Re: Small Derivational Idea

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 6:54 PM, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:
> On Feb 24, 2009, at 6∞22 PM, Alex Fink wrote:
>>
>> Well, if that's what disturbs you, why not say the masculine ending is
>> /-o/
>> in _Carlos_ as in every other word, and it just happens to have an extra
>> morpheme /-s/ tacked on after that?  (Meaning, I dunno, '(masculine proper
>> name)', but happens not to appear on most masculine proper names.)
>
> That is *precisely* what the formalism forces you to do: to posit some sort
> of meaning for the /-s/ there.  And doing that is patently absurd.  (Well,
> depending on what your goals are.  If your goals are to fill out the
> framework's
> predictions, then, by all means, mess with the data however you want to
> make it so.  If your goal is to explain language, though, this is troubling,
> at the very least.)
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? 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.

> Why on earth should regularity be confined to morphemes?
> Plus, once you accept that affixes need not to be treated as
> morphemes, it simplifies things quite a bit.  It's not like there's
> anything wrong with affixes, or with anything else.  But, for
> example, this pattern is totally regular--artificial, but regular:
>
> batol "cow"
> lotab "cows"
>
> donat "dog"
> tanod "dogs"
>
> keef "horse"
> feek "horses"
>
> If you want to explain this with morphemes, you have to have
> an invisible "switcharoo" suffixes that is added to the plural
> to switch the phonemes around.  The morpheme-based
> explanation, in fact, is much more complicated than the simple
> observation that you flip the word around to form the plural
> (or perhaps flip the plural around to form the singular).  This
> pattern is totally regular and pretty simple.  Why is it that separating
> meanings out and stringing them together is the default "easiest"
> and "simplest" way of doing things?  That seems to me to be
> a culturally-dependent idea at best.
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.