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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

Kenneth Holmqvist  and
Jarosław Płuciennik
Kenneth Holmqvist
Affiliation:
Department of Cognitive Science, Lund University, Kungshuset, Lundagård, S-222 22 Lund, Sweden. Email: kenneth.holm [email protected] and jarek@fil. lu.se
Jarosław Płuciennik
Affiliation:
Department of Cognitive Science, Lund University, Kungshuset, Lundagård, S-222 22 Lund, Sweden. Email: kenneth.holm [email protected] and jarek@fil. lu.se
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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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , June 1996 , pp. 3 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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