. to burgle:

And Which. A Note on (More or Less) Coordinated Relatives

English relative clauses can show signs of coordination with different kinds of phrases and clauses. Some of the coordinates, especially in spoken language, do not conform to conventional patterns. The paper tries to show that their irregularity nevertheless contributes to communicative efficiency.

Yourself: a general-purpose emphatic-reflexive?

In general, the reference of English personal pronouns has been relatively stable over the centuries: I (and its forerunners) can normally be taken to refer to the first person singular, and so on. If this is the general picture, it is necessary to add some qualifications, most of them of a minor kind. For instance, I is sometimes used to refer to the second person singular (“I shouldn’t disturb him at this time of night”), we is sometimes used with reference to the first person singular, the “authorial” and the “royal we” (“We are not amused”), to the second person singular (“How are we today?”) and with general reference (“We should not underestimate the defence of honour”), and they can also be used with general reference (“They say that ill weeds grow apace”). However, you and its reflexive-emphatic correspondence yourself stand out in this respect and differ from their pronominal cousins, both in that their referential changes have been more generally remarkable over the centuries, and in that such changes are still in progress. This paper will attempt to chart some of those changes in modern English with the help of large modern corpora.

Unstable fricatives: On Gothic pliuhan and Old English flēon

AbstractThere has been an almost century-long debate about the origin of Gothic pliuhan ‘to flee’ and its relations to semantically cognate words like Old English flēon, Old High German fliohan and Old Icelandic flýia. Traditionally it has been assumed that fl- developed out of pl-, and that the Gothic word hence represents a more original state than the West and North Germanic forms, but another school of thought contends that the change took place in the opposite direction,fl-being original and pl- secondary. The conflict is as yet unresolved.The present paper attempts to throw some light on the problem by placing it in a more general context and asks the question, If fl- > pl- and pl- > fl- are both theoretically possible, which change or substitution is intrinsically the more probable one? Material from Latin, Russian, German and English is adduced to suggest that [θ] relatively frequently changes into [f] or is replaced by [f] but that the opposite rarely if ever happens. Reference is then made to st...

Awful adjectives: a type of semantic change in present-day corpora

Semantic change observable in isolated linguistic items is both frequent and interesting in itself. More interesting, perhaps, are cases of structural change, i.e. cases where one and the same tendency can be discerned in a related group of words. This paper uses modern corpus material in order to sketch the development of one such group, words meaning ‘frightening’, and suggests that they all follow the same trend in the direction of ‘impressive, overwhelming’ although they differ with respect to how far they have advanced along that route. The semantic changes of some 25 words in the chosen area are studied in detail, and their development is illustrated with corpus material. One of the conclusions of the study is that their rate of semantic progress is partly dependent on the time when they entered the semantic field. The paper deals with the adjectives in the group and leaves the adverbs, although equally interesting, out of account for a later investigation.

Is There a Relative Adverb There in Modern English

In the development of a language over long periods it occasionally happens that a change is not universal but leaves certain relevant elements unaffected. One such example is the change of Middle English feminine nouns in the s-less genitive to conform to the majority pattern in –s. Ladie ‘‘lady’’ normally became ladies in the genitive singular, but the s-less genitive remained in a few contexts, like Lady Day and Lady Chapel. Such remaining features then have a certain interest in that they bear witness to an earlier state of the language. The question of interest here is whether the demonstrative-relative adverb þær, frequent in Old and Middle English but later replaced by where, still exists as a relative adverb in modern English in the form of there. There was used in English from Old English to Early New English times as a relative adverb. The following examples from The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) will illustrate this use through the centuries:

“Troublesome Relatives”: On Whose Her and Others

Relative structures are among the most widely studied in English. Variation and change in that field are probably mostly to be found among the non-standard relativisers such as as or what, but interesting and occasionally surprising phenomena occur even in the standard set. This paper is devoted to one such phenomenon. In (1) and (2), extracts from two English newspapers, the use of whose her is clearly unconventional:

A COUPLE HOURS – ON NON-OCCURRENCE OF OF AFTER PARTITIVE ENGLISH NOUNS

Abstract Of-less noun phrases like a couple tons, a lot food, a pair clogs are not unusual in modern English. The paper attempts to describe the phenomenon, assess its significance and explain its history. It is concluded that the construction is less of a modern careless defective variant and more of a historically motivated one.

Popular Etymology and Language Use: The case of beanfeast

When the origin of a word, by association to spurious parallels in the language, is taken to be another than the historically correct one, the new meaning can have drastic consequences for the way the word is used. The use of the word beanfeast illustrates the force of the phenomenon, so-called folk etymologuy.

How recent is recent? On overcoming interpretational difficulties

In this paper, the words recent and recently are shown to be ambiguous between the meanings of ‘not long before the present time’ and ‘not long before the time of the event described’. The ambiguity can be resolved in various ways, four of which are illustrated and discussed. It is claimed that the disambiguation phenomenon sheds some light on the more general process of textual interpretation and comprehension.