Re: Small Derivational Idea
| From: | Garth Wallace <gwalla@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, February 25, 2009, 16:47 |
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On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 3:20 AM, Andreas Johansson <andreasj@...> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 12:46 AM, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:
> [snip]
>
> In my experience, it encompasses linguists, conlangers, and language
> teachers. But it seems to me the association of the term with those
> claims is far from complete even among professional linguistics - I've
> seen ones speak of empty morphemes that carry no meaning (eg. -t- in
> dramatic), of words whose meanings are not reducible to those of their
> constituent morphemes (eg. "thriller"), and of words containing what's
> clearly a morpheme combined with something that appears to have no
> independent meaning (no English examples come to mind).
The canonical example, it seems, of an English morpheme with no
independent meaning is the "cran-" in "cranberry". "Berry" is a
morpheme with a known meaning, but "cran-" appears nowhere else
(unless you count Ocean Spray's juice blend brand names, like
"Cran-Apple" and "Crantastic", which are portmanteaus).
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