Uncovering the UN-Word : A Study in Lexical Pragmatics

In this paper I seek to account for the productive word-formation process resulting in the current proliferation of un-nouns, the semi-legitimate offspring of Humpty Dumpty's un-birthday present (1871) and 7-Up's commercial incarnation as The Un-Cola (1968), a construction that can be linked to the more well-established categories of un-adjectives and un-verbs, whose formation constraints we will also examine. Drawing on a large corpus of novel un-nouns I have assembled in collaboration with Beth Levin presented in the Appendices to this paper, I will invoke Rosch's prototype semantics and Aristotle's notion of PRIVATIVE opposites, defined in terms of a marked exception to a general class property, to generalize across the different categories of un-words. It will be argued that a given un-noun refers either to an element just outside a given category with whose members it shares a salient function (e.g. un-cola) or to a peripheral member of a given category (an unhotel is a hotel but not a good exemplar of the class-not a HOTEL hotel).