While the term pejorative is commonly used by both linguists and general language users to refer to individual words and senses, the mechanisms underlying pejoration, even in amply researched languages like English, still remain a somewhat peripheral object of investigation. Early research into English pejoratives such as that conducted by Allen (Reference Allen1958), MacMullen (Reference MacMullen1963) and Pederson (Reference Pederson1964) in the context of American English (see McMillan Reference McMillan1978) was characterised by its purely lexicographical and descriptive nature. More recent research has adopted corpus-based approaches to capture the semantic evolution of given morphemes in the history of the language (e.g. Eitelmann et al. Reference Eitelmann, Haugland and Haumann2020 on -ish), but even nowadays pejoration tends to be touched upon only in passing in reference to semantic change. Important exceptions to this trend are Schreuder's (Reference Schreuder1970) Pejorative Sense Development in English, Hom's (Reference Hom2010) article on the semantics of pejoratives in context and Finkbeiner et al.'s (Reference Finkbeiner, Meibauer and Wiese2016) edited book, Pejoration, which centralised this phenomenon and approached it from multiple linguistic levels, including phonology – more specifically prosody – and syntax, with particular reference to German.
Given the overall dearth of studies exclusively devoted to pejoration in English, Sánchez Fajardo's monograph stands out as a crucial and much-needed contribution to the study of pejorative suffixes and combining forms, skilfully – and holistically – tackling interfaces between, on the one hand, semantics and, on the other, pragmatics, morphology and syntax. This is one of the many assets of the book under review. Chapter 1 ‘Pejoration and beyond’ (pp. 7–31) precisely attempts to conceptualise pejoration, not restrictively but in relation to the linguistic levels and areas of study to which it is connected: the semantic–pragmatic interface (which is the focus of section 1.2); the linguistic elements beyond lexical items (including syntactic constructions) which contribute to the process of – and result in – pejoration (1.3); the diachronic and paradigmatic dimensions that need to be taken into account when tackling pejorative lexis (1.4); the properties of pejoratives (1.5); and how once the communicative functions of those words are identified, the speaker may decide to neutralise their pejorative meanings by means of euphemisms (1.6.1) or reinforce them through dysphemisms (1.6.2). Sections 1.7 and 1.8 address the relationship between pejoration and slang and taboo.
Chapter 2 ‘How pejoratives are made’ (pp. 33–59) considers the word-formation mechanisms involved in the formation of pejoratives: compounding (2.1), under which lexical blending is subsumed (2.1.1); affixation (2.2), mostly suffixation (as well as semi-suffixation (2.2.1)), which is at the centre of this book; conversion (2.3); clipping (2.4); abbreviation in the form of acronyms and initialisms (2.5); lexical borrowing (2.6); and reduplication (2.7). Given the fuzzy boundaries between some of the categories involved, it is worth pointing out that lexical blends are here considered ‘as types of compounding or of non-affixational derivation’, following Plag (Reference Plag2018: 13). The previous literature indeed shows the difficulties in classifying lexical blending,Footnote 1 which nevertheless does not affect its current status as an independent lexicogenetic mechanism. A useful approach to lexical blending is to consider it along a continuum that erases the traditional distinction between morphemic and non-morphemic – as blends make use of splinters (Berman Reference Berman1961) – word-formation processes. López-Rúa (Reference López Rúa2004: 73), adapting Bauer's (Reference Bauer1998) cline, described it as a ‘scale of increasing abbreviation’, from compounds (with no shortening) through blends to even alphabetisms, which instantiate the maximum amount of abbreviation. Consequently, sections 2.1, 2.1.1, 2.4 and 2.5 have this unifying principle within the larger framework of word-formation processes. A similar continuum, but in this case of constituents (e.g. -naut), is found in one of the following subsections, 2.2.1 ‘Why “semi” in semi-suffix?’ Kastovsky's (Reference Kastovsky, McConchie, Honkapohja and Tyrkkö2009: 12) scale of ‘progressively less independent constituents’ is revisited. However, it is not deemed entirely appropriate for the ill-defined nature of some categories, as Kastovsky's view on affixoids affords no clear direction. Hence, Sánchez Fajardo opts for the general label ‘combining form’, encapsulating three kinds of (derivational) formatives: neoclassical combining forms, native combining forms (i.e. those which have arisen out of well-established and/or integrated lexical items in English) and splinters.
