Re: THEORY: Question: Bound Morphemes

At 2:49 pm -0700 2/7/99, Charles wrote:
>Kristian Jensen wrote:
.....
>
>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.
Au contraire - they are most certainly bound.  Neither "the" nor "a" can
ever occur except bound to the beginning of a noun phrase.

And at 4:47 pm -0600 2/7/99, dirk elzinga wrote:
.....
>I couldn't resist jumping into this one.
Good  :-)
....
>
>Actually, I don't think that the distinction made here holds, if by
>"bound word" is meant "clitic".
Indeed - and if the "word" is monomorphemic, as such words (generally) are,
then we have a bound morpheme.

>Affixes and clitics are alike in that
>they become part of the phonological word to which they are attached.
>The difference between the two is that an affix attaches to a stem of a
>particular category, while a clitic attaches to a position. In English,
>this difference can be shown by the behavior of the plural suffix -s and
>the possessive clitic -'s.
Yes, the difference in behavior between the English plural suffix -(e)s
(and, indeed, the 3rd sing. suffix -(e)s) and the possessive clitic -'s
shows the difference very well.

Both affixes and clitics are certainly bound; languages where affixes &
clitics affect the accentuation of the whole 'word phrase', whether the
accentuation is stress, as in most of the Romancelangs, or pitch as in
ancient Greek, show this is clearly the case.  And Dirk's mail explains
this well.

The misunderstanding is due to identifying the written word with the
phonological word.  The two are by no means identical.  Written word
divisions are to a greater or lesser degree arbitrary conventions; they
often reflect earlier stages of the language and are also often influenced
by the written habits of older 'languages of prestige' etc.
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At 6:18 pm -0500 2/7/99, Nik Taylor wrote:
>Ed Heil wrote:
>> the Creole word for
>> "water" is "dlo"!)
>
>>From "de l'eau"? (is that /d@'lo/?)
Another example IMO of how the written word often misleads; and written
French is a very different beast from spoken French.  As Jacques Guy used
to point out every so often, written French shows a language in the
European inflexional tradition, spoken French is polysynthetic.

I've only ever heard "de l'eau" pronounced as a monosyllable by
francophones [dlo], presumably also /dlo/.

My daughter-in-law, who is as genuine a French francophone as one can
imagine (coming from almost the center of the Hexagone), always says [dlo]
and if either of my grandsons want water and are in 'French mode' (more
common with the elder one), he will ask for [dlo].

I guess neither /d/, /l/ or /o/ can be considered free morphemes in modern
French since, unlike English "water", "eau" can occur only bound with other
morphemes in a noun phrase.

Ray.