Feeling incalcitrant?
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The word incalcitrant is often used in Modern English, and is understood by native speakers to mean something like 'stubborn,' 'resistant,' 'uncooperative' (a Google search on incalcitrant brought 193 results, all with this meaning). Yet incalcitrant does not appear in any dictionaries that I have consulted. Incalcitrant appears to be related to the word recalcitrant, whose Webster's (Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, 1991) definition is as follows:
1. Obstinately defiant of authority or restraint
2. a: Difficult to manage or operate b: Not responsive to treatment
3. Resistant
This is the same definition as incalcitrant, so why the new word? Are Modern English speakers stupid, or ignorant, or what? Is English in danger? Is the language decaying? Can a word that is used by native speakers 'not exist?' Where did incalcitrant come from, and why is it used by Modern English speakers?
According to Webster's, recalcitrant comes from the Late Latin word recalcitrant-, recalcitrans, 'to be stubbornly disobedient,' derived from Latin re+ calcitrant, 'to kick back.' The prefix comes from the Latin re-, red- which means 'back, again, against.' The root comes from Latin calcitrare, 'to kick,' from calc-, calx 'heel.'
In Modern English, re- is a highly productive prefix that means 'again,' e.g. reconsider 'to consider again.' (The prefix also has the possibly non-productive meaning of 'back.' Webster's provides the example recall 'to call back.' I can't come up with any more.)
Of course, the word calcitrant no longer has its Latin meaning of 'to kick.' In fact, it doesn't mean anything in Modern English. Calcitrant is a bound root--it never appears independently, but only in combination with the prefix re-, where the (entire) word has the meanings shown above.
So how does a naïve Modern English speaker (that is, a native speaker unarmed with linguistics, dictionary entries, or knowledge of Latin) analyze the word recalcitrant when they encounter it in everyday (or more likely written) usage? Morphologically, the word looks like it ought to mean 'calcitrant again,' but it's used to mean 'stubborn, etc.' That meaning doesn't have anything to do with 'again,' and calcitrant has no meaning at all to modern speakers. Therefore the morphological form of recalcitrant is totally opaque--there is no apparent connection between its constituent morphemes (re- and -calcitrant) and its meaning ('stubborn, etc.').
Because of its opacity, the word recalcitrant has been morphologically reanalyzed by Modern English speakers. The word's constituent morpheme -calcitrant is reanalyzed according to its semantic context. Since recalcitrant always means 'stubborn, etc.,' -calcitrant is taken to mean something along the lines of 'cooperative, tractable, easily resolvable.' Note that this semantic reanalysis does not affect -calcitrant's morphological status as a bound root. No back-formation has occurred (yet), and -calcitrant does not appear independently (confirmed by a Google search).
If -calcitrant means 'cooperative, etc.' than recalcitrant should mean 'cooperative, etc. again.' But the word is never used with that meaning. A native speaker hears the bound root -calcitrant only when it is associated with the opposite meaning 'stubborn, etc.' A natural expression of 'stubborn, etc.' is 'not cooperative, etc.' So the native English speaker needs to derive a word with the meaning 'not cooperative, etc.' from a bound root -calcitrant meaning 'cooperative, etc.'
Enter the next constituent, the semi-productive prefix in-. This prefix means 'non-, not' and has phonologically conditioned variants. If you care about such stuff, they are: il- before /l/, e.g. illogical, illiterate; ir- before /r/, e.g. irretrievable; im- before labials, e.g. immaterial, impatient; variably realized as /ng/ before velars, e.g. incomplete /ingkomplit/ or /inkomplit/; in- before all other phoneme classes, e.g. intolerant, indecent, infirm, insincere, inhuman, injudicious, inadvisable, etc.
The prefix in- comes to English from an identical Latin prefix with the same meaning. It coexists in Modern English with another prefix un-, which comes from Old English, not Latin. These two prefixes have the same meaning 'non-, not,' e.g. uninteresting, unthinkable. (There is also a homophonous prefix un- meaning 'reverse,' e.g. untie.) The difference between them? in- may attach only to Latinate vocabulary, e.g. *ininteresting, *inthinkable, while un- attaches primarily to non-Latinate vocabulary including new and borrowed words, e.g. unhip, *inhip. Thus in Modern English un- is a much more productive suffix.
Summarizing, naïve Modern English speakers encounter the opaque recalcitrant, with the meaning 'stubborn, etc.' They semantically reanalyze -calcitrant as meaning something like 'cooperative, etc.' and replace the semantically unrelated prefix re- with the semantically relevant negating prefix in-. This yields the fully transparent new word incalcitrant, meaning 'stubborn, etc.,' literally 'not cooperative, etc.' The reanalyzed derivation of incalcitrant seems clear enough, and it should dispel any notion that English speakers are stupid or ignorant. The successful reanalysis of recalcitrant requires sophisticated (unconscious!) knowledge of morpho-lexical semantics, morphological constituency, morphotactics, and morphophonology (this latter because English speakers never mistakenly use the wrong variant of in-, e.g. *ilcalcitrant, *ircalcitrant, *imcalcitrant).
One question remains: why is the less productive prefix in- used instead of the fully productive prefix un-? That is, why don't we ever see *uncalcitrant (a Google search on this non-word brought back one single result, compared with 193 results for incalcitrant)? The answer is simple, but has a fascinating implication. As noted above, the prefix in- attaches to Latinate vocabulary. Because -calcitrant is a Latin root, it will be negated with in- and not un-. But that means that naïve Modern English speakers have unconscious knowledge about the Latinate/non-Latinate distinction in their vocabulary items! They retain this knowledge in spite of the fact that the Latin meaning of -calcitrant is not only lost, but changed in the reanalysis. So speakers of Modern English are much smarter than they are portrayed by prescriptivists and their ilk. The English language is in no danger of decay, whatever that would mean.