Re: USAGE: Circumfixes

Mark J. Reed said:
> How common are these in natlangs generally?  I know French has several;
> in the traditional (written) grammar <ne>...<pas> is one, and in
> the reanalyzed grammar of the spoken language, they're all over the
> place in the verb conjugations (e.g.  the first- and second-person plural
> markers /nu[z]/.../o~[z]/ and /vu[z]/.../e[z]/ in the present tense).
> But I can't think of any examples offhand in other agglutinating
> languages.
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.

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.

3. I seem to recall seeing quite a few in West African languages as well,
but I can't remember anything more concrete.

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).


-- Mark

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