1243: Lexical Limitation May 5, 2018

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The word 'back' is an adjective, verb, and noun; this sort of productivity is not possible in all languages, but even English has limitations. The uses of 'back' depend upon linguistic context, and that can be given in merely one other word; to make it a noun, add a determiner (e.g. 'the back'), for a verb, add a determiner phrase (e.g. 'I back [the company]), and for an adjective: a noun (e.g. 'back pain'). However, this means, this means that there are contexts in which back cannot exist. For instance, back cannot follow a preposition like "in back" (though "out back" is a phrase on its own), nor can 'back' be a noun and follow determiner phrase, although this is true throughout all of English and should not be terribly special. One could argue that this is only because word-order is so foundational to English grammar, but languages with more inflection tend to have less of this kind of productivity anyway. There is (at least) one language in which there is no such limitation, Salish, and this will be discussed tomorrow.

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