Re: THEORY: Question: Bound Morphemes

Kristian Jensen wrote:
>
> Charles wrote:
> >
> >According to http://www.sil.org/linguistics/glossary/ ,,,
> >
> >A bound morpheme is a morpheme which cannot occur as
> >a separate word apart from any other morpheme.
> Oh, I'm sorry, perhaps I myself should have given the definitions of
> the terms used in the question I was asking. But I was expecting to
> get answers from people who knew what I was talking about. Anyways
> thanks, Charles, maybe more people can give me an answer now.
It sounded to me like you were saying English "the" and "a" were
"bound". They are not, IIUC, and cannot be ... at least not yet.
Apparently, Basque once had the same phrasal structure as English
(but in reverse, mirror image), and then *did* glom the article on,
as you (seemed to) suggest. I am thinking of this classic exchange:

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9901&L=indo-european&D=&H=&T=&O=&F=&P=2573

Some excepts:

>> Then how will "a blue house" look
>> like, "ahouse blue"? That would require a change in which the
>> modifier would have to go after the noun. I don't see how that could
>> happen
>>> As a matter of fact, *exactly* the scenario described here has happened
>>> countless times in languages.
>>> Of course, this hasn't happened in English -- yet.  But it might.
>>> Already I notice that many of my students -- and one or two of the
>>> contributors to this list -- write `a lot of' as `alot of', suggesting
>>> that they feel the article to be fused to the following item in this
>>> case, at least.  There is nothing to stop English from doing the same
>>> thing that Basque has done, but at the other end of the noun phrase.