Derived nominalizations in -ee: a Role and Reference Grammar based semantic analysis

Abstract

The main aim of this article is to provide an explanation accounting for the production of English derived nouns in -ee. In line with Barker (1998), I will argue that analyses based on the syntactic argument structure of the verbal base are unsatisfactory, and that the conditions for this derivational process must be searched for within semantics. My intention is to explore the semantic factors that might be taken to be pre-eminent in the different sets of verbs taking the suffix using the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) framework. It will be shown that a semantic analysis based on a theory of lexical representation like RRG is relevant to account for the formation of derived nouns in -ee in English.I gratefully acknowledge comments and suggestions from Robert Van Valin, Lachlan Mackenzie, and two anonymous readers of a previous version of this paper.

75. Patient nouns

“…This rather special status is also reflected in the fact that -ee nouns in English have received a lot of attention in current scholarly work, and especially the particular syntactic and semantic properties of this word-formation pattern (Bauer 1983;Barker 1998;Baeskow 2002;Portero Munoz 2003;Booij and Lieber 2004;Mühleisen 2010). Corresponding easily identifiable derivative patterns for patient nouns are less common.…”

Attenders or attendees? Deverbal -ee and -er variants in English

“…A first set was extracted from a 56 million word subcorpus of the Bank of English, also known as the Collins COBUILD corpus. 5 Of the agentive -ee nouns mentioned in Bauer (1983), Marchand (1969, Barker (1998) andPortero Muñoz (2003) (included here under (15)) only 7 turned out to be attested in the COBUILD corpus, viz. attendee, enlistee, escapee, resignee, retiree, returnee and signee.…”