What's Done Can Be Undone: Lexical and Pragmatic Representation of the Un-Verbs

The following contribution will focus on a particular class of verbs, which in the literature has been defined as the class of the un-verbs. Nowadays, this class of verbs is in continuous evolution as more and more verbs can be preceded by the prefix un- (Cordisco 2011 ; Zimmer et al. 2011). Therefore, through a corpus-based analysis (McEnery et al. 2006 ; McEnery & Hardie 2012), we will try to offer some generalisations on the semantic and pragmatic nature of this class of verbs. In order to achieve this purpose, our investigation focuses on the analysis of a corpus of the main sections of Facebook, Google+ and Myspace’s Help Centres. The corpus has been analysed through the online corpus analysis tool Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004 ; Kilgarriff et al. 2014), which has allowed us to investigate the specific occurrences of the un-verbs found in our corpus and draw given generalisations on their linguistic behaviour. We will open this contribution with a brief literature review of the various approaches to the phenomenon of the un-verbs. We will, then, move on to methodology used in the corpus collection and analysis. The close study of the linguistic behaviour of the un-verbs found in our corpus has allowed us to draw three conditions for the creation of an un-verb, which will be introduced in the last sections of this study.