Some Morphological and Phonological Aspects of English Affix ‘en’: An Optimality Theoretic Account

The purpose of this paper is to give a formal and systematic account of the interaction of the prefix en- and the suffix –en in English with regard to the Righthand Head Rule (Williams, 1981). Both en-prefixation and en-suffixation have greatly merited attention in morphological studies due to their apparent exceptional property, but their exceptional behaviors have still remained unexplained. In an effort to account for those exceptional cases as well as their general patterns, I assume the morphological en-suffixation is the addition of syllabic [n̩] sound (Lawrence, Abe, Horiuchi, & Okazaki, 1989). I also suggest that some base nouns first undergo the process of 'conversion' (also, zero-derivation), changing nouns to verbs before en-prefixation applies. Under those assumptions, it is demonstrated that English morphology is faithful to the Righthand Head Rule as long as there are no competitive constraints in word-formation process. Some examples of the category-changing en-prefixed forms, which have been considered as apparent exceptional cases, can be accounted for as the optimal output forms with the constraints interactions model of Optimality Theory.