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Re: Small Derivational Idea

From:Alex Fink <000024@...>
Date:Tuesday, February 24, 2009, 20:58
On Tue, 24 Feb 2009 12:42:27 -0800, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:

>My favorite morpheme test: Spanish diminutives: > >Paco = /pak-/ "name" + /-o/ "masculine" >Paquito = /pak-/ "name" + /-it/ "diminutive" + /-o/ "masculine" >Carlos = /karlos/ "name" >Carlitos = /karl-/ "name" + /-it/ "diminutive" + /-os/ "?!?!?!?" >or... >Carlitos = /karlos/ "name" + /-it-/ "diminutive" > >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.
Isn't there also _azu'car_ > _azuquitar_? That one suggests infixing even more strongly. But why's it absurd that Spanish would have exactly one infix? I thought that languages with infixes tended to have only few of them. Anyway, are you saying that if you look at this word-and-paradigm style you should reject the whole concept of "infix"? You shouldn't use it to describe a paradigm with a pattern relating forms to the same forms with a bit stuck inside them somewhere? Alex

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David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...>