These two chapters set the ground for his multifaceted analysis of fifteen final-position formatives, organised into four underlying cognitive–semantic categories, namely diminution, excess, resemblance and metonymisation. The transition from each of those initially non-pejorative categories to pejoration is surveyed in chapters 3–6. Chapter 3 is concerned with diminution (pp. 61–100), chapter 4 with excess (pp. 101–40), chapter 5 with resemblance (pp. 141–61) and chapter 6 with metonymy/synecdoche (pp. 163–82). Each of these chapters has the same structure ‘[to facilitate] the reading process’ (p. 3), in Sánchez Fajardo's words. Each chapter is prefaced with a helpful introduction to the category in question, followed by a morphosemantic and pragmatic characterisation of the relevant formatives. His theoretical underpinning is based on (1) Construction Morphology, which analyses complex words as constructions (i.e. form-meaning pairings) and presupposes that the lexicon of a language is made up of words and their constructional schemas (and subschemas), which are hierarchically organised; (2) Componential analysis, which attempts to represent the meanings of words and their relations as complex entities consisting of different semantic components (or features) that can be isolated; and (3) Morphopragmatics, the relationship between morphology and pragmatics that Merlini Barbaresi & Dressler (Reference Merlini Barbaresi, Dressler, Pirrelli, Plag and Dressler2020) expounded (see also their earlier work, Dressler & Merlini Barbaresi Reference Dressler, Barbaresi, Kenesei and Harnish2001, Reference Dressler, Barbaresi and Huang2013), and according to which ‘certain morphological patterns may generate autonomous pragmatic meanings, independently of their denotative power’ (Dressler & Merlini Barbaresi Reference Dressler, Barbaresi and Huang2013: 493). While these approaches are introduced and succinctly discussed in the book (see pp. 2–6, particularly the discussion of constructional schemas on pp. 5–6, which includes a key figure (figure 1, p. 6) to understand the arrangement of input/output semantic components alongside schemas and examples), readers with other linguistic backgrounds may benefit from consulting further references (including some by the same author, e.g. Sánchez Fajardo Reference Sánchez Fajardo2021) to grasp the intricacies of such theoretical developments and their importance as a structuring principle in the volume under review.
After introducing each individual suffix/combining form, there is a description of their forms and functions, their constructional schemas, and finally a reflection on what ‘schemas tell us about pejoratives ending in X’. The central part of chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 draws on a combination of data of suffixed pejoratives obtained from mostly corpora and dictionaries (found in his References section) and in-context illustrative quotations. The majority of the lexemes considered (found in the Appendices) are not recorded in dictionaries, so corpora proved to be essential. In the discussion of the -ie, -o and -holic pejoratives, the author also offers subheadings on their schemas in relation to the two parameters under which formatives are typically classified; that is, the word class they form (mostly but not exclusively nouns) and the word class with which they are combined (denominal, deadjectival and deverbal): DnNs (denominal nominalisations), DaNs (deadjectival nominalisations) and, to a lesser extent, DvNs (deverbal nominalisations). Other possible nominalisations – deadverbial and deprepositional formations – are attested (as in the case of -ie), but his focus is, quite reasonably, on the aforementioned three because they are the most common ones.
