Doubler-upper nouns: A challenge for usage-based models of language?

Rare but regular double -er nouns call for an analysis which sees them as the output of various interacting grammar rules. These rules explain not only their occasional occurrence but also their surprisingly stable grammatical properties, which can hardly be learned on the basis of these infrequent occurrences alone. However, this apparent victory for rule-based language knowledge need not be interpreted as a victory for the linguistic innateness view or as a defeat for usage-based models of language knowledge. For instance, just because speakers who have never encountered the plural of the patientive form breaker-uppee know it must be breaker-uppees and not *breakers-uppee does not mean that speakers' knowledge has to be described in terms of innate principles of universal grammar. On the contrary, this knowledge could be ascribed to speakers' familiarity with a wealth of examples in which the plural is marked right after the meaning-determining derivational suffix in words (e.g., drivers, inhabitants, divorcees, etc.) and an even greater wealth of examples in which the plural is marked at the end of words (e.g. cats, dogs, houses, trees, etc.). So, the rules which account for the grammatical properties of the double -er pattern, and for the very use of the pattern itself, can very well be learned by imitation (i.e., via positive evidence) or by avoidance of what is expected but conspicuously absent (i.e., via indirect negative evidence). In this study, it is not demonstrated that this is how these rules are actually acquired, so no evidence is furnished for a kind of 'indirect' usage-
based acquisition of the doubler-upper construction, that is, for acquisition based on the observable behaviour of other patterns. Yet, to the extent that it can be shown that doubler-upper nouns share their grammatical properties with other, much more familiar linguistic phenomena, it can be argued that doubler-upper nouns pose less of a threat to a usage-based morphological model than their rarity would initially lead us to assume.

ISBN:978-3-11-022359-0

Publication year:2010

Keywords:usage-based morpholgy, -er, reduplication, phrasal verbs (verb-particle combinations), hapax legomena, corpus frequency, productivity, synthetic compound, nonce-word, left-headed compound