Questions: Derivational Morphology

Question 1

A speaker coins '*thievage' to mean 'the practice of stealing,' but native speakers reject it in favor of 'theft.' This is best explained by:

• A. The suffix -age being completely unproductive in English
• B. Blocking — the established word 'theft' already occupies the semantic slot
• C. Compounding being preferred over suffixation for abstract nouns
• D. 'Theft' being a converted form of the verb 'to thieve'

Answer: (B)

Blocking occurs when an existing word preempts a derived competitor. The derivational process that would produce '*thievage' is grammatically possible — -age is a productive suffix (drainage, seepage, breakage) — but 'theft' has already claimed the niche for 'act of stealing.' The mental lexicon acts like real estate: once a slot is taken, the derivational rule is suppressed even though it remains structurally available. Blocking explains why the morphological system is partly systematic and partly arbitrary.

Question 2

Adding '-ness' to 'happy' to create 'happiness' is a derivational process rather than an inflectional one primarily because:

• A. '-ness' attaches after the base rather than before it
• B. It creates a new word (lexeme) with a different grammatical category — adjective becomes noun
• C. Inflectional morphology only applies to verbs and nouns, not adjectives
• D. The resulting word 'happiness' has a completely unpredictable meaning

Answer: (B)

The hallmark of derivational morphology is creating a new lexeme — a new word that takes its own place in the mental lexicon, often with a different grammatical category. 'Happiness' is a noun; 'happy' is an adjective. Adding -ness changes the syntactic distribution, the meaning type, and opens new morphological possibilities (e.g., you can further derive 'unhappiness'). Inflectional morphology, by contrast, marks grammatical features (tense, number, case) without changing the word's basic category or lexical identity.

Question 3

The meaning of a derived word can usually be reliably predicted by combining the meanings of its component morphemes.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

Lexicalization causes derived words to drift semantically from their compositional meaning. A 'department' is not a group of people who depart; a 'deadline' has nothing to do with death; 'understand' does not mean to stand under. Once a derived word is stored as a unit in the mental lexicon, its meaning can shift through use, metaphor, and cultural change. This semantic opacity is especially common in compounding but occurs in affixation too. Productive, newly coined forms tend to be more compositionally transparent; established, lexicalized forms often are not.

Question 4

Conversion (zero-derivation) is a legitimate derivational process even though it adds no phonological material to the base form.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

Conversion shifts a word's grammatical category without any overt affix. 'Email' (noun) → 'to email' (verb); 'Google' (proper noun) → 'to google' (verb); 'bottle' (noun) → 'to bottle' (verb). The word gains new syntactic distribution and morphological behavior (it can now be inflected for tense: emailed, emailing) purely through a change in category assignment. Derivation is defined by the creation of a new lexeme, not by the requirement that an affix be audible — the derivation is phonologically empty but grammatically real.

Question 5

What is 'blocking' in derivational morphology, and why does it mean that derivational rules don't generate all the words they theoretically could?

Model answer: Blocking is the phenomenon where an established word in the mental lexicon prevents a derived word from being coined to fill the same semantic slot. Even when a derivational rule is productive, its output is suppressed if a pre-existing word already occupies that niche. 'Singer' exists, so '*songster' is blocked for the same meaning. 'Theft' exists, so '*stealage' is blocked. The rule remains grammatically possible — the block is lexical, not structural.

Blocking explains a core puzzle: if derivational rules are productive, why aren't there far more derived words in the lexicon? The answer is that productivity operates against the existing vocabulary. Every new derivation must find an unoccupied semantic slot; where one is already claimed, the derivation is preempted. This makes the lexicon feel partly rule-governed (new words can be coined) and partly arbitrary (many theoretically possible forms simply don't exist). The degree of blocking varies — it's stronger for near-synonyms and weaker when the new form adds nuance the established word lacks.