Re: USAGE: Circumfixes

Mark J. Reed said:
> 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?
A clitic is a morpheme that is a whole word in morphosyntax but only part
of a word in phonology. Stated differently: morphosyntactic words do not
usually match up perfectly with phonological words in natlangs. When a
particle (a monomorphemic, closed-class morphosyntactic word) is not a
phonological word, it's a clitic.

Many French particles are clitics. English 'the' and 'a/an' are clitics.


>> 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?
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'.

If they *did* get inserted within a morpheme, then you would have to
consider the latter discontinuous, yes. It's necessary to capture them as
discontinuous because you have to not only state that the affix is infixed
(not prefixed or suffixed), but also where exactly in the stem the affix
is inserted (which you can do with a morphophoneme).

All the languages I've seen with widespread discontinuous morphemes and
infixation have been pretty systematic about where the infix goes; I think
it's usually controlled by phonotactics. I do recall encountering a
language in which the the "infix goes here" morphophoneme could be pretty
much anywhere in the lexeme -- it was part of the (morpho)phoneme sequence
of the stem and couldn't be explained by phontactics. I wish I could
remember what language that would have been, but I can't. *shrug*


-- Mark

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