Date:    Thu, 19 Mar 1998 08:57:51 -0500
<br>From:    Laurence Horn  laurence.horn[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]YALE.EDU 
<br>Subject: Re: arbitrariness of derivational morphology
<br>
<br>At 5:17 PM -0500 3/18/98, RonButters wrote:
<br> "Why can't CONTEMPT be made into a verb in English?" asked my Turkish student.
<br> "And why can't DESPISE be made into a noun?" English is so very flexible when
<br> it comes to interchanging categories--with and without derivational
<br> morphology--one wonders why we can't say, "*David feels the sailor's
<br> despise/despisation for him" or "*Giovanni contempts/contemptates Jacques."
<br> 
<br> Any answers--other than the usual language-is-arbitrary response?
<br>
<br>I see others have made the point I was going to:  the historical answer is
<br>the verb "contemn" (attested from the 15th century, not that much after
<br>"contempt" occurs, the latter actually defined in the OED as 'the action of
<br>contemning or despising'), while "despisal" at least occasionally occurs.
<br>I wonder if the demise of "contemn" was partly sparked by the near-homonymy
<br>with "condemn", whose meaning is just close enough to cause problems.  In
<br>any case, this doesn't really answer Ron's question, since contemporary
<br>speakers don't HAVE the verb "contemn" or the noun "despisal" in their
<br>lexicons to block the zero-derivations.  We DO have "despite", which was
<br>the traditional nominal partner of the verb "despise", but again the
<br>relevant meaning no longer occurs.  In fact all we really have now for
<br>"despite" is the much more recent preposition; the older forms, both noun
<br>and verb (= 'despise'), despite their rich legacies, have vanished.  Maybe
<br>the noun "contempt" and the verb "despise", mismatched couple that they
<br>appear to be, are all the lexicon needs.
<br>
<br>L
<br>