- Bracketing paradox
In linguistic morphology, the term bracketing paradox refers to morphologically complex words which apparently have more than one incompatible analysis, or "bracketing", simultaneously.
One type of a bracketing paradox found in English is exemplified by words like "unhappier" or "uneasier". [Pesetsky, D. 1985. "Morphology and logical form." "Linguistic Inquiry" 16:193-246.] The synthetic
comparative suffix "-er" generally occurs with monosyllabic adjectives and a small class of disyllabic adjectives with the primary (and only) stress on the first syllable. Other adjectives take the analytic comparative "more". Thus, we have "older" and "grumpier", but "more correct" and "more restrictive". This suggests that a word like "uneasier" must be formed by combining the suffix "er" with the adjective "easy", since "uneasy" is a three syllable word::However, "uneasier" means "more uneasy", not "more difficult". Thus, from a semantic perspective, "uneasier" must be a combination of "er" with the adjective "uneasy"::however violates the morphophonological rules for the suffix "-er". Phenomena such as this have been argued to represent a mismatch between different levels of grammatical structure. [Sproat, R. 1988. "Bracketing paradoxes, cliticization, and other topics: The mapping between syntactic and phonological structure." In Everaert et al. (eds), "Morphology and Modularity." Amsterdam: North-Holland.]Another type of English bracketing paradox is found in
compound word s that are a name for a professional of a particular discipline, preceded by a modifier that narrows that discipline: "nuclear physicist", "historical linguist", "political scientist", etc. [Williams, E. 1981. "On the notions 'lexically related' and 'head of a word.'" "Linguistic Inquiry" 12:245-274.] [Spencer, A. 1988. "Bracketing paradoxes and the English lexicon." "Language" 64:663-682.] Taking "nuclear physicist" as an example, we see that there are at least two reasonable ways that the compound word can be bracketed (ignoring the fact that "nuclear" itself is morphologically complex):
# - one who studies physics, and who happens also to be nuclear
# - one who studies nuclear physics, a subfield of physics that deals with nuclear phenomenaWhat is interesting to many morphologists about this type of bracketing paradox in English is that the correct bracketing 2 (correct in the sense that this is the way that a native speaker would understand it) does not follow the usual bracketing pattern 1 typical for most compound words in English.References
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
