{"id":860,"date":"2020-01-18T23:34:19","date_gmt":"2020-01-18T23:34:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=860"},"modified":"2020-03-12T23:58:40","modified_gmt":"2020-03-12T23:58:40","slug":"on-the-not-exactly-libfixes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/on-the-not-exactly-libfixes\/","title":{"rendered":"On the not-exactly-libfixes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/defining-libfixes\/\">early post<\/a> I noted the existence of libfix-like elements where the newly liberated affix mirrors existing\u2014though possibly semantically opaque\u2014morphological boundaries. The example I gave was that of\u00a0<em>-giving<\/em>, as in <em>Spanksgiving<\/em> and <em>Friendsgiving.<\/em> Clearly, this comes from\u00a0<em>Thanksgiving<\/em>, which is etymologically (if not also synchronically) a compound of the plural noun <em>Thanks<\/em> and the gerund\/progressive <em>giving<\/em>. It seems some morphological innovation has occurred because this gives rise to new coinages and the semantics of <em>-giving<\/em> is more circumscribed than the free stem <em>giving<\/em>: it necessarily refers to a harvest-time holiday, not merely to &#8220;giving&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>At the time I speculated that it was no accident that the morphological boundaries of the new libfix mimic those of the compound. Other examples I have since collected include <em>&#8211;<\/em><em>mare<\/em> (&lt;\u00a0<em>nightmare<\/em>; e.g., <em>writemare<\/em>, <em>editmare<\/em>); <em>&#8211;<\/em><em>core <\/em>(&lt; <em>hardcore<\/em>; e.g.,\u00a0<em>nerdcore<\/em>, <em>speedcore<\/em>) and <em>&#8211;<\/em><em>step (&lt; two-step<\/em>; e.g., <em>breakstep<\/em>, <em>dubstep<\/em>), both of which refer to musical genres (Zimmer &amp; Carson 2012); <em>&#8211;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/List_of_%22-gate%22_scandals\">gate<\/a><\/em> (&lt;\u00a0<em>Watergate<\/em>; e.g., <em>Climategate<\/em>, <em>Nipplegate<\/em>, <em>Troopergate<\/em>) and <em>&#8211;<\/em><em>stock<\/em> (&lt;\u00a0<em>Woodstock<\/em>; e.g., <em>Madstock<\/em>, <em>Calstock<\/em>), extracted from familiar toponyms, and <em>&#8211;<\/em><em>position<\/em> (&lt;\u00a0<em>exposition<\/em>; e.g., <em>sexposition<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/slate.com\/culture\/2015\/09\/the-bastard-executioner-on-fx-reviewed-the-worst-kind-of-game-of-thrones-knock-off.html\"><em>craposition<\/em><\/a><em>),\u00a0<\/em>for which the most likely source can be analyzed as a Latinate &#8220;level 1&#8221; prefix attached to a bound stem. So, what do we think? Are these libfixes too? Does it matter that recutting mirrors the etymological\u2014or even synchronic\u2014segmentation of the source word?<\/p>\n<h1>References<\/h1>\n<p>B. Zimmer and C. E. Carson. 2012. Among the new words.\u00a0<em>American Speech <\/em>87(3): 350-368.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In an early post I noted the existence of libfix-like elements where the newly liberated affix mirrors existing\u2014though possibly semantically opaque\u2014morphological boundaries. The example I gave was that of\u00a0-giving, as in Spanksgiving and Friendsgiving. Clearly, this comes from\u00a0Thanksgiving, which is etymologically (if not also synchronically) a compound of the plural noun Thanks and the gerund\/progressive &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/on-the-not-exactly-libfixes\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;On the not-exactly-libfixes&#8221;<\/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],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-libfixes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860","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=860"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":886,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860\/revisions\/886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}