Re: Small Derivational Idea

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 10:11 PM, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:
>
> On Feb 24, 2009, at 9∞10 PM, Garth Wallace wrote:
>
>> What about saying that "Carlos" is a single morpheme, rather than
>> three morphemes "Carl-o-s". Gender is already lexically
>> determined―replacing "os" with "a" gives you a different word
>> entirely―and that the diminutive is the "-it-" infix before the rime
>> of the final syllable in all of those cases?
>
> Right, that's another option.  This, of course, goes against the standard
> linguistic description of Spanish, which separates all the -o/-a
> ending words into stem and masculine/feminine suffix.  I believe
> all morpheme-based analyses assume that (as do all non-morpheme-
> based analyses that I've seen), so a proponent of this analysis
> would be fighting an uphill battle.
True. But it wouldn't be the first time a traditional description of
grammar was inaccurate.

>> This doesn't address the
>> "-(e)cito/a" form of the diminutive for stems ending in other
>> consonants, but it does seem to solve the lookalike allomorph problem.
>
> Also, regarding this and the above, why does the natural diminutive
> of "mamá" seem to be "mamacita", and not "mamita"?
Maybe the infix is blocked by the stressed final syllable? I freely
admit that my Spanish is nonexistent, and my single-morpheme
hypothesis was a spur-of-the-moment idea rather than anything fully
worked out.

>> Not sure what you're getting at with this example. Sure, that's an
>> easier way of describing that process, but does any language do that?
>> I'd be really surprised if any language had phoneme order reversal as
>> a regular, productive process. And so we're back to the problem of not
>> ruling out impossible things.
>
> If you go back to Alex's message, we were talking about a conlanger
> who set out to create a simple and regular language; we weren't
> talking about natural language.  The example I gave was of a
> simple and regular language that didn't use stems and suffixes,
> not of a possible natural language.
Ah, okay.