Episodic - ee in English: A Thematic Role Constraint on New Word Formation

This article offers a detailed analysis of the English suffix - ee ( employee, escapee, refugee , etc.) based on fifteen hundred naturally occurring tokens of some five hundred word types. The data suggest that formation of nouns in - ee is moderately but genuinely productive, and that analyses based on the syntactic argument structure of the stem verb are unsatisfactory. Instead, formation of - ee nouns systematically adheres to three essentially semantic constraints: first, the referent of an - ee noun must be sentient; second, the denotation of an - ee noun must be episodically linked (as defined below) to the denotation of its stem; and third, a use of an - ee noun entails a relative lack of volitional control on the part of its referent. I argue that these semantic constraints taken together amount to a special-purpose thematic role that actively constrains productive use of derivational morphology.