Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Language Log has had a small blossoming of postings on playful morphology, here and here. So here’s an inventory of postings, on Language Log and this blog, on the topic. (I might well have missed some items.)

The major background is the 1987 Zwicky & Pullum BLS paper, “Plain morphology and expressive morphology” (available on-line here), which looks at three English cases: Shm– Reduplication, Expletive Infixation, -(e)teria.

(Items listed without sources are from Language Log.)

ML, 3/24/04: Cuteness (link)
–ness

AZ, 7/20/05: Curses! (link)
mention of Expletive Infixation

BZ, 2/13/06: Feeling all Olympic-y (link)

AZ, 8/28/06: Playing with your morphology  (link)
–ectomy, –opolis, –ocity, –licious; portmanteau satisfectellent

ML, 8/29/06: Bogosity (link)

AZ, 9/4/06: -Vlicious invention (link)

AZ, 9/4/06: Barney Miller and the linguist (link)
crunchalicious, kosherific

BZ, 9/5/06: The surreptitious history of -licious (link)

AZ, 1/20/07: Zippy retrospective 2 (link)
–orama

AZ, 3/1/07: Get Fuzzy gets playful (link)
–ity, –licious, –ness, –dar

AZ, 5/12/07: Zippy’s suffixiness (link)
-(os)ity, –itude, –ology

AZBlog, 12/27/08: Manecdotes and brobituaries (link)
various playful portmanteaus

AZ, 3/10/09: Snacklish (link)

BZ, 6/25/09: Slang affixation: it’s all mystery-y-ish-y (link)
playful infixations, –y

ML, 9/10/09: Schadenfreudelicious (link)

AZBlog, 9/10/09: To the next level (link)
–orama

AZ, 11/10/09: Zippyosity (link)
–osity

AZ, 12/11/09: liciousness (link)

AZBlog, 1/23/10: Libfixes (link)
–tard, –flation, –naut and more

AZBlog, 2/3/10: chillax(ious) (link)

ML, 2/7/10: In your face, Reginald (link)
variety of word formation techniques, including some clearly playful patterns

GP, 2/8/10: Isms, gasms, etc. (link)

This entry was posted on February 8, 2010 at 7:17 am and is filed under For reference, Language play. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.