Re: USAGE: Circumfixes

From:    "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
> On Mon, May 10, 2004 at 05:41:11PM -0500, Mark P. Line wrote:
> > 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.
"Usually"? Hardly.  They usually do, but sometimes they don't.
Grammatical mismatches are the unusual evidence that we use
to deduce the structure of the grammar's architecture as a whole,
but the norm is for modules to align.

> > > When a
> > > particle (a monomorphemic, closed-class morphosyntactic word) is not a
> > > phonological word, it's a clitic.
You can't define parts of speech in this Platonic kind of way;  parts
of speech are defined relative to one another.  In one language, particles
may be limited to so-called "function words", but in others all adjectives
or adverbs -- open classes -- may be formally particles.

> > 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.
Being written in a certain fashion has nothing at all to do with
a morpheme's status as a clitic.  Latin -que, like Greek -te, is
a clitic that joins two noun phrases together, and because it has
scope over phrases rather than words, it must be a morphosyntactic
word.  (Same goes for English <'s>)

> > 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.
You're right:  most American speakers I've known have "friggin'"
as well as "fuckin'" as infixes, usually not as prefixes as in
'un-friggin'-believable'.  The insertion point is pretonic.

> 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.
You're assuming that there is one lexical item, rather than
two homophonous ones with different syntactic properties.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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