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.The task of the morphologist would be to findout more about the exact nature of the restrictions mentioned in the rules.How thiscould be done is exemplified in exercise 2.5 below.We will now turn to another affix and try to establish the pertinent word-formation rule.(23) is a collection of nouns featuring the suffix -th, which derivesfrom an adjectival base an abstract noun denoting a state (we ignore here deverbalformations such as growth):(22) broad+th ’! breadthdeep+th ’! depthlong+th ’! lengthstrong+th ’! strengthtrue+th ’! truthFrom this pattern we can tentatively deduce the following word-formation rule.(23) word-formation rule for -th (tentative)phonology: X-/T/, with various base alternationsbase: X = adjectivesemantics: state or property of being XWhile the pattern is rather clear, the number of forms derived by the rule is verylimited.In fact, there seem to exist no forms other than those in (23), and it seemsgenerally impossible to create new words on the basis of the pattern.In technicalterms, the rule is totally unproductive.In order to form state nouns from adjectives,suffixes like -ness or -ity are attached, and only the adjectives listed in (23) take -th.Thus, the attachment of nominal -th can be said to be lexically governed, whichmeans that the possibility to take -th must be listed with each individual lexical itemthat has this possibility.It is impossible to define the class of -th taking adjectives by 47Chapter 2: Studying Complex Wordssome independent property that all possible bases have and all impossible basesdon t have.Strictly speaking then, we are not dealing with a rule that can be used toform new words, but with a rule that simply generalizes over the structure of a set ofexisting complex words.Such rules are sometimes referred to as redundancy rulesor word-structure rules.The redundancy rule for -th could look like this: 48Chapter 2: Studying Complex Words(24) redundancy rule for -thphonology: X-/T/, X = allomorph of basebase: {broad, deep, long, strong, true, warm}semantics: state or property of being XIn most cases, it is not necessary to make the distinction between rules that can beused to coin new words and rules that cannot be used in this way, so that we willoften use the term word-formation rule or word-formation process to refer to bothkinds of rule.Before finishing our discussion of word-formation rules, we should addressthe fact that sometimes new complex words are derived without an existing word-formation rule, but formed on the basis of a single (or very few) model words.Forexample, earwitness someone who has heard a crime being commited was coined onthe basis of eyewitness, cheeseburger on the basis of hamburger, and air-sick on the basisof sea-sick.The process by which these words came into being is called analogy,which can be modeled as proportional relation between words, as illustrated in (25):(25) a.a : b :: c : db.eye : eyewitness :: ear : earwitnessc.ham : hamburger :: cheese : cheeseburgerd.sea : sea-sick :: air : air-sickThe essence of a proportional analogy is that the relation between two items (a and bin the above formula) is the same as the relation between two other, correpondingitems (c and d in our case).The relation that holds between eye and eyewitness is thesame as the relation between ear and earwitness, ham and hamburger relate to eachother in the same way as do cheese and cheeseburger, and so on.Quite often, words areanalogically derived by deleting a suffix (or supposed suffix), a process called back-formation.An example of such a back-formation is the verb edit which was derivedfrom the word editor by deleting -or on the basis of a propotional analogy with wordpairs such as actor - act
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