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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 type=cite class=cite 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></body>
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