LING-SEMINAR: Mark Aronoff-Social Morphology in Present-Day English: the suffix -o.

In this presentation, I will discuss two recently evolved lexeme formation rules of English, both mapping onto a trochaic template ending in /o/ (orthographic ).Typo, rhino, ammo, boyo, and sicko are examples of the phenomenon. These rules go beyond ‘logical content’ or truth-conditional semantics in their meaning. The rules are rare instances of social morphology. As such, they provide a window into the nature of language. They show what language is for.