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Abstract Abstract:English X-ee derivatives have long beenmistakenly viewed aspatient nounsand their bases are considered to beonly transitive verbs. However, the actual language encoding is not that simple. On the basis of the data exracted fromthe Corpus of Contemporary American English,and in the light of theCo-indexation Principle on Semantic Arguments,this paper finds two main points: (1) The bases of X-ee derivatives can be nounsand verbs. Moreover, the base verbs can be furtherdivided into five categories as transitive verbs, ditransitive verbs, verbs with governed prepositions, intransitive verbs and verbs without arguments;(2)The various arguments of X-ee
derivatives are derived from the co-indexing processes of the affix and the bases’semantic arguments. Due to the co-indexing paths and semantic matching degrees, the productivity of these arguments presents a gradient from high to low: patient >indirect object and governed preposition > denominal person noun > agent > no argument.
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