Rival morphological processes 2: The structural properties of -ize derivatives

We will shed some new light on the phonological, morphological and semantic properties of verb-deriving processes in English. The main purpose of the investigation is to discover the structural restrictions that may be responsible for the observed differences in their productivity. As was pointed out earlier, restrictions are an integral part of a word formation rule. In other words, an adequate description of a rule entails the determination of its restrictions. It will become clear, however, that existing descriptions of derived verbs are often unsatisfactory, in spite of the extensive treatment in numerous publications. One prominent reason for this state of affairs is that the enormous semantic diversity and heterogeneity of these formations is paired with a rich poly-functionality of the elements that are used for deriving the verbs, making the analysis of these processes a very difficult task.¹

The primary data for this investigation are the OED neologisms, complemented by further data as they were found in other sources. The advantage of dealing primarily with neologisms is that by largely excluding lexicalized formations one has a better chance to detect the properties of possible words rather than of actual words, which may eventually lead to the correct formulation of the productive word formation rule instead of merely stating redundancies among institutionalized words.

¹ Cf. similar remarks by Laskowski (1981:19) on derived verbs in the Slavonic languages, or by Rainer (1993:237ff) on their Spanish equivalents.