Process-morpheme stems

Olga Yokoyama oyokoyam at HUSC.HARVARD.EDU
Tue Oct 31 02:00:23 UTC 1995


On Mon, 30 Oct 1995, Tuggy, D. wrote:

>      Do any of you funknetters know of a case of a root or stem which
>      consists of a process morpheme?  Zero stems have occasionally been
>      posited (and I'd be interested in any good examples of those you
>      have), but I don't know of any stems consisting of say a tone pattern
>      or (more likely) tone shift, an umlaut or ablaut, a reduplication,
>      palatalization, etc. It seems like they should be a predicted kind of
>      limiting case, though there are good reasons for them to be pretty
>      rare.  Any examples?
>
It's not clear to me what exactly you ar looking for, but Goldsmith's
dissertation on autosegmental phonol has many examples of morphemes that
consists only ;of a tone contour. As for zero segment and zero feature
root, thre is one in Russian:   vynut' 'to take out'
"vy" is a productive prefix meaning 'out'
"nu" is a productive suffix meaning 'one quick perfective action'
"t'" is the standard infinitive suffix
Cf. vyprygnut' 'to jump out', where pryg is the root 'jump', or
    vytrjaxnut' 'to shake out', where trjax is the root 'shake' etc. etc.
Regards



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