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Language is embiggened by words that don't exist. The case of a circumfix

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2017

Abstract

The presentation examines the parasynthetic formation of the en-Adj-en type, often described as a rare case of a circumfix in English, using both corpus and Web data. The large number of nonce-words of this type retrieved from the Web shows that the pattern is available to native speakers but the formations rarely, if at all, become institutionalised.