This book provides a detailed, theoretically well-founded and empirically validated account of verb-forming suffixation in English, focusing on the suffixes -ize, -ify, -ate and -en. Based on an exhaustive analysis of the use of suffixed formations in three large spoken corpora, the book updates and significantly augments previous work on the inventory of semantic categories covered by the suffixes, maps the distribution of the suffixes and categories over time and across registers, and introduces a novel framework that will also facilitate future research on morphological constructions.
Chapter 1 presents a clear introduction to the topic (pp. 1–9). The main research question explored in the book is ‘what meanings do speakers of English conceptualize when they encounter, use and create complex words bearing the verb-forming suffixes -ate, -en, -ify and -ize, given that each of these suffixes conveys a range of different and shared senses?’ (p. 1). Taking the work of Plag (Reference Plag1999) and Lieber (Reference Lieber2004) as a starting point, the aim is to develop a comprehensive, usage-based account of verb-forming suffixation in Present-Day English. The chapter explains that the semantic analysis of the derivatives is based on paraphrasing their meaning; the paraphrases are represented as argument structure constructions (Goldberg Reference Goldberg1995), which reveal the argument roles and relations involved in the event denoted by the verb. Construction Morphology (Booij Reference Booij2010) is then utilized to generate form–meaning schemas for the derivatives at different levels of specificity. The generalized schema states that the meaning of verbal derivation is to express some sort of a relation R to the meaning of the base, which is identified through the argument structure construction. For instance, hospitalize in ‘they hospitalized the child’ can be paraphrased as ‘they moved the child to the hospital’, which corresponds to the Caused–Motion construction, the semantic component of which is [Cause makes Theme move to/from Goal]. The meaning of hospitalize can then be expressed as [to have a Locative relation to hospital] (pp. 3–4).
Chapter 2, titled ‘Form and register characteristics of verbal derivatives’ (pp. 12–47), lucidly describes the suffixes based on previous work and moves on to discuss Study 1 on the grammatical profile of the suffixes. The material comprises the spoken components of the British National Corpus (BNC): the Demographically Sampled (DS1994) and Context-Governed (CG1994) sections of the BNC1994 recorded in the 1990s, and the Spoken BNC2014, which contains informal conversation like DS1994 but recorded in the 2010s. Register variation is analysed by comparing DS1994 and the more formal CG1994, while change over time is analysed by comparing DS1994 and BNC2014. The size of the corpora ranges from 4.2 million (DS1994) to 11.4 million words (BNC2014). The author’s choice to include multiply affixed forms (e.g. mechanization) in the dataset of verbal derivatives is unusual and could lead to comparability issues with previous research. However, it is consistent with the maximalist approach taken in the book that also aims for comprehensiveness by accounting for opaque formations where the meaning of the base is no longer available. The distribution of the derivatives across suffixes and corpora is analysed through raw and normalized type and token frequencies. While this is fine for token frequencies, the chapter acknowledges that normalizing type frequencies could produce unreliable results, as they depend on corpus size in a non-linear manner, with smaller corpora exhibiting relatively higher numbers of different types (e.g. Säily & Suomela Reference Säily, Suomela, Renouf and Kehoe2009: 96). This could partly explain the study’s finding that the larger BNC2014 appears to have a lower diversity of types than the DS1994, even though its token frequency is higher, which could be interpreted as part of a trend towards anti-colloquialization. As expected, -ize is the most frequent and diversely used suffix, and all four suffixes are used more in formal than in informal texts.
Chapter 3 surveys previous research on verb-forming suffixation, compiling an initial list of semantic categories to describe the suffixes (pp. 50–82). Plag (Reference Plag1999) and Lieber (Reference Lieber2004) identify seven categories: Locative and Ornative, which are associated with change of location; the change-of-state categories Causative, Resultative and Inchoative; and the activity categories Performative and Similative. Aiming for a more fine-grained account, Laws splits Inchoative into Inchoative–Causative and Inchoative–Resultative and adds another intransitive class called Inchoative–Ornative. Moreover, Ornative is recognized to cover a wide semantic scope, with the subcategories Ornative–Provide, Ornative–Cover, Ornative–Imbue and Ornative–Endow. Meaning paraphrases presented in the work of other authors yield the additional classes of Imposative, Inchoative–Imposative, Regardative, Representative, Achievement, Approximative and Tentative, most of which are activity categories. These sixteen categories, as well as their distribution across suffixes, will be tested on corpus data in chapter 5.