Chapter 3 examines the process whereby the diminutive nature of the suffixes -ie and -o semantically contributes to their acquisition of a derisive meaning through cognitive operations. The Diminution: endearment ↔ pejoration (DEP) scale, developed by the author himself alongside Tarasova, is here invoked (Sánchez Fajardo & Tarasova Reference Sánchez Fajardo, Tarasova, Fernández-Domínguez, Bagasheva and Lara-Clares2020). Beyond the inherent association of diminutives with smallness in its purely physical dimension, they are also imbued with a cognitive representation of this size, which would ambivalently lead to the creation of two connotative senses, fondness and pejoration. From a pragmatic viewpoint, the activation of any of the three categories is context-dependent and involves the speaker's and hearer's ability to discern between what is meant and what is said (cf. p. 62).
At the other end of the spectrum is excess, addressed in chapter 4, which concentrates on -ard, -holic, -rrhea, -itis, -later, -maniac and -porn. The morphemes that are typically associated with an augmentative value are prefixes, so they are the starting point for reflection on the transition from an excessive to a pejorative meaning. Like prefixes, suffixes and combining forms may have a positive, neutral or negative value, but one distinguishing feature of these final morphemes is that ‘their output semantics is less ambivalent than that of prefixed forms, and hence there is no strict correlation between negative bases and pejorative semantics’ (p. 103).
Chapter 5 concentrates on -ish, -oid and -aster to explore the category of (partial) resemblance. The pejorative value of these suffixes can arise out of the comparison of something/someone with what is a standard feature or measure. Along these lines, such words as niceish ‘not nice enough’ would fit into a category of ‘incompleteness’ (p. 142). In contrast to niceish, adjectives like apish ‘foolish’ do not have a gradable sense. Rather, they appropriate some features of an entity – what could be classified as the source referent (in this case, an ape) – and metaphorically transfer them to a person, the target referent. These pejoratives are particularly transparent since the negative features of the base are transposed to the derivative.
After having covered cognitive processes in chapters 3–5, chapter 6 investigates how pejoration can stem from ‘intralinguistic semantic changes’ (p. 163), namely metonymy and synecdoche. Because of the grey areas between these two semantic processes, the author decides to use metonymisation in a broad sense. Metonymisation is crucial in understanding exocentric compounds (e.g. killjoy) as well as the creation of combining forms such as -head and -pants (thoroughly examined in this chapter alongside the formative -ass). Likewise, it transpires that etymology plays an important role in the examination of the morphosemantic features of these combining forms.Footnote 2 Finally, some concluding remarks, highlighting the main findings, close the volume.
This cursory chapter-by-chapter summary does not do justice to the wealth of data adduced in Sánchez Fajardo's detailed discussion, which keeps a balance between theoretical accounts and illustrative examples in context. Rather than overwhelming the reader with evidence in the body of the text, the author intelligently included the lists of pejorative words in fifteen Appendices, which are the basis for the morphological patterns he pinpoints and for his devising of constructional schemas. Likewise, all the chapters are illustrated with helpful and visually attractive figures, which facilitate the understanding of abstract concepts and operations. Because of the nature of the research conducted, the fine-grained points that are made in each chapter have not been rehearsed herein, but they show an acute awareness of current trends and the potential of corpora. It should be noted that this is not a corpus-driven quantitative study in its scope, but rather it is a qualitative investigation, albeit informed by research into lexical tendencies (e.g. regarding frequency or productivity) (cf. p. 5). Sánchez Fajardo's use of data obtained from corpora enables him to assess the pairing of forms and functions in real-life usage and to create and analyse constructional schemas, which are pivotal to further investigations in the field. Potentially fruitful areas of research are also considered in the present book, such as accounting for variation in the varieties of English spoken around the world (e.g. as regards the possible varying semantic interpretations of same suffixed-words by speakers of different Englishes).
In sum, the cutting-edge nature of Pejorative Suffixes and Combining Forms in English makes it an indispensable reference book in the study of pejoration in this language, and it will surely pave the way for ensuing studies. In view of the array of linguistic disciplines which here converge, this book will be of great relevance not only to lexicologists but also to linguists in general.
