Re: USAGE: Circumfixes

On 12 May 2004 Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham@N...> wrote:

> It is a matter of the overall economy of the language.  When two
> morphemes must co-occur, it will usually make sense to regard them
> as a single morpheme.
  I think the bon mot of Mark P. Line is also true here: it is "not
theory-neutral, and you should consult your resident theoretician
for guidance."

  I suppose that your opinion comes from your "flexional bias".
Because flexional languages usually do this (i.e. they tend to join
the co-occurring/succeeding morphemes), it's seems "economic" for
you.

  My agglutinative bias says the opposite: it's not economic to
create (or: propose) huge sets of affixes for combined grammatical
cathegories. If you have a separate tense marker, a separate
personal marker and a short exception list (for segmantal morpheme
assimilations), you can build the whole paradigm.