So is the rule about stress that you have to stick the infix in before the stressed syllable?
I believe so, although I'd hazard there's a qualifier that if it makes a hash of morphological boundaries in the process, a native English-speaker will find somewhere else to throw it. I think one of the reasons unbelievfuckingable sounds wrong is that even without an explicit knowledge of adjectival formation, the listener notices that the expletive has been dropped between the stem and the suffix of the adjective (believ-able), which should really be one unit. Unfuckingbelievable is simple because it's just splitting the adjective and its negation, but even if the infix is postponed a syllable on from the privative un-, the core sense of the word is preserved when it picks back up again after the expletive. [F]uckingable is meaningless in a way that even the truncated -lievable isn't. I feel there should be a lot more technical language in this post, but I would have to go looking for it right now.
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I believe so, although I'd hazard there's a qualifier that if it makes a hash of morphological boundaries in the process, a native English-speaker will find somewhere else to throw it. I think one of the reasons unbelievfuckingable sounds wrong is that even without an explicit knowledge of adjectival formation, the listener notices that the expletive has been dropped between the stem and the suffix of the adjective (believ-able), which should really be one unit. Unfuckingbelievable is simple because it's just splitting the adjective and its negation, but even if the infix is postponed a syllable on from the privative un-, the core sense of the word is preserved when it picks back up again after the expletive. [F]uckingable is meaningless in a way that even the truncated -lievable isn't. I feel there should be a lot more technical language in this post, but I would have to go looking for it right now.