Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site ptsfa.UUCP
Path: utzoo!utcs!lsuc!pesnta!amd!dual!ptsfa!rob
From: rob@ptsfa.UUCP (Rob Bernardo)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Underlying Structure of Words
Message-ID: <487@ptsfa.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 20-Feb-85 23:06:58 EST
Article-I.D.: ptsfa.487
Posted: Wed Feb 20 23:06:58 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 22-Feb-85 11:45:18 EST
References: <406@cadovax.UUCP> <382@terak.UUCP>
Reply-To: rob@ptsfa.UUCP (Rob Bernardo)
Organization: Pacific Bell, San Francisco
Lines: 42
Summary: 

In article <382@terak.UUCP> doug@terak.UUCP (Doug Pardee) writes:
>> "-able" is more tightly bound to "employ" than "un-" is. Is this
>> because "employable" is a word and "unemploy" is not? (Or is it?)
>
>So what about "notwithstanding"?
>-- 

I think there is a basic difference between "unemployable"
and "notwithstanding".

To most speakers of English, I would suppose that the word "unemployable"
has an obvious structure that relates the meanings of its parts to the
meaning of the whole. After all, "un" and "able" are common affixes in
English that are routinely added to verbs to create words perhaps unheard
of before with a predictable meaning.

On the other hand, "notwithstanding" is lingustically-technicallys speaking
an idiom, i.e. an expression whose meaning is not deducible from its
structure and the meanings of its parts. To me, and I suspect to most
speakers of English, "notwithstanding" is not semantically parsable;
when you hear it or use it in speech, you treat it as an atomic vocabulary
item, not as a collection of atomic vocabulary items. The only way in
which "notwithstanding" may appear NOT to be an idiom, is that idioms
are usually phrases or larger constructions, not single words. However,
the fact that "notwithstanding" is WRITTEN without any spaces, instead
of as "not withstanding" (or some such), is an idiosyncrasy of how
we represent language on paper.

-- 


Rob Bernardo, Pacific Bell, San Francisco, California
{ihnp4,ucbvax,cbosgd,decwrl,amd70,fortune,zehntel}!dual!ptsfa!rob

	    	       _^__
	     	     ~/ \_.\
        _           ~/    \_\
      ~/ \_________~/   
     ~/  /\       /\ 
       _/  \     /  \
     _/      \ _/    \ 
              \      /