Re: isolating conlangs

Leon wrote:
<<
I think there is a subtle difference. Morphology only affects a word
or  root neighboring it (or neighboring neighbor affix), while
certain  words with grammatical usage may affect a word at the other
end of the  sentence. Surely no one defines a word as being separable
into  scattered parts all over a sentence?
 >>

That's part of the problem.  No one *has* put forward a satisfactory
definition of a word.  Even if one comes up with a satisfactory
definition in one language, it probably will not apply to a different
language.  Indeed, sometimes a single language will have different
definitions of "word" within the same word.  Take "that's" in English.
Most phonologists will agree that "that's" is a single phonological
word, but that "that" and "'s" are two separate morphological
words.  Are we to be satisfied with that?

It might turn out to be the case that the notion of "word" isn't
useful to linguistic analysis, along with the notion of "morpheme".
At the very least, they are assumptions that should be questioned.

-David
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