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Part of
All Things Morphology: Its independence and its interfaces
Edited by Sedigheh Moradi, Marcia Haag, Janie Rees-Miller and Andrija Petrovic
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 353] 2021
► pp. 305–324

Chapter 17
Two-suffix combinations in native and non-native English

Novel evidence for morphomic structures

| University of Vienna
ORCID logo | University of Vienna | Vrije Universiteit Brussel

We demonstrate the existence of a novel type of morphomic structure: the suffix combination in word formation. We ran two psycholinguistic experiments with 45 native and 30 non-native English speakers, asking them to judge whether or not existing and non-existing two-suffix combinations presented without bases occur in English. Both groups identified existing and non-existing suffix combinations with very high accuracy; productive combinations were recognized more accurately than unproductive ones. Our research shows that suffix combinations are listed in the mental lexicon as morphomes. This finding accords with recent research in natural language processing that induces a language’s patterns, rules, and semantics based entirely on form relations. We also discuss other possible applications of the morphome outside of theoretical linguistics.

Keywords: morphology, morphome, word formation, suffix ordering, productivity, language processing, foreign language learning, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, English
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Suffix ordering in English: History of research, our approach and why suffix combinations are morphomes
  • 3.Two psycholinguistic experiments
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Stimuli
    • 3.3Testing method
    • 3.4Data analysis
    • 3.5Results
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 25 August 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.353.17man
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