Chapter 4, titled ‘A constructional approach to verbal derivation’ (pp. 83–118), continues to build the theoretical framework of the book by presenting an extensive discussion of argument structure constructions in Construction Grammar as well as the essentials of Construction Morphology (CM). As mentioned above, the key notion of the framework is relating meaning paraphrases of verbal derivation to argument structure constructions, which are then used to define the senses conveyed by verbal derivatives in CM schema representations. For instance, derivatives belonging to the Locative category, which corresponds to the Caused–Motion argument structure construction, are represented by the schema in (1). The double-headed arrow relates the form (left) and the meaning (right) of the construction. It has been attested with the suffixes -ize and -ify; [x] is the base (e.g. hospital), Y is its word class and the index i is used to indicate that the Goal has the semantics (SEM) of the base (pp. 113–14).
(1) Locative: [[x]Yi -ize, -ify]Vj ↔ [Cause makes Theme move to/from GoalSEMi]j
Chapter 5 describes the methods and results of Study 2 on the semantics of verb-forming suffixation with regard to constructional properties (pp. 120–203). In a massive effort documented in detail, each occurrence of a verbal derivative in the three corpora has been analysed in context, paraphrased as an argument structure construction and classified into a semantic category. Initial definitions for established derivatives have been collected from several sources including the Oxford English Dictionary and WordNet. In addition to the sixteen semantic categories presented in chapter 3, four new ones are identified (Regardative, Representative, Defining, Acknowledging); a number of derivatives remain unclassified but receive higher-level labels such as Unclassified Transitive Change-of-State. This fine-grained model could perhaps be criticized for being labour-intensive to implement, and its psychological reality in speakers’ minds could also be questioned. Nevertheless, it is both theoretically and empirically sound (as verified by a second annotator), and it enables the categorization of multiple unclear cases from previous research. The results include a detailed description of each semantic category, its construction hierarchy and its share in spoken British English. The Ornative category with the semantics [Cause makes Patient have Theme], as in accessorize, is found to play a larger role than previously recognized; Causative and Ornative are the largest categories, and Ornative has the highest number of neologisms.
Chapter 6, ‘The characteristics of verbal derivatives in spoken British English’ (pp. 204–27), shifts the focus to the individual suffixes, developing a construction network for each and discussing their frequency and productivity over time and across registers. The semantic scope of the suffixes across the twenty categories is found to range from nineteen for -ize and eighteen for -ify to twelve for -ate and six for -en. The results support previous research that -ize is the major process, while -ify is a phonologically conditioned allomorph of -ize; -ate has similar phonological restrictions to -ize and favours the scientific register, which explains its limited use in speech. The marginally productive -en suffix is found to dominate the Causative and Inchoative–Causative categories and to be the most polysemous in terms of the number of senses by type; many of the senses are idiosyncratic, suggesting metaphorical sense extension over time. The principal meaning across the suffixes is change; -ify has the most complex profile, possibly owing to the large number of borrowings from French. Both diversity (number of different senses) and density (token frequency) are higher for the more formal CG1994 corpus across semantic categories; for example, the newly identified Defining category only occurs in CG1994. As for change over time, BNC2014 has a higher density but a lower diversity than DS1994, although the latter result could again be influenced by corpus size. While neologisms (of which -ify has the largest proportion) mostly belong to well-established semantic categories expressing change, new senses (with -ate in the lead) are less often classifiable, indicating that sense extension allows speakers ‘to explore new interpretations of the verbal suffixation process’ (p. 225).
The final chapter summarizes the results of the two studies, evaluates the approach and discusses implications for future research (pp. 230–5). The chief contribution identified by Laws is threefold: firstly, the idea of linking morphological constructions and argument structure constructions via the semantic relation R; secondly, the development of a unified construction hierarchy for verb-forming suffixation in spoken British English; and thirdly, providing a much more comprehensive account than before, including a wider range of derivatives and their interpretations. The author’s directions for future research include extending the study to more genres, analysing sense evolution, investigating potential reasons for the observed anti-colloquialization process, and accounting for alternative ways of expressing the same sense beyond suffixation. Methodologically, I think it would be of interest to attempt integrating the model with a more automated approach to classification relying on distributional semantics (cf. Perek Reference Perek2016) to facilitate future work.
In conclusion, this comprehensive monograph is a valuable contribution to the study of English verb-forming suffixation. The author is to be commended for the theoretical rigour and empirical commitment that have significantly advanced the field.
