bound roots

[Hagit Borer]

Dear all -

I must admit that I am a bit puzzled by the discussion.  We have always taken it for granted, in linguistics, that knowledge of language does not refer to conscious knowledge of language.  Whether or not speakers think that a word is complex is no doubt an interesting question from many respects, but typically, we do not take any such reflections to be indicative of structure (for instance, we do not necessarily take seriously native speakers thoughts about whether sentences are complex or not or on why they may ill-formed).  What, ultimately, reflects knowledge, in the sense linguists typically mean it, is whether speakers linguistic behavior indicates the existence of such knowledge, at times not conscious.  For instance, if a native speaker of English has the intuition that the nominalized forms of commit, permit, emit etc. all involve the same allomorphic change (i.e., comiSSion, permiSSion, emiSSion), then it is at least suggestive of the fact that they know that 'mit' has properties which cut across all its occurrences, regardless of the fact that 'mit' is not a word and that statistically, most speakers may not judge a word as 'permit' to be complex.  Similarly, of course, for 'ceive', as in 'reception', 'conception', 'inception', 'perception' etc.

Hagit Borer


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Benjamin Munson 
  To: Carolyn Chaney ; info-childes 
  Sent: Friday, November 12, 2004 7:39 AM
  Subject: Re: bound roots


  Dear List-Mates:

  I feel compelled to chime in.  I would like to echo Marc Joanisse's statement that the difference between decomposed and non-decomposed words is continuous rather than discrete.  In addition to the reference he suggested, I would point you to the research of Jen Hay.  She showed that the extent to which a derived word can be decomposed into a root-plus-derivational morpheme is dependent on the relative frequency of the stem and the derived form.  This is illustrated in the following article:

  Hay, Jennifer (2001) Lexical Frequency in Morphology: Is Everything Relative? Linguistics , 39 (6), 2001, pg 1041-1070. 

  I would also point you to other relevant papers by her:

  Hay, Jennifer (2002) From Speech Perception to Morphology: Affix-ordering Revisited.  Language 78.3, 2002: 527-555. 
  Hay, Jennifer and Ingo Plag (2004)  What constrains possible suffix combinations?  On the interaction of grammatical and processing restrictions in derivational morphology.   Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 22: 565-596 

  I'm not sure that detailed analyses in these articles clearly inform language pedagogy (re Caroline's original question), but they are nifty and relevant works nonetheless, and they serve to bolster Marc's point about these differences being continuous.  

  Cordially,
  Ben Munson
  Asst. Prof., Dept. of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences
  University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

  At 05:49 PM 11/11/04, Carolyn Chaney wrote:

    In my Language for Teachers class we were discussing various kinds of
    morphemes, and we discovered that we had difficulty knowing if certain
    words were free morphemes or a combo of an affix plus a bound root.  This
    was particularly difficult when the word has a syllable that looks like am
    affix, such as mothER or DEcide.  Cases where there are several like words
    (receive, deceive, conceive) look like bound roots.  Mother seems clearly
    to be a free morpheme, as a mother is not one who moths.  But what about
    decide?  inept?  nonchalant?  uncouth?  refine?  Uncouth, for example, is
    given in texts as an affix plus bound root, but surely it doesn't mean
    not-couth.  Does anyone have a clear explanation of how to distinguish
    words with affix-looking parts from words that really have affixes + bound
    roots, preferably an explanation that does not require looking up
    derivations in the dictionary?

    Thanks for the help!

    Carolyn Chaney
    Just call me stumped
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