Chapter 17. Two-suffix combinations in native and non-native English

Abstract

We demonstrate the existence of a novel type of morphomic structure: the suffix combination in word formation. We ran two psycholinguistic experiments with 45 native and 30 non-native English speakers, asking them to judge whether or not existing and non-existing two-suffix combinations presented without bases occur in English. Both groups identified existing and non-existing suffix combinations with very high accuracy; productive combinations were recognized more accurately than unproductive ones. Our research shows that suffix combinations are listed in the mental lexicon as morphomes. This finding accords with recent research in natural language processing that induces a language’s patterns, rules, and semantics based entirely on form relations. We also discuss other possible applications of the morphome outside of theoretical linguistics.