Re: THEORY: Question: Bound Morphemes

On Sat, 3 Jul 1999, Charles wrote:

>
> Ray agrees with you also ... But these still feel like very separate
> words to me, and apparently also for Trask in his message, in comparison
> to Basque in which the articles are always glued onto other words,
> even inducing sound changes. A "bound morpheme" means "bound into
> a word", I stubbornly still think. This is not "just" a spelling thing.
> English and many other langs have a strong sense of what is a word,
> whereas in Chinese and others it is much more fluid.
>
This reminds me of the rules I learnt in my fieldwork classes for
establishing word boundaries:

. Use your own intuition
. Keep on on the lookout for phonological phenomena that seem to be
  restricted to parts of the clause
. Ask your informant. He will probably have a strong intuition about
  it himself.

To be applied in order ;-).

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt