“Uncommon terminations”: Proscription and morphological productivity

Discussions of the standardization of English vocabulary are seldom taken up with questions of morphology. Yet there is a history of, often strikingly similar, attempts to influence the use of particular word-formation processes, such as the proscription of individual lexical items on morphological grounds, or more precisely, the grounds that an affix is being “overextended”. This is not a reference to the whole-sale disapproval of latinate word-formation processes. Frequently, an “over-extended” latinate affix is compared unfavourably to another latinate affix. Examples of proscription considered here are taken from the seventeenth and eighteenth century “branding” dictionaries, periodicals, and style/rhetoric manuals, and, from a rather different milieu, American twentieth century style manuals, which, so many years later, also caution readers not to, for instance, form verbs in ize. Questions I pose in relation to these attempted interventions are: is proscription a response to increased productivity? Do certain processes invite more censure than others? Is proscription a response to innovations in the category of the base? Where proscribers explicitly indicate that another “perfectly good” word already exists, their actions could be considered manifestations of blocking, usually a hypothetical event in morphological theory (Aronoff 1976; Bauer 2001). When blockers and over-extenders have distinct identities however, a sociolinguistic account of blocking may be more appropriate.