Re: "discontinuous affixes"

At 11:33 PM -0400 5/6/99, Ed Heil wrote:
>I'm not sure what they mean by "discontinuous affixes" here...
>are those things like prepositions used as part of a verb, such
>as "pre+pono"?  That would explain why they are associated with
>prepositions, if that's what they are.
>
>But does anyone know the technical definition of a "discontinuous
>affix"?  Or, for that matter, "prefixing" and "suffixing" as
>used in the paragraphs above?
They all refer to processes that modify phonological works. English is both
prefixing and suffixing in its morphology
pre-test-ing (for instance)

A discontinuous affix would be a pair, like To-  -na. Applied to the word
vriktna, you would get the _two_ morphome word:
to-vriktna-na

For a discontinuous analysis, the two should always occur together, so that
they can't be analyzed as independently meaningful.

You could also have prefix/infix pairs, or infix/suffix pairs.

Some have analyzed semitic vowel changes (very free, as long as the
consonants stay the same) as discontinuous infixes. I think modern theory
tends to analyze these differently, however.

   -- David
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