The Reduplication of the Agentive -er Morpheme in Phrasal Verbs
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2019
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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en
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Abstract
For many English speakers, the agentive form of the phrasal verb pick up is picker-upper. The unusual reduplication of the -er has been subject to much debate on how it should be analyzed. I combined McIntyre's existing proposal of viewing this as inflectional with my own proposal of a derivational relationship between -er and -ee, in order to account for data that was unexplained by his original proposal. To find more evidence to inform my combinative theory, I conducted two surveys gathering grammaticality judgements on a variety of forms from each. The results from Survey A, which attempted to test if there was a derivational relationship between -er and -ee, did not indicate such a relationship, but the distribution of the survey and the results are problematic and should be discounted. The results from Survey B, which asked about wider ranges of are open-ended, but indicate more variation in which morphemes double than previously thought, and also call into question some previously assumed properties of phrasal verbs.