Recent Derivatives with the Suffix -Less: A Change in Progress within the Category of English Privative Adjectives?

1. Introduction (1) The aim of the present paper is to offer a cognitive grammar account of newly coined privative adjectives such as paperless (office) and cordless (telephone). (2) First, however, I will briefly characterize the overall network of constructional schemas for privative adjectives, concentrating on the semantics of prototypical patterns within it (section 2). (3) Referring to this network, I will argue that the new derivatives with the suffix -less impose a construal of the profiled conceptual content which substantially differs from that evoked by new derivatives with the suffix -free, such as acid-free (paper) or focus-free (camera) (section 3). On these grounds, I will suggest that the adjectives of the paperless and cordless type are likely to mark a change in progress within the category of privative adjectives as a whole (section 4). 2. The complex category of privative adjectives: An overview of main generalizations From the perspective of cognitive grammar, privative adjectives have the status of a complex category, i.e. an assembly of interconnected symbolic structures. As a morphological category, the category of privative adjectives is represented in the form of a schematic network which subsumes not only specific expressions, but also several patterns, called "constructional (sub)schemas" (see Figure 1 in G6rska 1994: 415), all of which have the status of a "unit", i.e. a structure mastered by a speaker as a cognitive routine, so that "it can be employed in largely automatic fashion, without requiring attention to its individual parts or their arrangement" (Langacker 1991: 555). Well-entrenched specific expressions in -less and -free, just like constructional (sub)schemas whose extraction (at different levels of abstraction) they have supported are the network's "nodes", which are interlinked via two main types of "categorizing relationships": elaboration/instantiation or else extension. In the case of semantic structures, (4) the former resides in establishing the relationship of schematicity between the relevant two senses: the two semantic structures are fully compatible in their specifications, differing only in the degree of precision and detail with which they are characterized. The categorizing relationship of extension, on the other hand, involves some conflict in the relevant specifications. Semantic extension is, moreover, "invariably based on some perception of similarity or association between the original (sanctioning) sense and its extended sense" (Langacker 1987: 157). (5) For example, the adjective childless instantiates/elaborates one of the most salient subschema of the -less subcategory, while the adjective sugar-free is an instantiation/elaboration of the most salient subschema of the -free subcategory. On the other hand, the nonce adjective child-free, as in: (1) We are child-free for the weekend! Would be categorized as an extension of the prototypical pattern for the adjectives in -free, since its semantic characterization has a lot in common with the specification of this schema (it designates a positively evaluated state which obtains due to some intentional actions of a human agent); at the same time, it departs from any schema with the suffix -free in that this suffix (unlike -less, cf. childless) is normally not integrated with nominal bases designating relatives. It needs to be emphasized that the nodes and categorizing relationships in a network are not of equal status. They vary in terms of two parameters: cognitive salience or "entrenchment" and cognitive "distance". The latter parameter is measured in terms of the degree to which the sanctioning structure has to be elaborated or extended to categorize the target of the relevant categorization judgment as, respectively, its elaboration or extension. The parameter of entrenchment, in turn, is (primarily) correlated with the frequency of previous activation of a structure on the one hand, and the likelihood of its subsequent activation on the other hand; with repeated use, a novel structure becomes more and more entrenched so that, eventually, it receives the status of a conventional unit, and thereby is included in the inventory of the symbolic resources of a given language. …