Un-stoppable?

George Orwell’s famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four presents a world in which the state conditions thought through control of language. The hero Winston Smith is charged with rewriting documents in ‘Newspeak’, a version of English in which the words to express opposition to the all-powerful Big Brother simply do not exist. Part of this involves removal of antonyms; thus ‘bad’ becomes ‘ungood’ and heretical statements beyond ‘Big Brother is ungood’ become all but impossible:

‘After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself.

Take "good", for instance. If you have a word like "good", what need is there for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will do just as well — better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not.’

Fortunately, language is far too complex, and human beings far too creative in its use, for top-down control ever to be possible. Ungood may never have caught on, but uncool has, and unfriend, while ruled out as a noun, has emerged as a verb with the advent of Facebook. What Orwell appears to have grasped is the flexibility with which English speakers apply this prefix to create antonyms:

But I’ve already booked a table!

- Well, unbook it!

I have even heard a speaker, known for his fondness for British understatement (litotes), observe that: ‘this actor doesn’t unremind me of a young Robert Redford’!

Our derivational inventiveness stems in part from the fact that we associate morphemes with a particular meaning, and learn those meanings in the same way we do those of full lexemes. But there is an interesting subset of derivational morphemes with no apparent meaning outside the isolated lexemes in which they occur. These have become known as cranberry morphemes after their most celebrated example:

straw+ berry

black+ berry

goose+ berry

blue+ berry

cran+ berry

All of these cases appear to involve compounding of free morphemes, but cran has no independent meaning or function outside of the word cranberry. A slightly more marginal case is lukewarm, in which the first element luke- appears to qualify warm and is thought to derive from a Middle English word meaning ‘tepid’, but has no such meaning in any other lexeme.

Children learn not just a list of derivational morphemes, which enables them to understand new words like giant-baking-soda-volcano-inator, but also the rules by which they may be combined. A child needs to know not just that prefixes can only be placed at the beginning of the word and suffixes at the end, but also that affixes attach to particular kinds of word-class.

The word uncontrollableness, for example, can be divided into four morphemes un+control+able+ness, but these morphemes have an internal constituent structure and are not simply juxtaposed. Control needs to combine first with able to form controllable, because the prefix un- can only attach to adjectives (unwary) and verbs (undo), but not nouns, ruling out *uncontrol. The same restriction applies to the abstract noun controllableness, which suggests that, in spite of the fact that controllableness does exist, the proper constituent structure is uncontrollable+ness rather than un+controllableness. This can be illustrated by the following tree diagram.

In the above example, morphologists would distinguish between root and stem morphemes: the root noun (in this case) around which uncontrollableness is built is control, which is also the stem of controllable. But controllable itself is the stem of uncontrollable, and likewise uncontrollable is the stem that yields uncontrollableness.

While many aspects of derivational morphology reveal regular patterns, much has to be learned on an item-by-item basis. In the example above, the meaning of the -ness suffix used for coining abstract nouns is broadly synonymous with that of -ity, and many speakers prefer uncontrollability to uncontrollableness (prescriptive dictionaries allow both). A quick Google search gave around 25,000 hits for uncontrollableness, but 241,000 for uncontrollability, but unfathomableness gave 41,600 hits as opposed to only 10,700 for unfathomability. The same highly unscientific test suggested a preference for unremarkableness over unremarkability but a strong preference the other way for predictability over predictableness. Similarly, there is no obvious reason why the antonyms of complete and capable are incomplete and incapable while those of conscious and comfortable are unconscious and uncomfortable: this is simply an arbitrary fact about present-day English.

Derivational morphology reveals many grey areas in which form or meaning can vary and change. The suffix -phobia, for example, has acquired a generally pejorative meaning in xenophobia and homophobia which it lacks in claustrophobia or agoraphobia, and while some speakers insist on the dictionary distinction between disinterested and uninterested, for many others the two words are now synonymous.