The nature of affixing in written English, part II

This is a continuation of the authors' paper of the same title which appeared in Volume 8 of this journal. The present part extends the authors' definitions of prefix and suffix (in written English) to corpora of three-vowel-string words, and implements them on a corpus K consisting of 19,329 graphemically distinct three-vowel-string words from the Shorter Oxford Dictionary. The notion of a parasitic affix is introduced , and the parasitic suffixes for K are determined. This paper is a continuation of reference 1 (which will be called Part I throughout). In that paper 1 a systematic procedure for finding English affixes was briefly described, and the results of applying the procedure to the CVCVC words in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary were given. Here we will present several refinements of the procedure used in Part I and apply the technique to the study of affixes in the three-vowel-string words, that is, CVCVCVC words. There are some novelties which arise. Among these, the most important is certainly the occurrence of suffixes which primarily occur attached to other suffixes. Evidently these could not be found from an investigation of the two-vowel-string words, and so they did not make their appearance in Part I. Another new feature is the occurrence of two-vowel-string affixes, which cannot occur in two-vowel-string words for obvious reasons. Except where otherwise noted, the terminology and definitions are those used in Part I. The reader should note the recently published work of Monroe, 2 which forms an interesting complement to our investigations, Notational Refinements Before coming to the proper subject of this paper we would like to make corrections to Part I and to introduce some minor refinements of notation. The weak suffix-Y should be added to Table III of Part I. The classes Cls(NCH/Y) and Cls(FF/Y), among others, testify to the existence of this affix. Also, in the penultimate paragraph, read-IST for-ous. We turn now to the notational refinements. From Volume 2 of The English Word Speculum 3 it can be seen that the letter Q in initial position is always followed by the letter U with only one occurrence of the sequence QY. Since there are fewer than four exceptions to the statement that Q is always followed by U in initial position, this will be taken as a universal property of English words. Using the terminology of Part I, the sequence QU is the only admissible initial …