Bill,
Your morphological intuition seems sound. The suffixes -ible and -able, rather than being simply spelling variants, are morphologically different. -able is productive, in fact one of the most productive derivational suffixes in English. When -able is suffixed, the stem to which it is suffixed is nearly always a free morpheme in its own right, as in tow/towable, read/readable, etc. -ible, on the other hand, is not productive and nearly always suffixes a bound root, as in "legible," "feasible," or your coinage "recursible."
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Spruiell, William C
Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2011 4:25 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: functionalism in the classroom
TJ,
I was going for "able to be subjected to recursion" rather than "displaying at least one level of recursion", and all I could think of was "recursible" (I tried "recursable," but that somehow looked more like "able to be cursed a second time").
As a linguist, of course I'm going to make up words; deriving license, and all that. I figure I'm in bounds as long as I don't start substituting Greek letters for things in a bid for faux-mathiness (or "gammadygoop", as I've just now decided to call that trick). Linguists make up words the way dogs chase rabbits (i.e. persistently and compulsively, but usually with no material rewards).
--- Bill Spruiell
________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of T. J. Ray [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2011 1:44 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: functionalism in the classroom
How about "recursive" instead of "recursible" to avoid creating a new term? Trying to follow threads on this site already demands a terminology dictionary.
tj
(2) There are clausal constructions that you might describe as allowing recursion, but which aren't examples of projection, thus the set of recursible (sp?) clauses is not identical to the set of projected clauses:
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