Re: THEORY: Question: Bound Morphemes
| From: | Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, July 5, 1999, 10:00 |
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At 18:13 02/07/99 -0500, you wrote:
>Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>> I think you can consider them as affixes, just as in French I
consider the
>> so-called "subject pronouns" as mere prefixes.
>
>Well, clitic is more accurate than affix, at least with regards to "a"
>and "the" (I don't know enough French to say about je, etc.). A clitic
>is halfway between a word and an affix. One thing that determines
>whether a morpheme is a clitic or an affix is whether things can go
>between it and the other word. For instance, you can say "A tall man".=20
>If "a" were a prefix, you'd have to say something like *"Tall a man".=20
>Can you put anything between "je" and the verb in French (other than
>object pronouns)? If so, I'd call it a clitic.
>
Well, I won't call 'je' a clitic, but French conjugation is very
incorporating (like in polysynthetic languages). We can have things like
'je le lui donne' (I give him/her it) where the accent is put on the last
syllable (donne). We can sometimes have words, like in "je n'ai rien vu"
(it's a compound conjugation I know, but in French, the auxiliary and the
verb can't generally be separated). In this case, 'rien' (nothing), even if
it is normally a word in its own right, doesn't carry any stress. That's
why I consider it 'incorporated' in the verbal form, and why I still
consider 'je' as a mere prefix.
>> (doesn't "the" come from a demonstrative pronoun by the way?)\
>
>Yes, from _se_, the masculine singular nominative word for "that". The
>"th" comes from analogy with the other forms, which had a thorn, such as
>_thone_, accusative singular (plural?) masculine. "That" comes from the
>nominative singular *neuter*, incidentally, =FE=E6t (thaet).
>
>> Writing is very
>> traditionalist I think, and often after one century after design or
>> redesign, it doesn't follow the reality of a language anymore.
>
>Very true, writing usually lags behind speech. ESPECIALLY formal
>writing. In formal written English, one can never say "I'm", for
>instance. And, I suspect, there was a period of time after the
>invention of /ajm/ (/i:m/?) when it was not written, just as I suspect
>that French probly went thru a time when "je" was always written out,
>rather than being written "j'" before vowels (i.e., "je ai" instead of
>"j'ai")
>
I don't know. The apostrophe is very old in French, but you may be right.
I'm not a specialist of Old and Middle French.
Christophe Grandsire
|Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.
"Reality is just another point of view."
homepage : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html