"Cranberry morphemes", and the case of -ula

Rhosgobel has been carrying on a discussion with a gentleman who goes by Pharyngula. This is not about that discussion.

Not being a biologist, Semantic Compositions had no idea what a pharyngula is. (The answer can be found here.) However, SC's first instinct was that it must be something dark and scary. Why?

Well, what ends in -ula?

Dracula and tarantula are all that come to mind.

Of course, "ula" isn't a word. But given a couple of examples, it starts to look like there's a paradigm (an apparently productive linguistic rule for conjugating words into new forms). Maybe "ula" isn't a word, but the ending "-ula" can be attached to something to mean "scary". This is actually a well-known linguistic phenomenon (well-known to linguists, that is), called a "cranberry morpheme".

A morpheme is an independently meaningful string, which is not necessarily a word in and of itself (many linguists would quibble with this definition, but hey, this is Pop Linguistics). Now, the "boysen" in "boysenberry" is actually someone's last name -- go to your grocery store and hit the jelly aisle if you don't believe me. But there's no "cran". There are, however, a variety of "cran" words which have succeeded "cranberry". Like "cran-raspberry" or "cran-grape". So "cran" appears to be productively affixable to other words to form new ones (at least if you speak Marketing, an offshoot of English). Thus, the "cranberry morpheme", an item like "cran" which attaches to other things to form new words, even though it's not a word itself.

Cranberry Morphology is a potentially rich source of humor, so this may become a running feature.

Comments

[Sandi Michele de Oliveira]

I've been living in Denmark for the past several years and have learned that cranberry in Danish is TRANEBÆR (tranebaer), and trane = crane. The cranes eat the berries.

[wcbixvljy wkmoxi]

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