Re: "discontinuous affixes"

Nik Taylor wrote:

> Tom Wier wrote:
> > Well, why should we restrict the meaning to a root?  I mean, what's happening
> > is this:  you have a prefix like "nala-" in your example, which has one meaning,
> > is one morpheme, and than you insert another prefix inside that to alter the
> > word further, with the two constituent elements of the original prefix remaining
> > otherwise intact...  what makes that any less of an infix than one that goes on
> > a root?
>
> Hmmm .... I s'pose you *could* extend the meaning to being inside an
> affix, but I think I personally would analyze nala- as two prefixes,
> which usually (or always) co-occur, frequently adjacent to each other.
Well, to be honest, it probably depends to a large extent on the actual
language system you have before you, how the entire morphology of a
particular language works.  Either answer could probably be correct,
depending on how other aspects of the morphology work.

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
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