Paradigmatic morphology: splinters, combining forms, and secreted affixes

Splinters, combining forms, and secreted affixes are three morpheme (or morpheme-like) elements which are often conflated in the literature on English word-formation. Scholars have differently focused on their morphological origin (i.e. blending, paradigmatic substitution, analogy) or on their semantics (i.e. secretion vs. mere abbreviation) (Warren 1990; Fradin 2000; Mattiello 2007; Bauer et al. 2013). This paper investigates these phenomena as part of paradigmatic morphology, or similarity among words. In particular, the investigation of five case studies (i.e. -(a)holic, docu-, -exit, -umentary, -zilla) shows that they are frequently used to create new words and even to produce series, through analogy via schema (cf. Köpcke 1993, 1998). In the paper, diachronic study combined with corpus-based analysis help us 1) categorise these phenomena as ‘marginal’ vs. ‘extra-grammatical’, and as ‘productive’ vs. ‘creative’, and 2) shed some light on their role in the development of morphological rules and in the expansion of the English lexicon.