{"id":68,"date":"2013-11-29T03:22:27","date_gmt":"2013-11-29T03:22:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sonny..ogi.edu\/~kgorman\/blog\/?p=68"},"modified":"2018-11-13T03:54:40","modified_gmt":"2018-11-13T03:54:40","slug":"defining-libfixes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/defining-libfixes\/","title":{"rendered":"Defining libfixes"},"content":{"rendered":"

A recent late-night discussion with two fellow philologists revealed some interesting problems in defining libfixes<\/a>. Arnold Zwicky coined this term to describe affix-like formatives such as -(a)<\/em>thon<\/i>\u00a0(from marathon<\/em>; e.g., saleathon<\/em>) or -(o)holic<\/em> (from alcoholic<\/em>, e.g., chocoholic<\/em>)\u00a0that appear to have been extracted (“liberated”) from another word. These are then affixed to free stems, and the resulting form often conveys a sense of either jocularity or pejoration.\u00a0The extraction of libfixes is a special case of what historical linguists call “recutting”, and like recutting in general, the ontogenesis of libfixation is largely mysterious.<\/p>\n

As the evening’s discussion showed, it is not trivial to distinguish libfixation from similar derivational processes. What follows are a few examples of interesting derivational processes which in my opinion should not<\/strong>\u00a0be identified with libfixation.<\/p>\n

Blending is not libfixation<\/h2>\n

One superficially similar process is “blending”, in which new forms are derived by combining identifiable subparts of two simplex words.\u00a0The resulting forms are sometimes called “portmanteaux”<\/a> (sg. “portmanteau”), a term of art with its own interesting history.\u00a0Two canonical blends are br-unch<\/em> and sm-og<\/em>, derived from the unholy union of breakfast<\/em> and lunch<\/em>, and smoke<\/em> and fog<\/em>, respectively.\u00a0These two are particularly memorable\u2014yet unobstrustive\u2014thanks to a clever indexical trick: both word and referent are mongrel-like in their own ways.\u00a0What exactly distinguishes blending from libfixation?\u00a0I see two features which distinguish the two word-formation processes.<\/p>\n

The first is productivity: libfixation has some degree of productivity whereas blending does not.\u00a0In no other derivative can one find the “pieces” (I am using the term pretheoretically) of smog<\/em>, namely sm-<\/em> and -og<\/em>.\u00a0In contrast, there are over a dozen novel -omics<\/em>es<\/a> and dozens of -gate<\/em>s<\/a>.\u00a0There is therefore no reason to posit that either sm-<\/em> or -og<\/em> has been reconceptualized as an affix.<\/p>\n

The second feature which distinguishes blending and libfixation deals with\u00a0the way the pieces are spelled out.\u00a0Libfixes are affixes and do not normally modify the freestanding base they attach to.\u00a0In blends, one form overwrites the other (and vis versa).\u00a0Were -og<\/em> a newly liberated suffix, we would expect *smoke-og<\/em>.\u00a0This criterion also suggests that mansplain<\/em><\/a>, poptimism<\/em><\/a>, and snowquester<\/em><\/a> are not\u00a0in fact instances of libfixation; in each case, material from the “base” (I also use this term pretheoretically) is deleted.<\/p>\n

Zwicky himself has noted the existence of a blend-libfix cline<\/a>, and the tendency of blends to become libfixes.\u00a0He suggests the following natural history:<\/p>\n

A portmanteau word (useful or playful or both) invites other portmanteaus sharing an element (usually the second), and then these drift from the phonology and semantics of the original to such an extent that the shared element takes on a life of its own \u2014 is “liberated” as an affix.<\/p>\n

 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Clipping is not libfixation<\/h2>\n

“Clipping”<\/a> (or “truncation”) is a process which reduces a word to one of its parts.\u00a0Sometimes truncated forms are themselves used for compound formation.\u00a0For instance, burger<\/em> is derived from\u00a0Hamburger<\/em> ‘resident of Hamburg’ (the semantic connection is a mystery).\u00a0According to the Online Etymology Dictionary<\/a>, forms like cheese-burger<\/em> appear in the historical record at about the same time as burger<\/em> itself. There is one way that clipping is distinct from libfixation, however. Clippings are free forms (i.e., prosodic words), whereas libfixes need not be. In particular, whereas some libfixes have homophonous free forms (e.g., -gate<\/em>, -core<\/em>), these are semantically distinct: whereas one can claim to love burgers<\/em>, one cannot reasonably claim that the current administration has fallen prey to many gates<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The curious case of -giving<\/em><\/h2>\n

To conclude, consider a new set of words in -giving<\/em>, including Friendsgiving<\/em>, Fauxgiving<\/em>, and Spanksgiving.\u00a0<\/em>These are not blends according to the criteria above, and while giving is a free form, the bound form has different semantics (something like ‘holiday gathering’). But is -giving<\/em> a libfix? I’d say that it depends on whether Thanksgiving<\/em>, etymologically an noun-gerund compound, is synchronically analyzed as such. If so, -giving<\/em> has not so much been extracted as reanalyzed as a noun-forming suffix, a curious development but not an event of affix liberation.<\/p>\n

h\/t: Stacy Dickerman<\/a>, John Kelly<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A recent late-night discussion with two fellow philologists revealed some interesting problems in defining libfixes. Arnold Zwicky coined this term to describe affix-like formatives such as -(a)thon\u00a0(from marathon; e.g., saleathon) or -(o)holic (from alcoholic, e.g., chocoholic)\u00a0that appear to have been extracted (“liberated”) from another word. These are then affixed to free stems, and the resulting … Continue reading “Defining libfixes”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,26,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-libfixes","category-phonology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":616,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions\/616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}