Re: Small Derivational Idea

----- Original Message ----
> From: David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...>
> My favorite morpheme test: Spanish diminutives:
>
> Either there is allomorphy among the masculine suffix morpheme,
> or the diminutive has an infix allomorph, giving Spanish hosts of
> prefixes and suffixes and exactly one infix.  Both are rather absurd,
> and entirely miss the point.
I think you have missed *my* point. If one sees morphemes as
indivisible building blocks, than infixing as a concept is a challenge, I
agree. How can something that is indivisible absorb something else? But if
you're not using a building block notion *at all*, then you wouldn't be using
the terms "infix," "suffix," and "prefix" *at all,* because those terms refer
to affixing someting in, after, or before. Regardless, though, by my reading,
you *are* using a building block concept, and that concept is tied to pieces
with meaning, you're just not taking out buckets and insisting that each sort
of affix go in a specific bucket, or that morphemes are innately inseparable
except when they're not. To use your example, "carlos" and "it" are still
identifiable chunks, even if you don't want to call them "morphemes."

By the way, your example misses a possibility: -it- is an infix across the board,
and is infixed into "Paco" after -o as added. Regardless, though, I don't have
a theoretical qualm with getting rid of the notion of "infix," "prefix," and
"suffix" and simply going with "basic units are combined into words according
to certain pholological and word-level rules" or some such.

There's a further possibility: Modern diminuatives aren't currently productive, but
rather are the result of centuries of fossilization, at least for common names
(like "Carlos"). This would explain the sporadic implementation. For instance,
English "children" must be learned as an exceptional plural, but it's the
result of two historic plurals (-er and -en); at the point that -en was
affixed, speakers had apparently forgotten that "-er" was an earlier plural
affix. These days, it's not unheard of to hear "childrens," which
diachronically contains three plural affixes, but which to most ModE speakers
contains the standard plural affix combined with the fossilized exceptional
plural form. With regards to names, the common English diminuatives largely
came from some sort of productive rule a long time ago, but have since become
fixed forms (John -> Jack, Richard -> Dick, William -> Bill, etc.); I see no
reason to not suspect something similar in other
 languages.

> I can
> understand why a linguist might want to be constrained thus, but
> why a conlanger?
This conlanger wants languages that are constrained by linguistic principles. If
you don't, that's your prerogative as well. :)

> That, of course, was an example of infix placement which could
> possible occur in a conlang which could NOT occur in a natural
> language.  I'm pretty sure I said as much in my original post.
If you did it, I missed it, which is certainly a possibility. I'll take your word
that the error was mine. :)

-- Paul