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Re: USAGE: Circumfixes

From:Tamas Racsko <tracsko@...>
Date:Wednesday, May 12, 2004, 19:19
On 11 May 2004 Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham@N...> wrote:

> In which case we're back to Ce- -[h/k]-a- as a single morpheme! (At > least, as single as French ne..pas, ne..jamais etc. are.
I'm sure that in agglutinative languages a circumfix may express only one thing: person, tense, mood, voice, aspect, word derivation etc. In this context I don't know what can be a circumfix in a flexional language. I think that we must be careful when a flexional affix encodes more grammatical cathegory, e.g. in case of ne..jamais: negating the verb (ne = not) and a negative time complement (jamais = never). Is English colloquial "ain't (do/say/etc) nothing" a circumfix? Is English phrase "and ... respectively" is a circumfix? I think this is the same for Greek "Ce- -[h/k]-a-". What is the difference between the conjunction of allomorphemes and the circumfix in flexional languages? Are Slovak active past participles -- like u.vide.vs^i' 'seen, seeing' < vidie.t' 'to see' -- formed by circumfixes or are they formed by simple suffixes from perfective verbs, therefore you must change the imperfective verb into its perfective counterpart? Are the future of the motion verbs -- like po^.jd.em 'I will go' < ist' (< *id.t') 'to go' -- formed by circumfixes or are they simple present forms of the perfecticve counterparts (since analytic future of imperfective forms isn't possible in these verb group)? Are Slovak negated verbs -- like ne.robi'.m 'I don't work' < robi.t' 'to work' -- formed by circumfix or are they just a conjunction of proclitic negating particle ne- and the respective personal suffix? Therefore, I think, a circumfix may express by definition only one grammatical cathegory even in flexional languages. Otherwise this term would be excessively general, superficial, and useless.

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Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham@...>