Derivation and Semantics
The Utne Reader quoted the following Bucharest sign in its March–April 1996 issue:
The lift is being fixed for the next day.
During that time we regret that you will be unbearable.
Unbearable is a perfectly good English word derived from the verb bear ‘carry’, or is it? Why is this sign so funny? First of all, unbearable already exists in English with the meaning ‘difficult to tolerate’, and this is the meaning we first think of when we read the sign. But this isn’t the whole story. If we replace unbearable with a similar but unambiguous word, like untransportable, the sentence is no longer humorous, but it still sounds less than native. It’s because words like unbearable, untransportable, and uneatable describe inherent qualities of people or things, qualities that don’t change simply because an elevator is out of order. To take another example, the fact that someone is allergic to chocolate doesn’t make the chocolate cupcakes in the window uneatable.
In this simple sign, there is a complex interaction between affixation and semantics going on. We begin by introducing a fundamental problem in lexical semantics, the study of word meaning: the meanings of individual lexemes can be highly diverse. We then examine in some detail the semantics of derived lexemes to see what generalizations we can draw.
