Marion Schulte: Accounting for the meaning of derivational affixes with semantic

Although a number of recent investigations show an interest in the semantics of word formation, comprehensive accounts of the semantics of derivational affixes are rare. This lack of research might be due to the fact that affixes are usually highly multifunctional and thus difficult to describe. Derivatives of a single affix often exhibit a perplexing variety of different readings: The English nominal suffix -age, for example, gives rise to derivatives with locative (orphanage), collective (baggage), charge (plankage), state (victimage), or action (spillage) interpretations, among others. Although derivational affixes are under-researched in this regard, inflectional affixes have been the focus of a number of investigations. Polysemy is also an issue in this area, and one model that deals particularly well with this is the semantic map model. This approach is often used in cross-linguistic studies of inflectional categories (e.g. Haspelmath 2003, Wälchli & Cysouw 2012), so it has to be adapted in order to be used for a small number of derivational affixes from a single language.
In this talk, I am going to introduce the adapted semantic map model and show how it can be used to analyse the polysemy of English -age derivatives, as well as to illustrate the developments and changes in the semantics of this suffix.