Re: Terminology defs

Hey.

Been having a little trouble with sending to CONLANG; I hope this time
it goes through.

On Mon, 13 Sep 1999, Tom Wier wrote:

> Bryan Maloney wrote:
>
> > To expand on morphology:
> >
> > The morpheme often spelled in English "-ly" is an English morpheme
> > consisting of the phonemes /l/ and /y/.  However, there is no English
> > morpheme comprised of /n/ followed by /g/--that violates English
> > morphological characteristics (I prefer that to "rules", which some folks
> > use, since I'm a biologist and teleological language makes me all oooogly).
>
> Exactly what would those rules be that you're referring to? Are you
> talking about phonological rules? If so, I might believe that:  I can't
> think of one example where a nasal stop followed by a velar stop does
> not assimilate in place of articulation:  [n] / _g --> [N].  But morphological
> rules?
One sense in which morphology can be said to have rules (pace Bryan) is
with ablaut and mutation. Getting 'took' from 'take' involves no
addition of material, only a qualitative change in the stem vowel.
Describing this change with a rule is a pretty straightforward step.
There are currents within morphology which analyze all word-formation
processes in this way, even affixation. In such an approach, the
(regular) past tense formation rule of English looks something like:

        /X/ -> /X-ed/; 'past tense'

There are advantages and disadvantages to such an approach.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu                   "All grammars leak."
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~elzinga/                 -Edward Sapir