Re: Small Derivational Idea

On Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:46:58 -0800, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:

>> Isn't there also _azu'car_ > _azuquitar_?  That one suggests
>> infixing even
>> more strongly.
>
>Wow.  Certainly not in my Spanish!  I haven't got all the responses I
>need
>yet, but I'm trying to find out if this is even productive, and at
>one point
>it stopped being productive, if it isn't.
[...]
>Are you sure it's not regional or antiquated?
No, I'm not sure it's not anything.  My own knowledge of Spanish is small,
and the only place I've seen that form _azuquitar_ anywhere is in a
discussion of this example.  I did give it a Google to make sure I'd
remembered it right and was reassured to see more than just a couple pages
of results...

>Let me further specify: It's absurd for Spanish's one infix to be the
>allomorph
>of a diminutive suffix that is identical in form.
Hm?  It's still not unexpected that an infix would occur in one paradigm
where a homologous affix appears in another.  I've been reading van
Engelenhoven's grammar of Leti recently (which granted has more, er,
morphemes that surface discontiguous than the lang on the street), so why
not a few examples from there.

Leti has two classes of verbs.  In class II, which is unmarked, the subject
prefixes are subject to the metathesis and apocope binding processes that
take place at most word-internal juncture: so a verb like [sOpla] 'sail'
with 1st singular prefix [u-] becomes [swOpla].  In class I, which verbs can
get into for phonological or morphological or lexical (i.e. no) reasons, the
binding processes are blocked: so [Beli] 'buy' has 1sg. [uBeli].  Voila,
infix and prefix as allomorphs.

Or take the nominaliser, which has an even worse mess of realisations,
mostly phonologically conditioned but also subject to the verb class in the
above sense: it can appear as prefixed [i] or [nj] or [nja], or infixed [n]
or [nj] or [j] after the first onset, or prefixed [i] together with infixed [j]!

In any case, the other traditional analysis of _-os_ doesn't offend me
either -- more on that below.

>> Anyway, are you saying that if you look at this word-and-paradigm
>> style you
>> should reject the whole concept of "infix"?
>
>No.  Did it seem like I was saying that?  If so, how?
On looking back, I can't figure how I thought you were saying that in
particular... chalk it up to some confusion of mine, sorry.

>On Feb 24, 2009, at 1°28 PM, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>> What's absurd about supposing -os to be an ending? Its etymology, the
>> repeat occurence in Marcos, and its disappearance in derivations like
>> _carlista_ are certainly suggestive of endingness.
>
[...]
>More importantly, if you posit, let's say, two masculine endings, /-o/
>and /-os/, then there's no reason why you couldn't have /-men/ or
>/-tifuli/, or anything as a masculine ending.  By positing these as
>allomorphs of the same underlying morpheme, you deny the similarity
>in shape, or their evolution--and the same goes for positing /-it/ and
>/-it-/.  Formally, it looks like an accident that the forms are similar.
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.)

But more fundamentally, you seem to be objecting to the morphemic way of
thinking here because it formally lets you do implausible things, doesn't
constrain you to the realm of plausibility, wrt. allomorphs looking similar.
 Could I not level the very same charge against WP, indeed even more so,
given that it's a more general framework?  Maybe not in this example, but
you could certainly write down a pattern which was normally a suffix but
happened to be an infix just for stems ending in /-men/ or /-tifuli/.

I think it's too much to ask that one's theory of morphology rule out such
absurdities by purely formal means.  We get progressively more absurd as we
pass from one masculine marker to two dissimilar ones to three to a
kapillion, but there certainly must be natlangs that have two dissimilar
ones by an accident of history, maybe even three: so how is a theory
supposed to draw the bright line and say, okay, you can have N allomorphs,
any more and it's the loony bin?

>> But there's at
>> least one obvious reason a conlanger might want to be so constrained -
>> lots of people find its easier to be creative when working under
>> constraints rather than in total freedom.
>
>I certainly agree.  And if someone has laid hold of some sort of
>framework or theoretical idea to artificially constrain one's creation
>by choice, that's their choice, and it's interesting to see what the
>results are given those choices.  If, however, this is not a consciously
>accepted choice, that's what I object to.  Many I suspect simply
>accept the idea of a morpheme, and, as a result, create highly
>concatenative conlangs--more so than any natural language
>(even Turkish).
I would suspect that for every one who simply accepts the idea of a morpheme
and proceeds to do that, there's another three who haven't even gotten that
far in linguistic background, and are doing that because it's the easy thing
to think of and implement.  If you want to make a uniform way to mark, say,
masculines, I'd wager that you're much likelier to hit on sticking /-men/ on
the end of your string than something with several different alloforms or
paradigms just because it's objectively simpler, and it didn't occur to you
to throw in any complications...

For that matter there are conlangers of the breed who turn to the hobby to
make something not beset by all the irregularities and complexities that
plague natlangs.  I don't think it's right to call them morphemists either.

Alex

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