In linguistics, a libfix is a productivebound morphemeaffix created by rebracketing and back-formation, often a generalization of a component of a blended or portmanteau word. For example, walkathon was coined in 1932 as a blend of walk and marathon,[1] and soon thereafter the -athon part was reinterpreted as a libfix morpheme meaning "event or activity lasting a long time or involving a great deal of something".[2][3] Words formed with this suffix include talkathon, telethon, hackathon, and so on. Affixes whose morpheme boundaries are etymologically based, and which are used in their original sense, are not libfixes. Libfixes often utilise interthesis, as in the example of -holism and -holic which are joined with consonant-final segments via the vowel /a/, creating work-a-holism or sex-a-holism.
History
Splinters were defined by Berman in 1961 as non-morphemic word fragments. This includes not just libfixes, but also word fragments which become words, like burger (< hamburger), flu (< influenza), and net (< network).[4][5][6]
The name libfix was coined by Arnold Zwicky in 2010 as a blend of "liberated" and "affix" specifically for splinters used as productive morphemes.[7]
Criticism
Some of these formations have been considered barbarisms by prescriptive writers on style,[8] though other writers have praised them. Speaking of the -tron suffix, a philologist commented:
I once heard an unkind critic allude disparagingly to these neologisms as dog-Greek. To a lover of the language of Sophocles and Plato these recent coinages may indeed appear to be Greek debased. More appropriately, perhaps, they might be termed lion-Greek or chameleon-Greek. They are Neo-Hellenic in the genuine Renaissance tradition.[9]
Examples
Each example gives the affix, the source word(s) from which it was formed, the meaning, and examples.
This list does not include:
affixes based on English words like tech or burger used literally, even if they are shortened forms, in this case, for technology and hamburger;
affixes which are aligned in form and meaning with their etymological source, like -(o)cracy or -orama in cyclorama and diorama from ὅραμα 'spectacle'; motorama is a portmanteau of motor and orama, not a compound of mot- and -orama;
words which have been separated from phrases, e.g.fu from kung fu.
Bernard Fradin, "Combining forms, blends, and related phenomena", in Ursula Doleschal, Anna M. Thornton, eds., Extragrammatical and Marginal Morphology, LINCOM studies in theoretical linguistics12 (2000), ISBN3895865907, papers from a workshop in Vienna, 1996, p. 11-59 full text
Otto Jespersen, Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin, 1922, 19:13-15
Muriel Norde, Sara Sippach, "Nerdalicious scientainment: A network analysis of English libfixes", Word Structure12:3:353-384 doi:10.3366/word.2019.0153.
Yuval Pinter, Cassandra L. Jacobs, Max Bittker. "NYTWIT: A Dataset of Novel Words in the New York Times", Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Barcelona), p. 6509–6515, December 8–13, 2020. full text
Neal Whitman, "A linguistic tour of the best libfixes, from -ana to -zilla, The Week, September 17, 2013.
^Laurie Bauer, "The borderline between derivation and compounding", p. 97-108 in Morphology and its Demarcations, Selected papers from the 11th Morphology Meeting, Vienna, February 2004
^J.M. Berman, "Contribution on Blending", Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik9:278-281 (1961) (not seen)
^Ingrid Fandrych, "Submorphemic elements in the formation of acronyms, blends and clippings", Lexis: Journal in English Lexicology2 (2008) doi:10.4000/lexis.713
^ abTom McArthur, ed., The Oxford companion to the English language, 1992, ISBN019214183X, s.v. 'Greek', p. 453-454
^Simeon Potter, Our Language, 1950, as quoted in Tom McArthur, ed., The Oxford companion to the English language, 1992, ISBN019214183X, s.v. 'Greek', p. 453-454