Dominique Sportiche, Hilda Koopman, and Edward Stabler [1] make the following claim about Affixation in section 2.3.2 of their Introduction to Syntactic Analysis and Theory:
There are 5!=120 different orderings of the five morphemes in de-nation-al-ize-ation, but only one order forms a word... We claim: (1) A speaker of English, even one who is unfamiliar with this word, will only accept one of these sequences as a possible English word.
This isn't because only one of them is an English word:
We could try another one, even a non-existing word (e.g. denodalization, from node - nodal - nodalize, etc)... What are the regularities that a speaker needs to know in order to accept denationalization and reject the other 119 forms?
This seems to be untrue because the combination de-nation-ize-ation-al (denationizational) is equally valid - to quote two of the rules they give:
- "-ize c-selects root N to form V, e.g. symbol-ize" (I would have thought that "nation" is just as much a root N as "symbol" and can therefore legitimately form "nationize")
- "-al c-selects N to form A, e.g. natur-al" (Indeed, they themselves note that "from denationalization, we could form denationalizational")
Again, the words "nationize" and "denationizational" might not yet have been coined, but the authors stressed that their point about "denationalization" being the sole legitimate ordering of the five morphemes isn't dependent on the word actually existing. So it seems that their "empirical" discovery that only one of the 120 orderings is valid is flawed - or is it I who have misunderstood?
I am not sure whether Sportiche et al. view "-ize" as two separate suffixes (that just happen to have the same form), one attaching to adjectives and the other to nouns. But this way of defending their proposition would fail to support their claim that "a speaker of English, even one who is unfamiliar with this word, will only accept one of these sequences as a possible English word".
[1] Sportiche, D., Koopman, H., Stabler, E. (2014) An Introduction to Syntactic Analysis and Theory. Wiley Blackwell.