Re: Unilang: the Morphology

Andreas wrote:

Why not?  Russian has both `s' and `k' as prepositions.  :-) And
>>prepositions are very close to case endings in agglutinating languages
>>(-> Finno-Ugric).
>
>I know of that Russian habit, but I thought they were just WRITTEN by
>themselves. If they're truly independent words, then I assume they're
>actually pronounced as [s@] and [k@], or perhaps [@s] and [@k]?
They have an underlying vowel (formally called a 'jer'), that is usually
deleted at the surface but can appear in the appropriate contexts.
(Information provided by my roommate, a native Russian-speaking linguist).

On the topic of independent words, not all words in all languages have a
vowel. Pima, for example, has a perfective marker <t> (pronounced as an
interdental stop), which can occur without a vowel. It cliticizes onto
either a preceding or following word, depending on the context of the sentence.

>I am, of course, operating on the theory that a 'word' is an speech unit
>that can be pronounced by itself and is "complete". According to this
>definition, the reduced forms of the English copula (-'m, -'re, -'s) aren't
>proper words - you won't say [z] in isolation if asked what the 3rd sg
>present of 'to be' is. If that Russian {s} is pronounced as part of the
>preceeding or following word, I won't consider it a 'word' on its own, but
>rather as an affix.
So, English possessive -'s is an affix that attaches to any part of speech
what-so-ever, providing that the phrase containing the word is headed by a
noun, and that the noun is the possessor of another noun?

A serious problem in linguistics that few people have addressed is that
there is no decent definition of what a "word" is. Phonological definitions
run afoul of the syntactic data, and vice versa.


Marcus Smith

"Sit down before fact as a little child,
be prepared to give up every preconceived notion,
follow humbly wherever and to whatsoever abysses Nature leads,
or you shall learn nothing."
                -- Thomas Huxley