Re: Unilang: the Morphology

Marcus Smith wrote:
>Andreas wrote:
>>Marcus Smith wrote:
>>>>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?
>>
>>Something like that, yes. It would perhaps be better to desribe it as
>>attaching to the end of a phrase functioning as a noun in relation to the
>>rest of the sentence. If we consider it a 'word' we have pretty much
>>abolished the distinction between 'word' and 'morpheme'.
>
>Two completely different responses came to my head immediately.
>
>1) There is nothing necessarily wrong with the abolishment of the
>word/morpheme distinction.
I didn't mean to imply it necessarily was wrong. But I think that for
describing syntax etc we need some sort of unit(s) that's bigger than a
morpheme but smaller than a phrase. Obviously, this doesn't have to be
called 'words'.

>A "morpheme" is a purely theoretical notion that
>can be redefined anytime linguists (as a whole) feel the need to do so.
>"Word" has a pre-theoretical meaning, but that meaning runs afoul of all
>kinds of problems so that it is unworkable in a formalized context. The
>relatively popular theory Distributed Morphology claims that words do not
>exist -- only morphemes do, so abolishing the distinction between 'word'
>and 'morpheme' is an idea that some linguists are taking seriously.
>
>2) Possessive -'s and plural -s behave differently, and these differences
>need to be captured somehow. Calling possessive -'s a phrasal affix will
>cause more problems than it solves (not necessarily for English, but
>certainly cross-linguistically). The best thing to do is call it a clitic.
>As a clitic, it is a word (in a syntactic sense); but it lacks the prosodic
>requirements of a word (in a phonological sense), so the clitic will lean
>on (attach to) whatever word happens to precede it.
Then we should, I think, either use 'word' only in the "phonological" sense,
or alternatively use other names for both senses you describe and leave
'word' as a non-technical word that can be used according to whatever
traditions exist for a particular lang.
>
>>>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.
>>
>>I didn't claim my defintion was perfect, but it seems workable to me. Any
>>better suggestion?
>
>I don't know if this is better, but I would suggest not ignoring the
>syntactic side of words. Syntax overtly manipulates words but not affixes.
>(I have a professor or two who would probably skewer me for saying that.)
>If something can appear in different positions relative to other relevant
>words, it should probably be considered a word (or clitic) even if it can't
>stand on it own.
Hm. 'Clitics' and 'words' could be sorted as "syntactic units" or something
like that, without being equated themselves.

                                                   Andreas
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