Re: Unilang: the Morphology

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'.
>
>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?

                                                        Andreas
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

Reply