Re: infix
| From: | dirk elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Monday, March 26, 2001, 20:27 |
|---|
On Mon, 26 Mar 2001, Patrick Dunn wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Mar 2001, Frank George Valoczy wrote:
>
> > Just curious after having watched Snatch (I had to...one of my fav films
> > thus far was Lock Stock and two Smoking Barrels), are the constructions
> >
> > absofuckinglutely
> >
> > and
> >
> > confuckingfounded
> >
> > examples of infixing?
>
> Yup. The only infix in English (except for -bloody- in British English).
> Absolfuckinglutely is the classic example.
>
> One of my office mates was a linguist (yeah, I'm just a lowly literature
> person) and he showed me an article analyzing -fucking- as an infix. I
> wish I could remember the author.
There was a volume entitled "Studies in Left Field" which has an
expletive infixation article. The phenomenon found its way into
the serious literature in a 1982 article by John McCarthy which
appeared in the journal _Language_. Mike Hammond also uses the
data to motivate the foot in the phonological description of
English. See his 1991 article "Poetic Meter and the Arboreal
Grid" (also in _Language_) and his chapter in the 1997
Optimality Theory volume edited by Diana Archangeli and Terry
Langedoen (published by Blackwell, IIRC).
Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu
"The strong craving for a simple formula
has been the undoing of linguists." - Edward Sapir
Replies