Re: USAGE: Circumfixes

On Sat, May 08, 2004 at 09:54:57PM -0500, Mark P. Line wrote:
> 1. Circumfixes are affixes. The examples you give for French involve
> clitics and free morphemes. You can analyze them as discontinuous
> constituents (of which circumfixes are one type), but calling them
> circumfixes would be quite unusual.
Okay, if the alleged affix can appear by itself, then it's really
a free morpheme; but what is the difference between an affix and a
clitic?

> 2. I'd be very surprised to find an absence of circumfixes in *any*
> Austronesian language. I've seen them all over Western Malayo-Polynesian
> and Oceanic. Any good reference grammar of an Austronesian language will
> probably give you some examples.
Thanks!

>
> 4. There's another kind of discontinuous morpheme in many languages,
> including Austronesian languages, whereby a (generally open-class)
> morpheme is *interrupted* by another morpheme (usually an affix, but some
> languages can incorporate another open-class morpheme). If "bili" is a
> root morpheme and "-um-" is an affix, you would analyze "bili" as a
> discontinuous morpheme if you found a form like "bumili" (which you do, as
> it happens, in Tagalog).
Is it necessary to analyze the root morpheme as discontinuous just
because it can take an infix?  Are all the morphemes into which
someone can insert "fucking" for emphasis in English therefore discontinuous?
be- + -lievable, etc?

-Mark

Replies