earticle

영어

In general, for the explanation of language processing of morphologically complex words, there are two competing models; the continuous (or left-to-right) processing approach and the discontinuous (or decompositional) processing approach. One of the typical arguments for the discontinuous processing approach is the Prefix-Stripping Hypothesis(cf. Taft and Foster 1975). The main claim of the Prefix-Stripping Hypothesis is that prefixes should be stripped off before the lexical access, since the lexical access can be done via only stem. In this paper, we provided an account of some asymmetrical behaviors of English prefixes and suffixes on the basis of the language parsing processes. Moreover, we attempted to provide further evidence supporting the Prefix-Stripping Hypothesis. As discussed in Melinger(2001) and Wurm(1996, 1997), prefixes and suffixes in English exhibit several asymmetrical behaviors. For instance, when suffixes are attached to the stem, they cause changes to the consonants of the stem. However, prefixes do not cause such change. In addition, we can find more suffixes across languages than prefixes. Through explaining and analyzing such prefix/suffix asymmetries in English, we provided further evidence for the Prefix-Stripping Hypothesis and argued that the Prefix-Stripping Hypothesis is more advantageous for the explanation of the prefix/suffix asymmetries in English.