Re: USAGE: Circumfixes

Mark J. Reed said:
> On Mon, May 10, 2004 at 05:41:11PM -0500, Mark P. Line wrote:
>> Many French particles are clitics. English 'the' and 'a/an' are clitics.
>
> Okay.  What about Latin -que?  It's referred to as a[n en]clitic, but it
> not to be a whole word even morphosyntactically.  At least, it's written
> as a suffix.
Orthographic words are yet another kind of word, and they also don't match
up perfectly with phonological and morphosyntactic words in natlangs.

Latin -que is a clitic because it's a morphosyntactic word but not a
phonological word. (It's considered a morphosyntactic word because it
distributes like one -- my knowledge of Latin fails to convince me of
this, but that's neither here nor there.)

Because of this discrepancy, a clitic sometimes gets written as part of
another orthographic word (following its role as part of a phonological
word) and sometimes as a separate orthographic word (following its role as
a morphosyntactic word in its own right). It's pretty much up to the
historical happenstance of orthographic evolution in the particular
natlang. (Of course, some orthographies are simply flawed and do not
represent words of any kind with any great degree of consistency.)

Latin -que is called an enclitic because it's attached to the end of
another word, like a suffix. It would be called a proclitic if it were
attached to the beginning of another word, like a prefix.


>> I've never noticed "frigging" or similar AmE emphatic terms inserted
>> within a morpheme, only between morphemes. I've never heard or used
>> *'be-frigging-lievable', only 'un-frigging-believable'.
>
> Well, I have heard, and use, unbe-frigging-lievable et sim.  On the
> other hand, it is "I don't frigging believe it!" rather than
> *"I don't be-frigging-lieve it!".  So I'm not sure what the rule is,
> but it doesn't seem to honor morpheme boundaries consistently.
The discontinuous version might be a recent innovation, I reckon, or it
might have a limited distribution among sociolectal varieties. Or maybe I
just don't get out enough.


-- Mark

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