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.