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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Dear all -</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Hagit Borer</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
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<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; FONT: 10pt arial; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=munso005@umn.edu href="mailto:munso005@umn.edu">Benjamin Munson</A>
</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A title=cchaney@sfsu.edu
href="mailto:cchaney@sfsu.edu">Carolyn Chaney</A> ; <A
title=info-childes@mail.talkbank.org
href="mailto:info-childes@mail.talkbank.org">info-childes</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Friday, November 12, 2004 7:39
AM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> Re: bound roots</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>Dear List-Mates:<BR><BR>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:<BR><BR>Hay, Jennifer (2001) Lexical Frequency in
Morphology: Is Everything Relative? <I>Linguistics</I> , 39 (6), 2001, pg
1041-1070. <BR><BR>I would also point you to other relevant papers by
her:<BR><BR>Hay, Jennifer (2002) From Speech Perception to Morphology:
Affix-ordering Revisited. <I>Language </I>78.3, 2002: 527-555. <BR>Hay,
Jennifer and Ingo Plag (2004) What constrains possible suffix
combinations? On the interaction of grammatical and processing
restrictions in derivational morphology. <I>Natural Language and
Linguistic Theory 22: </I>565-596 <BR><BR>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.
<BR><BR>Cordially,<BR>Ben Munson<BR>Asst. Prof., Dept. of
Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences<BR>University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis<BR><BR>At 05:49 PM 11/11/04, Carolyn Chaney wrote:<BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE class=cite cite="" type="cite">In my Language for Teachers class
we were discussing various kinds of<BR>morphemes, and we discovered that we
had difficulty knowing if certain<BR>words were free morphemes or a combo of
an affix plus a bound root. This<BR>was particularly difficult when
the word has a syllable that looks like am<BR>affix, such as mothER or
DEcide. Cases where there are several like words<BR>(receive, deceive,
conceive) look like bound roots. Mother seems clearly<BR>to be a free
morpheme, as a mother is not one who moths. But what
about<BR>decide? inept? nonchalant? uncouth?
refine? Uncouth, for example, is<BR>given in texts as an affix plus
bound root, but surely it doesn't mean<BR>not-couth. Does anyone have
a clear explanation of how to distinguish<BR>words with affix-looking parts
from words that really have affixes + bound<BR>roots, preferably an
explanation that does not require looking up<BR>derivations in the
dictionary?<BR><BR>Thanks for the help!<BR><BR>Carolyn Chaney<BR>Just call
me stumped</BLOCKQUOTE></BLOCKQUOTE></BODY></HTML>