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Conceptualized Deviations from Expected Normality: A Semantic Comparison Between Lexical Items Ending in -ful and -less
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2008
Abstract
In our article, we start by posing the question why some adjectival stems can end both in -ful and -less, while others take only one of the endings. Together these items make up around 1% of the entries in a good dictionary. It soon becomes clear that we need to use several basic concepts from cognitive linguistics to answer our question: boundedness, mass vs individual, part-whole relations and container metaphors. By so doing we can divide the -ful and -less items into a number of subgroups with different semantics. The most important aspect of their semantics, however, is that both -ful and -less express deviations from our expectations of how the normal world is structured. In other words, they represent the world by negating it.
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