Re: (Separable) suffixes?

Hi!

Philip Newton writes:
>...
> The thread started, as I recall, with talk of "separable prefixes" as
> in German or Hungarian -- which aren't necessarily connected to the
> verb, either. "Er machte das Licht vorsichtig aus" contains an
> inflected form of the verb "ausmachen", where "aus-" is considered a
> prefix even though in the given sentence, it's neither affixed to the
> verb nor even before it.
>
> My point was that a form in English could be equally validly
> considered a suffix, even when it is neither affixed to the form _in a
> given situation_ nor, perhaps, necessarily even after it, as long as
> in some "ideal" form, it's suffixed.
>
> Or would you say that "aus-" in "ausmachen" is not a prefix since it
> doesn't "act like other morphemes that are considered to [be
> prefixes]"?
>...
The German verb prefixes are quite interesting, I think.  The
non-prefixed variant is clearly a word on its own -- shown e.g. by
cases where the prefix is in directly pre-verbal position and still
not prefixed (neither orthographically nor by pronunciation), so the
rule is not simply that it's part of the word in all pre-verbal
positions:

  Aus machte er das Licht nicht.

Here, 'aus' is in topic position (=first) in the sentence while the
verb 'machte' is in normal second position, so 'aus' in this sentence
is a full-fletched, independent constituent.

I find this behaviour quite interesting.  I don't know much about the
Hungarian verb prefixes.  Is their behaviour similar?

**Henrik