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From: mmar@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP (Mitchell Marks)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Infix?
Message-ID: <637@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 9-Jun-85 00:09:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: sphinx.637
Posted: Sun Jun  9 00:09:12 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 13-Jun-85 23:09:27 EDT
References: <14800002@ism70.UUCP> <394@bu-cs.UUCP> <502@ucsfcgl.UUCP>, <705@asgb.UUCP>
Organization: U. Chicago - Computation Center
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Linguists have published a body of fairly serious work on "English expletive
infixation".   Some have examined the phenomenon as interesting for its
own sake, and some have used it as evidence for something else.
	For instance, here I have "Where You Can Shove Infixes" by
James D. McCawley from Syllables and Segments, A. Bell and J.B. Hooper, eds,
                       ______________________
North Holland Publishing Company 1978.  This is an offprint, and the book
must have merged bibliographies at the end, so I can't interpret McCawley's
references to previous literature: Siegel 1974, Aronoff 1976,, and
McCarthy 1977.  The Aronoff is Word Formation in Generative Grammar, 
                               ---- --------- -- ---------- -------
published by MIT Press as Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 1.
	English is a suffixing and prefixing language, so it's peculiar
that infixing is possible for the special case of expletives.  But
f*ckin is by no means the only one which will work.  Reportedly, speakers
of British English, if they normally say 'bloody' at all can use it
as an infix.  I can easily get 'goddam' as an infix.  And apparently
most people who do this at all can accept a range of infixes.
	The major interest that linguists have taken in the subject is not
in what the infix can be but in where it can go.  There seems to be general
agreement by now that it's based on syllable structure and stress pattern,
but the details of that have been subject to dispute.  For example, note
the difference between Pennsyl-f_ckin-vania and *Penn-f_ckin-sylvania.  Most
people accept the first and reject the second.
	If you think you have a good account of how syllable structure
affects where infixes can go, you can turn around and use data about
infixation as evidence for syllable structure.  For instance, in the
article cited above, McCawley claims that some speakers have "ambisyllabic
segments" in some words; that is, sounds which they apparently count as
part of both the previous syllable and the following one.  The first
[l] in 'illegible' and the [s] in 'transcription' seem to be ambisyllabic
for some speakers, for instance--a claim that McCawley bases on the popularity
of the infixed forms il-f_ckin-legible and trans-f_ckin-scription.

             -- Mitchell Marks
                I have no idea of my path, except that it ends
                gargoyle!sphinx!mmar